Page 52 of Making It Count
“She didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“Layne enrolled in Dunbar as a graduate student.”
“She did what?”
“I don’t know the specifics. She just sent me an email asking if she could play again, and I said yes because she has the fifth year of eligibility. I thought she would’ve told you.”
“She didn’t. When was this?”
“Last week. She had to be accepted into the university’s program first.”
“She’s… she’s coming back?” Shay asked no one in particular.
Silently, she followed that with, ‘And she didn’t tell me?’
“She is. I’m guessing they made an exception for her. Given COVID, they’re making exceptions all around, and they might have let her in late because of that. Either way, we get her back on the team, which is fantastic because I need more experience. We lost a lot of seniors after last season. Now, we have one more, even though she’s a grad student. Anyway, if you hear from her, can you have her call me? I’ll email her, too, just to verify. She’s really the one I’m worried about since it’s all happening last-minute with her.”
“I’ll tell her, yeah,” Shay replied.
“Great. Thanks, Shay. I know it’s going to be a weird season, but we’ll make it through it together.”
“Yes, Coach,” she replied and hung up.
Shay’s first instinct was to call Layne and yell at her for not telling her that she was going back to Dunbar. Her second instinct was to smile because Layne was going back to Dunbar. They were going to be playing together again, living down the hall from each other, and they could finally talk in-person about what was going on between them. She decided that a text message was at least in order here because, as good as that all sounded, she was still a little upset that Layne hadn’t told her.
Shay: Hey. Coach just called me to ask me something, but she said you’re coming back to Dunbar. You’re a grad student now? She asked me to tell you to call her because she needs to talk to all of us about the off-season plan. And, Layne, can you just send me a text that’s more than one word, please? I know you’re busy. I hope your mom’s okay. I’m just really confused, and I want to call you, but I’m trying not to make this about me and what I need. So, I went with this. I hope you’re okay, too, by the way.
She hit send before she could think too much about it and went about figuring out what she was going to bring back to school for her fifth year there. She knew it would be a strange season, like Coach had said. They all still had to be incredibly careful not to get sick, and it wouldn’t be how it was any other year. They’d all lost something. The ability to be in the same room watching film together without masks and having to spread out their chairs, for one. The team dinners would also likely not happen in the same way. They’d have to adapt. But if they did that well enough, they had a chance to have a good season and maybe get back to where they were before everything went to shit in the spring.
When her phone sounded, Shay hurried over to it, and while she didn’t see Layne’s face on the screen, she did have a message from her.
Layne: I’ll explain more when I see you in a couple of weeks. I’m sorry, Shay. Things have been hard here. I’m doing the best I can, but I lost the internship. They ended the program because of COVID. I got a remote job working customer service, and that’s, like, fifty hours a week, but it’s helping us get by right now. My mom is getting better. She’s had a negative test, and she’s going back to work next week. I applied to the MBA program thinking that I wouldn’t get in since I was so late, but they let me in; probably because I’m a student-athlete. I don’t know. Anyway, I didn’t know what else to do. If I go back to school on scholarship, my room and board is paid for, so my mom doesn’t have to worry about feeding me, too, you know? I’m only eligible for my basketball scholarship this year, so I don’t know whether I’ll actually finish the program or not. I can do the internship again starting next summer. They told me I’d get my spot back. Everything is just so hard right now. My mom told me she didn’t want me to just hang around here and answer chats from rude customers for the rest of my life. She didn’t tell me that she was kicking me out, but it was close enough. She means well. I know that. Going back to Dunbar just seemed like the safe thing for me to do right now. I can postpone worrying about everything else and focus on school and basketball again. I didn’t tell you because I just got accepted officially last week, and I needed to make sure Coach would honor my scholarship, or I couldn’t afford to go anyway. Things have been busy around here, but I’m wrapping everything up that I can, and with my mom going back to work, I think she’ll struggle with me back at school. I am sorry, though. I’m going to focus on getting things taken care of here, but I’ll see you back at school soon, okay?
“Well, at least it was more than one word,” Shay said to herself.
CHAPTER 20
This was not the direction her life was supposed to take. Layne had done all the right things, taken all the right steps, and here she was, right back at Dunbar University, where she’d already spent four years and was supposed to only see again if she came back to campus to watch a basketball game. She’d never planned on going to graduate school because she hadn’t needed it for the job she wanted. And she’d never imagined herself being able to afford to go to a school for four years and pay for it without massive loans, so graduate school had been completely out of the question. COVID had changed all of that.
Layne sat in her car, which was packed with her stuff. She had a full trunk and a full back seat and was sitting just outside her old dorm building, waiting for her slot to move her stuff in solo. Although, it wasn’t her old building anymore; it was her current building, and the same room she’d lived in for the past two years was about to be her home again for the next year.
After that, she would no longer be on scholarship because she wouldn’t be eligible for a sixth year unless there were some more pandemic-related rule changes from the NCAA that would impact her. It wouldn’t matter. Layne tried to look at the bright side as she pulled her car up and saw someone with a clipboard and a mask on pointing to her to roll down her passenger window.
“Name?”
“Layne Stoll,” she replied.
“You’re up. You’ve got an hour to get everything from the car. Just get it all upstairs, and you can unpack it later, okay?”
“Okay,” she replied.
The bright side was that Layne’s mom was good now and back at work. The woman wasn’t all better yet, but the coughing was gone, and the fever had broken weeks ago, so she was mainly dealing with fatigue. Layne had found a job after the internship had ended unexpectedly, and she’d worked a minimum of fifty hours each week, taking as much overtime pay as she could to help her mom out as much as possible. She couldn’t get a part-time job while in school and playing basketball, but she planned to try to tutor to earn extra cash, and when the season was over, she’d get something part-time before probably doing her internship again. It was the best she could do right now. She had offered to keep her job and live at home until the internship started back up, but her mom wouldn’t allow it.
“You’re not giving up a year of your life because I got sick. If that school lets you back in, you’re going,” she’d ordered.
Her mom had promised to be even more careful at work and not to take any housecleaning gigs for a while because they were both convinced that was where she’d gotten it from in the first place.