Full Court Press
by
ASHLEY ROSE
Chapter One
C
armondy Hamilton sat in her new Jeep Rubicon for a moment, staring up at the sign. This was the first day of winter semester of her senior year. Excitement for her first day at her new school started to build, tinged with a little nervousness. Prosser was three times as big as her school in Maine had been. She hoped that basketball tryouts this afternoon went well. How would her skills stack up against these Washington girls?
She got out of the Jeep and headed toward the building, following the crowd. The school had mailed her locker number and combination, so she went searching for it, jostling her way through her new schoolmates.
Locker 321 ended up being toward the end of the main hallway. She got out what she would need for her first class, along with her schedule.
She leaned against her locker and surveyed the mass of students, immediately noticing two boys coming down the hallway. They looked to be friends. They must have been important in the school hierarchy, since the crowd parted for them. Their lockers were almost directly across the hall from hers. A few girls suddenly appeared, fawning over the boys.
They both looked like athletes, tall and muscular. One was about six feet, the other maybe three inches taller. The shorter of the two had short black hair and dark eyes, while the taller one had steel-gray eyes and dark-brown hair trimmed short on the sides and a little longer on top. It looked good on him. The taller one had some serious muscles. The shorter one was built a bit leaner and not as bulky. They were both drop-dead gorgeous, but the taller one absolutely riveted her. Something about him took her breath away.
“Aw, please, Anderson? Please, please, please?” One of the girls addressed the black-haired one while clutching his arm.
“Sorry, Trin. I don’t kiss and tell.” He winked at her and put his arm around another girl.
The taller one was getting attention too, but he wasn’t acknowledging it at the moment. A black-haired beauty with big boobs plastered herself to his side, stroking his chest while he sorted through his locker.
The one with black hair, Anderson, shut his locker and put his arms around two girls, kissing each one on the cheek. “Hey, Beck, what do you have first period?”
The taller boy answered without looking away from his locker. “Accounting”
The girl attached to him looked up and batted her big eyes at him. “Beck?”
No response.
“Beck?”
Nothing.
“Beck!”
The boy looked down, seemingly puzzled to have a girl attached to him. “Off.”
“Beck, baby?”
“Off.” His brooding intensity might just be an act, but he still sent a shiver up Carmondy’s spine.
“But, Beck!”
He removed her easily with one hand and then turned his back, dismissing her.
The girl stood there, puzzled, for almost a full minute before getting over it and joining the two blondes with Anderson.
“Don’t worry about him. He just doesn’t warm up well to girls he doesn’t know,” Anderson assured the dark-haired girl.
“But I know him! We had sex two days ago,” she pouted.
Beck looked over his shoulder with a disgusted look. He surveyed her body and then shrugged, turning back to his locker.
The bell rang and put an end to the scene. Carmondy watched the boy named Beck walk away, then shook herself. She didn’t know why she’d been so attracted to someone who treated the girls he slept with so badly. With a sigh, she looked at her schedule and then used her map to find her first class, Algebra. She took a seat at one of the tables and watched the door. Students filed in, including Anderson.
He came to her table and looked at her for a moment.
“Uh, can I help you?” she asked, noticing that he was pretty attractive too.
“I don’t recognize you. Are you new?”
“Yes.”
“Got a name?” he asked, taking the chair next to her and lounging back.
“Carmondy.”
“Carmondy? That’s cool, I’m Anderson.” He held a hand out across the table and she shook it. “Where’d you move here from?”
“Maine.”
“Oh yeah? That’s way across the country.”
“Yeah, I know, I’m not dumb.”
He laughed. “Right, sorry. You’re blonde, and I was just hanging out with some airhead bleach-blondes.”
“First of all, I’m not a blonde, and why would you mix me up with them?” she asked. Her hair was closer to brown than blonde.
Anderson shrugged. “Well, you’re a girl.”
“So?”
“You’re a hot girl?”
“Oh, so I’m hot and that means I’m an airhead.”
“Typically works that way.” He shrugged.
“Right.” She rolled her eyes and turned to listen to the teacher talk about the things they were going to be doing this semester.
“So, Carmondy, huh? Do you go by Car for short?” He obviously wasn’t paying attention to the teacher.
“What’s it to you?”
“Just trying to make conversation here.”
Carmondy sighed. Maybe she was kind of being a jerk. She was a little on edge. She didn’t like guys like him, guys other girls clung to. They were players. Her last boyfriend had been one. She thought she’d changed him but the second she said she was moving away, he moved on. He didn’t even talk to her about a long distance relationship before he found some random girl from their high school to bang. Eric had been a total jerk, but she had never seen it. He got what he wanted out of her by pretending he was someone he wasn’t. She didn’t see the real him until after they’d broken up. She’d been torn up about it. She’d vowed not to blindly trust guys after that.
She tried her best to be polite. “Yeah, what about you? Anything short for Anderson?”
“Andy, sometimes.” He grinned. “Girls like to call me that.”
“Ah, I see. Your airheads, you mean?”
He shook his head and started to fold the assessment into a paper airplane. “No, they call me Anderson. Believe it or not, I have some friends who are girls who aren’t dumb.”
“Oh yeah? How did they achieve such a high status?” she asked sarcastically.
“The girls on the basketball team. You gotta have decent brains to play b-ball.”
“Tell me about it. Memorizing offenses, plays, defenses, zone patterns, presses—full, three-quarter and half. Not to mention the act of playing the game itself—gotta be a quick thinker.”
He was taken aback. “You play?”
“I played at my old school and plan on trying out after school today. You play?”
“Yep, varsity point.”
She nodded slowly, giving him a once over. “Yeah, I can see that.”
He laughed. “What do you mean?”
“You’re tall, but not too tall. You look strong enough to play ball but not so big that you lose the speed you need to be a a point guard.”
“Hmm, okay, gimme a second. I’m gonna guess what position you play.” He took his time looking her over.
“You’re looking at my boobs.”
“So? They’re important too.”
“Important or nice to look at?”
“Both.”
“So it would be okay if I stared at your package all the time?” she asked.
“Of course. Normally I would say look but don’t touch, but with you...you can touch all you want.”
She smiled, enjoying the sexual banter.
“This is difficult. You’re not quite tall enough for a center but too tall for a wing or point. So...power forward?”
“You got it.”
“Awesome, I got it right. So you’ve got some ball-handling skills?”
“I started varsity every year of high school at my old school but it was way smaller than here, so I’m anxious to see how I’m going to match up.”
Anderson nodded. “Yeah, we’ll see. I’ll be watching tryouts today.”
“Really?”
“We try out right after the girls. Normally the guys watch the girls and then the girls stay and watch the guys. We cheer for the girls we want to get varsity but really the coach decides on his own.” He shrugged.
“That’s cool.”
“Hope you’re in shape. The girls’ coach is a conditioning maniac.”
“I actually think I’m okay on that front. It’s the other stuff I’m worried about.”
“Well, you’ve got some competition. We’ve got four starters returning this year.”
“Four? Really?”
“Yep, we had a young team last year. They’re good.”
They chatted a little bit more and listened the teacher talk about his grading policies and procedures until the bell rang.
Anderson stood up and pulled out a sleek black cell phone from his pocket. “Hey, what’s your number?”
She recited it for him.
“Got your cell on you?”
“In my locker.”
“Cool, I’m calling you. Save my number in your phone.”
“Uh, why exactly?”
He winked. “I like to keep hot girls on speed dial in case I get lonely.”
She grinned. “Awesome, call me. Anytime.” She added the last word huskily and got a laugh from him in response.
“Will do.”
She laughed to herself as he walked away. He was not her type, but she enjoyed talking with him. Perhaps tomorrow she would ask him about his hot friend.
Lunch soon arrived, and Carmondy entered the cafeteria. The food didn’t look half bad so she got a sandwich, an apple and a bottle of water. She didn’t even attempt to find a seat in the overcrowded lunch room. She wasn’t up for that right now. She walked her food out to her car, which wasn’t too far from the exit. Once she was situated in her Jeep, she saved the unknown number on her phone as Anderson and started listening to her voicemails.
The first was from her dad, letting her know that snowfall was expected in the afternoon. Carmondy looked out her window, up at the sky. Sure enough, she could see clouds moving in. This was a bit disconcerting. Her new house was halfway up the mountain. Her father had put in a private, five-mile drive that led straight into town, but the highway department did not maintain it, and he’d warned her that if the snow got too bad she’d have to take the state highway, which would turn her twenty-minute drive home into two hours.
The next message was from her ex-boyfriend, who was spouting a bunch of shit about missing her and saying he had made a mistake. She deleted it before the message was even finished. She wasn’t interested. The last message was from her best friend back in Maine, just checking in, letting her know she was missed.
Carmondy took a bite of her sandwich as a song started playing on the radio. A loud knock on her window scared the crap out of her, causing her to spill her water all over her jeans. “Jesus Christ!”