The afternoon seemed to move glacially yet with all the speed of a bullet train, especially given what was trailing it. Mediation. The first face-to-face with the Mount Valley girls since the brawl. If the DIAA insists, we'll do it, Nicole sighed. It seems dumb, but I don't know them well. When the final bell sounded, the team congregated around one of the school's small buses to make the trip to Mount Valley, where the two schools had agreed to meet.
Nicole had been there a number of times, especially for basketball and baseball games, but she wondered just how things had gone there, especially with the fact that one of their players was in the wrong place. She stared out the window as the bus began moving and noticed a few things different: a sign here, a house color there. Traffic slowed to a crawl at the Ridgefield Mall, where an accident blocked half the intersection. As Nicole sat in her seat waiting for everything to clear, she looked on at the incident.
A black pickup truck turning left to leave the mall had hit a white subcompact going straight and caused serious damage to the back of the small car. A burly woman with a shaved head wearing a tank top and jeans was shouting at the other driver. The other motorist, it turned out, was a man. He had long blonde hair and wore a pink sleeveless dress. The man had his hands in his face, clearly crying. Maybe he was texting and driving, Nicole thought.
"Male drivers," Nicole heard the bus driver mutter as she shook her head. Nicole felt sorry for the man. Thanks to her wish, Nicole had inside knowledge on how it felt to be shouted down by a loudmouth. Before she could say anything to the driver, though, a police car arrived on the scene. An officer got out and tried to calm the woman down, while her partner started clearing the road of debris to open a lane for traffic. After what seemed like an eternity (but in actuality was only 15 minutes), traffic began to flow, and as the bus finally resumed its journey, Nicole saw the tow trucks headed in the other direction to pull the vehicles off the roadway.
As the bus headed deeper into Mount Valley, Nicole noticed, the changes did not stop. A popular barbecue joint named Tom and Mike's had become Tomi and Chel's. Some street names were different. A massive billboard along the road advertising a department store at Ridgefield showed three men in dresses; another depicted a woman spinning a basketball on her finger.
It was starting to sink in for Nicole. This is the new normal for everybody now.
Meanwhile, Jade was heading to the gym after school while excitedly talking to his brother Crystal on the phone.
"You never told me that you went to school with the J-Boys!" he said excitedly.
"I guess it never came up," Crystal replied. "I'm actually pretty good friends with them. If you'd like, I can see if they'd want to meet you."
Jade nearly fainted at that. "Really!?" he asked, hardly daring to believe it.
"Uh huh... I can't guarantee it, mind you, but... I'll see what I can do."
The bus finally pulled up to the front of Mount Valley High School. It looked like just any other day there, or at least it would have to people not named Nicole Forsyth. A few students still hung around, waiting for rides or after-school plans or perhaps a late bus. The Lake Point team filed into the front office and were ushered into a rather large conference room, where the players from Mount Valley were already sitting. A woman in a DIAA polo shirt sat at one end of the table, while all the administrators and athletic personnel clustered around the other end.
"Good afternoon, and thank you for coming," the DIAA representative began. "My name is Taylor Ward, and I sit on the Disciplinary Council of the Dandridge Interscholastic Athletic Association." Nicole looked around at the players, all with long, nervous and deflated faces. "We understand that the ruling today must come as a blow to all of you." A few players nodded. "It has been several years since we have seen a brawl of that scale at a basketball contest, and we believe that, for the safety of our student athletes and to set an example for the schools in our association, we had no choice but to impose a serious penalty."
"So why are we here?" Mel Smith asked, kind of angry. "If you impose the penalty, why bring us here?"
"Because this is serious," she continued. "The entire purpose of high school sports is to develop young women and men, whether that's done by the players, the coaches, the administrators, or the officials."
"This just seems like a waste of all of our time," Ash grumbled. "I wish we all could just... get along."
