Will Daphne kill me?

Like she killed so many others…

“Fuck this,” she says, still held aloft.

Because this is not the time to feel bad. Now is not the time to punish herself for feeling good.

Smiling (tempered now, though, and do her best friends notice?), she tries to remember a phrase she saw online, wrote down in her journal. Strong words that, she’s long hoped, might deter the next all-out panic attack.

“Why are you thinking about that?” she asks herself.

No, this is not the time to be thinking about panic. Anxiety. Fear.

But she’s asked it. And, despite the cacophony in here, she heard herself ask it.

And the tremble she heard in her voice reminds her of the first she ever heard there:

The night she called 911 on herself.

Hello? I think I’m dying…

She looks to the gym doors. Sees they’re closed. Okay. She breathes a little better. Why? She doesn’t know. A feeling. Security. Nobody can get in without opening a door first. She looks to her friends below. Glad for the people she sees. Checks for another. One she might not know.

She wears makeup, Natasha said last night. To hide her blue face.

“Aren’t you so happy right now?” Natasha asks. She’s holding up Kit’s right leg. Natasha hasn’t made a basket all year. Natasha is one of the funniest people Kit knows. That’s why hearing her tell that story last night was so unsettling.

Nothing funny about that one.

“Kit,” Natasha says, “they’re gonna hang your fuckin’ jersey from the rafters.”

“Easy,” Coach Wanda says, stepping into the crush of players (and friends now, right? Yes, Kit recognizes their faces, all of them; good). Coach extends a hand up to Kit. “Heck of a shot, Lamb.”

Kit shakes the hand. Doesn’t want to think of the question she asked the rim but thinks of the question she asked the rim.

The rim has never lied to Kit. Not once.

And here the rim said yes.

Stop it now, she tells herself. You fucking won. Then, to all: “We fucking won!”

Coach Wanda is trying to get the girls to stop swearing, but it’s no use. Kit Lamb just hit the fucking game-winning free throw with a second to go on the holy-shit clock.

Let the ballers howl. Let them shout legend till they’re blue in the face.

Kit thinks of that, blue in the face, as the world continues to blur with excitement. She thinks of Natasha’s story, the seven-footer named Daphne dying in her car, parked in her own garage, her bare hands gripping the wheel long after she died.

They say Samhattan’s paramedics pried those fingers loose with wrenches.

They say Samhattan’s bogeywoman was blue in the face.

“Kit!” someone shouts. Should sound like unbridled joy. Sounds more like warning.

Kit looks to the doors. One is open.

Is she going to have a panic attack…right now?

“Kit Lamb for the win!”

She might. She knows this amplification well. It comes unannounced, of course. Nobody hears a panic attack coming. Not until it’s too close to dodge.