“Kit!” Dana shouts. “We love you!”

Kit smiles. Tempered, though.

“You stole the ball!” she calls back. And Dana makes a muscle with one arm. It’s funny. Kit should remember it forever. Will she? Or will her memory of this night always be centered on the anxiety she feels, held high in the sky on the shoulders of soulmates?

She wants to cry. So much triumph. So much love.

“KI-IT! KI-IT!”

It’s the nature of panic that it is believed by the sufferer. Kit’s never read about somebody avoiding an attack by telling themselves they’d gotten through the last one.

“Okay, let me down,” Kit says. Not loud enough for her friends to hear. There’s heat at the base of her neck. Always the place it begins.

She looks to Dana. To Natasha. To Coach Wanda. To the doors. To those windows high up the brick walls.

Will Daphne kill me?

No. She refuses to let this question continue.

“Daphne is a fucking myth,” she says.

But she’s thinking about her. Thinking about Daphne.

“A myth,” she repeats. Her voice tiny on the spectrum of sound in the gym. There’s Mom and Dad. There’s Emily Holt. Beck Nelson. Kennedy Lichtenstein. Tammy Jones.

Friends.

Family.

“Myth…”

Something incredible, something unexpected, something rare happens: Kit talks the heat away.

“And this?” she says. “This is real, Kit. This is your life.”

The anxiety ebbs. Pride in the shot she made exists alone, untouched, untethered.

As it should.

Now isn’t the time for myth.

Now is the time for legend.

She raises her arms and howls, and everybody in the gym are wolves with her.

And soon they lower her back down to the gym floor. The floor on which she just shot the shot of her life.

“Pizza,” Natasha says.

“Yes,” Kit says.

But first, Kit finds Coach Wanda.

“Thanks for believing in me,” she says.

Coach imitates shooting a free throw with perfect form, the same way she’d been teaching the girls to shoot them for years.

“Go eat,” she says. “Go be happy.”

Kit smiles, but Coach’s words feel large.

Go be happy…

Is she? Can she be?

No heat at the base of her neck. But a long battle seems to stretch out before her. She sees it extending through the walls of the far side of the gym: all of life, linear, ahead. And anxiety, panic, somewhere in the shadows off to either side of the path. Whatever path she and her best friends take from here.

The question returns, yes:

Will Daphne kill me?

But the question is lost, for now, in the blind bliss of friends unaware of how close they stand to that path. And lost, too, in the sudden mob of teammates pulling Kit across the floor, toward the locker room, toward the rest of the night, what should be the best night of her life.

Just before getting there, she looks to the closest rim, the one she saw the ball, her ball, sail through.