“That isn't the way it's done,” Miss Kinney said, growing dangerously patient. Miss Kinney never got really angry, but it bothered Stella that she could hold in so much irritation and not express it. It made the teacher smell unpleasant.
“So, tell us how it's-KUK done,” Celia said. She and LaShawna approached. Celia stood an inch taller than Stella, almost five eleven, and LaShawna was shorter than Miss Kinney, about five seven. Celia had the usual olive-to-brown skin and flyaway reddish hair that never seemed to know what to do or how to hold together on her head. LaShawna was darker, but not much, with finely kinked black hair that formed a slumped nimbus around her ears and down to her shoulders.
“It's called a game. Come on, girls, you know what a game is.”
“We play,” Stella said defensively.
“Of course you play. All of us monkeys play,” the teacher said.
Stella and LaShawna smiled. Sometimes Miss Kinney was more open and direct than the other teachers. They liked her, which made frustrating her even more distressing.
“This is organizedplay. You guys are good at organizing, aren't you? What's not to understand?”
“Teams,” LaShawna said. “Teams are like demes. But demes choose themselves.” She lifted her hands and spread them beside her temples, making little elephant ears. It was a sign; many of the new children did such things without really understanding why. Sometimes the teachers thought they were acting smart; but not Miss Kinney.
She glanced at LaShawna's “ears,” blinked, and said for the tenth time, “Teams are not demes. Work with me here. A team is temporary and fun. Ichoose sides for you.”
Stella wrinkled her nose.
“I pick players with complementary abilities. I can help sculpt a team. You understand how that works, I'm sure.”
“Sure,” Stella said.
“Then you play against another team, and that makes all of you better players. Plus, you get exercise.”
“Right,” Stella said. So far, so good. She bounced the ball experimentally.
“Let's try it again. Just the practice part. Celia, cover Stella. Stella, go for the basket.”
Celia stood back and dropped into a crouch and spread her arms, as Miss Kinney had told her to do. Stella bounced the ball, made a step forward, remembered the rules, then dribbled toward the basket. The floor of the court was marked with lines and half circles. Stella could smell Celia and knew what she was going to do. Stella moved toward her, and Celia stepped aside with a graceful sweep of her arms, but without any signs or suggestions for adjustment, and Stella, in some confusion, threw the ball. It bounced off the backboard without touching the basket.
Stella made a face at Celia.
“You are supposed to try to stopher,” Miss Kinney told Celia.
“I didn't helpher.” Celia glanced apologetically at Stella.
“No, I mean, actively try to stop her.”
“But that would be a foul,” Celia said.
“Only if you chop her arms or push her or run into her.”
Celia said, “We all want to make baskets and be happy, right? If I stop her from getting a basket, won't that reduce the number of baskets?”
Miss Kinney raised her eyes to the roof. Her face pinked. “You want to get the most baskets for your team, and keep the other team from getting anybaskets.”
Celia was getting tired of thinking this through. Tears started in her eyes. “I thought we were trying to get the most baskets.”
“For your team,” Miss Kinney said. “Why isn't that clear?”
“It hurts to make others fail,” Stella said, looking around the court as if to find a door and escape.
“Oh, puh- leeze, Stella, it's onlya game! You play against one another. It's called sport.Everyone can be friendly afterward. There's no harm.”
“I saw soccer riots on TV once,” LaShawna said. Miss Kinney lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “People got hurt,” LaShawna added doubtfully.
“There's a lot of passion in sport,” Miss Kinney admitted. “People care, but usually the players don't hurt each other.”
“They run into each other and lay down for a long time. Someone should have warned them they were about to collide,” said Crystal Newman, who had silver-white hair and smelled like some new kind of citrus tree.
Miss Kinney motioned the twelve girls to go over to the metal chairs lined up outside the lines. They pulled the chairs into a circle and sat.
Miss Kinney took a deep breath. “I think maybe I'm missing something,” she said. “Stella, how would you liketo play?”
Stella thought about this. “For exercise, we could push-pull and swing, mosey, you know, like a dance. If we wanted to learn how to run better, or make baskets better, we could set up running academies. Girls could form wavy channels and ovals and others could run the channels. The girls in the wavy channels could tell them how they aren't doing it right.” She pointedly did not tell Miss Kinney about spit-calming, all the players slapping palms, which she had seen athletes do in human games. “Then the runners could shoot baskets from inside the channels and at different distances, until they could sink them from all the way across the court. That's more points, right?”
Miss Kinney nodded, going along for the moment.
“We'd switch out a runner and a channel each time. In a couple of hours, I bet most of us could sink baskets really well, and if we added up the points, the teams would have more points than if they, you know, fought with each other.” Stella thought this over very earnestly for an instant and her face lit up. “Maybe a thousand points in a game.”
“Nobody would want to watch,” Miss Kinney said. She was showing her exhaustion now, but also making a funny little grin that Stella could not interpret. Stella looked at the blinking red light on the nosey on Miss Kinney's belt. Miss Kinney had turned off the nosey before practice, perhaps because the girls often triggered its tiny little wheeping alarm when they exercised, no matter how much self-control they displayed.
“I would watch!” Celia said, leaning into the words. “I could learn how to train people in motion with, you know, signs.” Celia glanced at Stella conspiratorially, and undered, / Signs and smells and spit, eyes that twirl and brows that knit.It was a little song they sometimes sang in the dorm before sleep; softly. “That would really be fun.”
The other girls agreed that they understood that sort of game.
Miss Kinney lifted her hand and twisted it back and forth like a little flag. “What is it? You don't like competition?”
“We like push-pull,” Stella said. “We do it all the time. On the playground, in the walking square.”
“Is that when you do those little dances?” Miss Kinney asked.
“That's mosey or maybe push-pull,” said Harriet Pincher, the stockiest girl in the group. “Palms get sweaty with mosey. They stay dry with push-pull.”
Stella did not know how to begin to explain the difference. Sweaty palms in a group touch could make all sorts of changes. Individuals could become stronger, more willing to lead, or less aggressive in their push to lead, or simply sit out a deme debate, if one happened. Dry palms indicated a push-pull, and that was less serious, more like play. A deme needed to adjust all the time, and there were many ways to do that, some fun, some more like hard work.
Rarely, a deme adjustment involved stronger measures. The few attempts she had seen had resulted in some pretty nasty reactions. She didn't want to bring that up now, though Miss Kinney seemed genuinely interested.
Adjusting to humans was a puzzle. The new children were supposed to do all the adjusting, and that made it hard.