The Fox’s Tale

November finally rolled around and for once I was eager to get to school on a Monday. Basketball tryouts started that afternoon and I was dying to get some of my pent up energy out.

You’re probably thinking it isn’t fair for supernatural beings to compete in sports, but it’s one of the only safe ways to keep ourselves sane as teenagers when you live in an urban or suburban area. Besides, almost every professional athlete has a shifter somewhere on their family tree. You think those levels of stamina and agility are human?

I was raring to go when I came into the gym, singing a song under my breath that had been stuck in my head for hours, and looking forward to sweating thoughts of Ellery Sinclair out of my system when I smelled her.

Cursing internally about cheerleading I heard her say “damn it. I just got that song out of my head.”

There she was, dressed in green cheerleading shorts and a white tank top emblazoned with Celts in blue across her breasts, stretching in a split on the gym floor. She looked up at me, annoyed.

“Seriously, it has been stuck in there all day.”

I dropped my gear and made a beeline to Matt.

“What is she doing here? Aren’t we supposed to have the gym to ourselves for tryouts?”

Matt laughed, his gray eyes glinting. “We do have it to ourselves. Didn’t Dad tell you? Ellery’s our trainer.”

“Say what?” I asked, my eyes going so wide I thought my eyelids would tear.

“Trainer, manager, statistician. She does a little bit of everything.”

“Shouldn’t that be an adult or something?” I felt myself start to panic. I wanted a chance to talk to her, flirt a little, ask her out if she responded the way I wanted her to, but this?

To have her at practice every day, at every game, on the damn bus for away games….well shit. That could prove to be hard on my body in more ways than one. Her scent alone was enough to make me start to pant.

“Right, because professional medical personnel are willing to work for a high school basketball team. Trust me, if you get banged up in a game you’ll be thrilled to have her take care of it. She’s got magic fingers.” Lee, last year’s starting center, joined our conversation.

He was in my English and trigonometry classes, and he was a massive six foot six. “Anyway, we’ve won the conference and the regional title every year and state twice since Ellery started working with the team. That was, what, four years ago?”

“How the hell did that happen? She’s a junior.” Nothing about this situation made sense to me.

“Oh, all her older brothers played and when she was in seventh grade her brother Ellis had to pick her up from school and bring her with him to practice every day for some reason. Rumor has it that she told Coach Hendrix that if he wanted to have a winning season he should implement a weight training regimen for his post players or they were going to get pushed all over the floor.

“Then she said that his guards needed to work with a dance instructor so they could learn to pick up their feet. At least that’s what I was told when I asked why we had to do some of the drills we do, and why we were all given a weight training program after tryouts my sophomore year.”

He ran his hand through his shaggy black hair. “God, I hate some of those drills.”

“That did happen. Dad couldn’t stop talking about it. The best part of the story is what she did to Carl.” Matt’s eyes gleamed with delight.

“Who the hell is Carl?” I’d never felt so confused in my entire life.

“Carl is this absolute tool that was on the team that year. He played shooting guard and he heard what she said, and he took it personally. He said ‘you’re not going to listen to a little girl are you, Coach?’ Ellery jumped up and got in his face and said ‘you’re slow and sloppy and I can pick your pocket without breaking a sweat.’

“He tried to brush it off but she followed it up with ‘come on Carl, let’s go and see who’s right and who’s wrong. Or are you afraid of a little girl?’ Coach Murphy recorded it and shows the guards every year. It is glorious. She demolished him.”

Matt cackled with glee in remembrance and then went on with the story. “I think at first he did it just to humor her, but after she stole the ball three times in a row he got pissed and really went for it. She ran circles around him and all the while was calling out instructions like ‘stay on your toes, Carl’ or ‘quit palming the ball.’

“After the seventh time she stole the ball from him, he chucked the ball across the gym and stormed off in a rage. ‘So, dance lessons?’ she said to Dad and she’s been part of the team every year since.”

“Why doesn’t she play?” I asked; baffled.

“I don’t really know. She gives different answers every time anyone asks her. At any rate, Dad learned that having her help with tryouts leads to well balanced teams and that anyone who can survive trial by Ellery is not going to be bothered by anything that might happen during a game.”

Just as I was about to ask him what he meant, Coach Hendrix blew his whistle. “Alright folks, make sure you’ve turned in your paperwork and then spread yourselves out on the court. Ms. Sinclair is going to lead you through your warm up stretches today and only today.

“Tomorrow she’ll review and by day three you should be able to do them by memory. A warmed up player is a player who is less likely to be injured. Once stretching is done, take two laps around the gym. Let’s go.”

What the ever loving fuck? I thought as I watched her walk to the center of the right sideline. She stood with her hands on her hips watching us with an air of impatience.

“We don’t have the gym all day guys!” she called out.

Thirty of us were trying out for the team and it took us a bit to get spread out to her satisfaction. She snapped her fingers at a few guys and pointed to where she wanted them, others she physically moved. She wove around all of us before heading back to her spot on the sideline and began stretching.

It wasn’t too bad to start with, just simple cross arm stretches and shoulder rolls. Then she went into a reverse shoulder stretch which caused audible intakes of breath from half the team myself included. She smiled in a way that let us know she’d heard and then turned around to show that her hands had met in the center of her back.

Coach Hendrix and Coach Murphy walked behind us, comparing our flexibility and range of motion with hers and called out “switch” when they were done. Ellery rotated her arms to change positions.

Even though I was naturally flexible thanks to being a Shifter, tears stung my eyes as we held this pose for what felt like five centuries. When the whistle finally blew for us to change positions, there was a chorus of relieved sighs.

Ellery turned back around to have us stretch our arms over our heads and my mouth went dry. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the sight of her breasts pushing against her tank top. She caught my eye and proceeded to lean backwards at her hips, arching her back and pushing her breasts out even further.

“This pose helps elongate your spinal column, easing the tension in your lower back. You should do this after every class. I do.”

“Gods,” I muttered to myself and I heard the guy next to me say “fuck.”

Matt was on my other side and he whispered to me “she does, and it’s the best part of my day.” She straightened up, arms still pushing up over head and turned around so her back was to us.

“Make sure you lift out of your hips guys or you won’t be able to do this,” she said right before folding herself in half to touch her toes. The sounds of swearing became louder and from more people. One guy actually fell over.

“Get back up, Ryan. We’re holding this until you’ve caught up,” she called out.

“Move your ass, Ryan!” growled Lee.

Once he’d managed to get back into position Ellery called out her next set of directions. “Don’t worry if you can’t do this exactly right just yet. If you make the team by midseason you’ll have it.” Then she walked her hands forward on the floor and moved into a lunge with her left leg in front.

I was dead. I had to be dead and this was my personal hell. With gritted teeth I managed to copy her, but all around me more players toppled over and scrambled to get into a lunge position.

The cussing was near constant now and Ellery called out in a sing-song voice “come on guys, it’s not that bad. What on earth were you doing during the off season? I bet I can guess!” before she shifted into a heel stretch for thirty seconds and then moved into an even deeper lunge.

She repeated the whole process of lunge, heel stretch, lunge on the other leg, and just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse it did. She took her left leg and slid it under her bent right leg, rolled onto her left hip and spun around into a butterfly sit. No one moved or made a sound.

“You don’t have to turn around,” she said, “but you need to find a way to move into a butterfly sit without standing up completely.”

She played with her hair, her knees flat on the floor and back perfectly straight while she waited. The cussing started again, but we all managed to get into a butterfly sit without making fools of ourselves.

“This stretches your hips, inner thighs, knees and groin, as I’m sure you can tell.” She tilted her head to the left bringing her ear almost to her shoulder and raised an eyebrow when we didn’t follow her example.

“Take your time gentlemen, we’ll hold it until you all do this. Butterfly sit doesn’t bother me.” The sound barrier was probably broken by heads snapping to the side. “Stretch it guys, don’t just snap it over. This stretches your SCM, shoulder, and pectoral muscles.” She sighed in contentment, at ease in the pose. “Now, switch to the other side, slowly.”

By the time we got to the final quad stretches with Ellery rotating on one foot to show the proper positions I had decided I wasn’t dead, just a masochist. Muscles I wasn’t sure I had had been stretched in ways I wasn’t sure they should be, but as we started the required laps I felt better than I had in months.