Hamilton sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. I can tell she’s at a loss. “Yeah, I know.”
“You have to sit her out. Don’t let her come to practice for a few days or weeks. Make sure she doesn’t get to compete in the first couple of games as punishment. Lakes is really hurt, Freya. She was crying to me. She told me she hates it here—feels like she doesn’t fit in. She wants to leave the school.”
Hamilton’s face screws a bit. A recognizable pain fills her eyes and I know I’ve tugged on her heartstrings. Our gazes lock and she finally says, “I’ll work on Howard. I’ll call her mother if I have to. She gets away with shit like this when I contact her dad, but as you know, her parents are divorced and her mother doesn’t take too kindly to Melanie’s tantrums and she doesn’t cater to Mr. Howard.”
“Right.”
“In the meantime, I’ll pay Lakes a visit. The last thing I want is for her to feel like she doesn’t belong here. It was my choice to recruit her. I wanted to diversify this team and the staff. She won’t pay for my decisions like this.” Hamilton picks her head up. “Thank you for telling me, Joaquin. And thank you for not reacting the way you really wanted to when you saw it happen. I know how that temper of yours can get.”
“Of course.” I turn and open the door, walking right out.
Hamilton will do the right thing. She and I have a lot in common. Interestingly enough, when Hamilton first came to Bennett University, she was only an assistant coach for the track team. It was an all-male staff and they were all assholes. They felt women were inferior, which made Hamilton feel like she never really belonged on the staff. Eventually, all of that changed. The men left, Hamilton moved up to head coach, and the staff needed replacements and upgrading. Hamilton took initiative and handled all of it.
She now has more women on staff and she has me, a thirty-year-old Mexican man. She diversified the staff, and now she’s working on diversifying the team. Hamilton’s biggest fear was that Lakes wouldn’t choose BU because of the racial stats. The number of black athletes at BU is extremely low for track, and a lot of them don’t choose this school because of that sad fact. But Lakes did, and now she’s facing the one thing girls with black and brown skin have always faced: discrimination.
Hamilton has no choice but to make this right for her.
“So, how was practice today?” Mamá walks into the dining room with a white dish in her oven-mitten clad hands. Placing the dish on the center of the table, she smiles and then steps back. I stand, pulling her chair out for her. “Gracias, hijo.” She pats my hand as I push her chair in.
After sitting, I say, “Practice was not so good today. One of the girls got hurt.”
“Hurt?” Mamá takes off the lid from the dish, revealing baked chicken and Spanish red rice. “How?”
“One of the girls on the team tripped her.” I drag my palm over my face, remembering the fall. The tears in Amber’s eyes.
“What? Why would she do such a thing?” Mamá’s voice is angry now, and her eyes are on mine, a spoon in her hand.
“The girl who was tripped is black. The one who tripped her is white. I’ll let you put two and two together.”
“Ridiculous,” she hisses. “What did you do about it?”
“I couldn’t do anything about it, Má. The girl who tripped her, Melanie Howard, her father donates heavily to the track team and the college. She gets away with stuff around there because the school respects him. He’s the reason I was suspended two years ago for two games.”
“Eso es mierda!” she snaps. That’s bullshit!
I sigh as she dumps some rice on my plate and then uses a fork to grab chicken and place it on my plate too. “I spoke to Hamilton about it. I’m sure she’ll handle it.”
“She’d better. I told you I didn’t like the idea of you coaching at that school, Joaquin. You’re the only Hispanic coach in that school.”
“There’s a black assistant coach on the football team,” I say, as if that will settle the issue.
“And what about all the other teams? Soccer and lacrosse and basketball and all the others?”
I shrug. I don’t want to answer, but I know all the coaches are white.
“Exactly,” she says, acknowledging my silence. “If more of them were like Hamilton, then it wouldn’t be so bad, but they aren’t all like her, are they?”
I dig into my food. I hate getting my mother started. She’s experienced blatant discrimination herself many, many times. Hell, she lost her husband due to a ruthless act of violence and discrimination, and I lost my father.