Stealing Emma

Chapter 1 - Team Building

Emma Blake walked onto the basketball court, trying to find the rest of her group. She held an ugly grey t-shirt that she was supposed to be wearing, almost dragging it by her side. It had been handed out to her moments before by one of the team building organizers. She much rather wear her cute sports tank top so she was trying to hold off until the last possible moment to put on the offending clothing. After all, organized sports and team building were not her thing.

She couldn’t believe this was her first day of graduate school. Shouldn’t she be at some type of orientation where everybody is jammed together in one room and forced to do awkward introductions? At least that’s what she always assumed it would be like it.

Instead, she was expected to play none other than basketball before even properly meeting anyone in her class. What is more, they had switched up the regular assigned groups so in reality she wouldn’t even be “team building” with the people she had to actually work with for the rest of the semester. What was the point of that?

She went to sit down by an area designated “Team B” where a few others were already gathered. She barely caught anyone’s name but turns out they were all from different countries such as Colombia, Switzerland and Italy. Quite the international crowd. She didn’t add much to the group conversation while they waited for everyone to settle down. She also didn’t pay much attention to the head organizer when he started talking and gave his version of a big motivational speech which included mentioning Michael Jordan every five minutes. At the end he just concluded to ‘go play some ball’.

Emma hadn’t played basketball since high school, but she was certainly no stranger to the NBA, meaning she had a pretty good understanding of the rules and all. At the moment, all they really had to do was pass the ball around and practice shooting some hoops. Sounded easy enough. If only the ugly t-shirt she had begrudgingly resorted to wearing wouldn’t cramp her style.

“Alright everyone, gather around,” the head organizer called out after an hour of shooting around. “We’ll be moving on to the interesting stuff now. Each group will be competing against each other in a series of drills you need to complete as a group. First team to successfully complete all of the drills wins. We have three coaches here who will explain the details to you and answer any questions you have.”

One of the coaches went over the drills with her group and one other. They had to complete three different drills that seemed pretty standard enough. They had to dribble around some cones, pass the ball to each other without dropping it, and finally make a basket seated in a chair from the free throw line.

Most people immediately dispersed after the instructions were given to divide the tasks between team members, but Emma decided to probe the coach a bit more. The instructions had seemed pretty vague to her.

“So what exactly are the rules?” she asked him.

“You’re going to need to be more specific than that,” he answered.

“Well, is there anything we can or can’t do?”

“I can only give yes or no answers. Rephrase the question.”

Ugh, he was being so cryptic. She looked out towards the court and considered just dropping the whole thing. She was running out of time and needed to talk to her group and find out what the hell she was supposed to do. She eyed the basketballs set in the middle of the court, to the cones, and the chair.

“You said it was all about completing each drill successfully, but didn’t mention any particular order. Does that mean we have to do them in a sequence, like one after the other?”

His eyes lit up and he smiled at her. “No.”

“So you’re saying we can do the drills at the same time?” a deep yet soothing voice asked right behind her. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise at the way the words had curled around in an elegant British accent.