Chapter 9: The Coach's Fury
The walk to the athletics complex was a gauntlet. Every rustling leaf, every distant shout, made Ally jump. She kept her head down, the hood of Nate’s oversized sweatshirt pulled up, but the leggings left nothing to the imagination. Marcus walked beside her, shoulders hunched, radiating a defensive fury.
They used a side entrance, Nate’s keycard buzzing them through the staff door. The familiar hallway—lined with championship photos and gleaming trophies—felt like a haunted house. The sounds of the building were all wrong: the shush of their leggings, the delicate tap of borrowed sneakers instead of the thunder of their own footfalls.
They could hear him before they saw him.
“—like a couple of goddamn ghosts!” Coach Briggs’s voice boomed from the open door of the locker room, muffled but vibrating with rage. “Johnson’s phone goes to voicemail. Hamilton’s is off. This isn’t a damn spa day, it’s Tuesday! My starting linebacker and my best deep threat are MIA on a heavy contact practice day. Does anyone want to tell me what the hell is going on?”
A muttered, collective “No, Coach” from the team echoed back.
Nate stopped just outside the door, blocking their view. He looked back at them, his expression grim. “Ready to give him a coronary?” he whispered.
Before they could answer, Briggs stormed into the hallway, his meaty face a thundercloud. He was a block of a man, his neck thicker than his head, his coaching whistle resting on a chest that had played defensive line thirty years ago.He spotted Nate.
“Nelson! You room with them. Where are they?”
Nate took a deep breath. “They’re here, Coach.”
“They’re—what?” Briggs’s eyes narrowed. He looked past Nate, seeing the two hooded figures. “Who the hell are these? This isn’t a goddamn recruiting visit for the cheer squad. Get them out.”
“Coach,” Nate said, his voice low and serious, a tone he rarely used. “You need to see them. In your office.Now. It’s… it’s about Jake and Marcus.”
Something in Nate’s delivery cut through Briggs’s anger. He scowled, his gaze flicking between the two conspicuously feminine forms. “Two minutes,” he grunted, turning on his heel and stalking toward his office.
The office was a shrine to old-school football. Frayed play diagrams, a scratched desk, a glass case holding game balls. The air smelled of stale coffee and liniment. Briggs planted himself behind his desk, not sitting.“Well? Start talking.”
Nate closed the door. The click was final.
Ally pushed back her hood.
Ally pushed back her hood. Her blonde hair tumbled free, framing a face that was all wrong—all soft lines and pouty lips where hard angles and stubble should be. Beside her, Marcus did the same, revealing dark, wild curls and a defiant, feminine glare that somehow still contained Marcus Johnson’s stubborn fury.
Coach Briggs’s eyes bulged. He blinked, once, twice, as if clearing a phantom. He leaned forward, his knuckles pressing white into the desk’s scratched surface. “What is this?” he whispered, the rage cooling into something more dangerous: pure, uncomprehending shock. “Nelson, explain. Now.”
Nate stepped forward, putting himself slightly between the coach and the two impossible women. He cleared his throat, the sound too loud in the tense silence. The words, rehearsed in his head on the walk over, now felt ludicrous.
“Coach,” Nate began, his voice strained. “That’s… okay, you see that girl in the gray? The blonde?” He pointed a hesitant finger at Ally, who flinched. “That’s Jake. The Hammer. And the one in burgundy, with the hair? That’s Marcus. The Flash.”
Briggs didn’t move. He didn’t laugh. He just stared, his gaze dragging over the curves outlined by the leggings, the swell of chests under thin fabric, the entirely feminine posture of his two star players. A vein began to pulse in his temple. “Nelson,” he said, his voice dangerously low. “If this is some jackass, sorority-house prank, I will run you until you puke your spleen onto the field.”
“It’s not a prank,” Nate said, the words rushing out. He looked at the floor, then back at his coach, pleading in his eyes. “They took something. A pill. It was supposed to be a joke, to mess with each other, you know how they are. But it… it didn’t wear off.”
NATE CONFESSES.
The sentence hung there, simple and devastating. He didn’t elaborate on the nature of the prank, the bathroom, the bar. He just laid the impossible truth bare at his coach’s feet. “They’re stuck. It’s been over fifteen hours. We didn’t know what else to do. We had to tell you.”
Briggs slowly sank into his creaking leather chair. The anger had evaporated, replaced by a pallor that made him look suddenly old. His eyes never left Ally and Marcus. “Jake?” he said, the name a rough, unfamiliar sound directed at the blonde bombshell.
Ally—Jake—nodded, a single tear tracing a path through makeup she hadn’t applied. “Yeah, Coach,” she said, and it was Jake’s cadence, Jake’s heartbreak, in that sultry, alien voice. “It’s me.”
The coach turned his haunted gaze to Marcus. “Marcus? This true?”
Marcus just nodded, her jaw clenched so tight a muscle jumped. She couldn’t trust herself to speak.
Coach Briggs leaned back, the chair groaning in protest. He stared at the ceiling tiles, then at the game balls in their case, symbols of a world that had just shattered. He brought a thick, trembling hand to his mouth, rubbing his lips. The silence stretched, taut and screaming.
Finally, he looked at Nate, his expression unreadable. “Get out,” he said, his voice hollow. “Wait in the hall. Close the door.”
Nate hesitated, casting a worried glance at his friends, but the command was absolute. He slipped out, pulling the door shut with a soft, definitive click. The three of them were alone: the coach, and his two players, who were not his players at all.
Briggs stood up. He walked around the desk, his steps heavy. He stopped directly in front of Ally, so close she could smell the peppermint on his breath. He studied her face, looking for the young man he’d recruited, the one he’d yelled at and praised for three years.
He saw only her. “The game is in seventy-two hours,” he said, not to Ally, not to Marcus, but to the horrifying reality in the room.
His eyes, hard and assessing, scanned Ally from her anxious face down to the subtle tremor in her hands, then over to Marcus’s rigid posture. The fluorescent light hummed overhead, bleaching the color from the room, making their transformed bodies look like a surrealist painting.
“Seventy-two hours,” he repeated, quieter now, a man staring at a战术板 with no plays left. “You’re my starters. You’re the heart of this defense, the speed of this offense.” A thick hand scrubbed over his close-cropped gray hair. “And you’re telling me you did this to yourselves. For a laugh.”
“It was just a stupid prank war thing,” Marcus burst out, her new voice sharp with old frustration. “The guy said twelve hours, max. We got the pills from some sketchy website, okay? We didn’t think—”
“You didn’t think,” Briggs cut in, his voice like stone. “That’s the goddamn headline, isn’t it?” He turned and walked to the window, staring out at the empty practice field. His shoulders, always squared for battle, slumped just a fraction. “I can’t put you on that field. Not like this. One hit—hell, one awkward photo—and this program is a national joke. We’re forfeiting scholarships. We’re a meme.”
The finality in his tone stole the air from the room. Ally felt the polished floor tilt under her borrowed sneakers. Football wasn’t just a game; it was the scaffolding of their lives, of their futures. To have it simply vanish was a different kind of bodily dissolution.
“So what then?” Ally asked, Jake’s defiance threading through the melodic voice. “We just disappear? We’re just… gone?”
Briggs turned from the window. His expression had shifted from shock to a cold, calculating pragmatism they knew well from halftime adjustments. His gaze landed on them, not as his players, but as problems to be managed.
“You can’t vanish. That raises more questions. Campus sees you two around one day, then poof—gone right before the biggest game of the season?” He shook his head, a grim smile touching his lips. “No. You’re going to be very, very visible.”
He walked back to his desk and leaned on it, his weight making the wood groan. He looked from Ally’s blonde, horrified perfection to Marcus’s smoldering, furious glamour. The absurdity of it, the sheer catastrophic stupidity, seemed to settle on him all at once.
A laugh escaped him, dry and hollow as a cough. “Alright, dumbasses. You’re on cheer till you turn back.” He let the sentence hang, watching the confusion and then the dawning horror bleach their faces. “The squad practices on the south field, same as us. You’ll be there. In uniform. You’ll smile, you’ll wave your damn pom-poms, and you will be seen by every player, every coach, every fan on campus.”
He stood up straight, looming, his decision final. “Maybe the movement, the yelling, whatever the hell cheerleaders do, will jog whatever chemical nightmare you cooked up in your systems. Enjoy it, Princess.”
The word, Princess, hung in the air like a slap. It wasn’t a joke. It was a brand.
Marcus took a step forward, her fists clenched at her sides, the burgundy fabric of her top straining. “You cannot be serious. Cheer? We have plays to learn. We have tape. We—”
“You have nothing!” Briggs roared, the veneer of control shattering.Spittle flew. “You have a pair of tits and a lesson to learn! You wanted a new perspective? You got it. Now get the hell out of my office. Report to Coach Gutierrez on the south field at 3 PM. Tell her I sent you. Tell her… tell her you’re walk-ons with a special appreciation for team spirit.”
He yanked the door open. Nate nearly fell into the room, having been pressed against it. The hallway, with its framed glory, felt like a tunnel to a different life.
“Nelson,” Briggs snapped, his voice exhausted. “You keep an eye on them. You’re their babysitter. Anyone asks, they’re distant cousins here on a… a cultural exchange. I don’t care. Make it work.”
Briggs looked at them one last time, his eyes holding a mixture of profound disappointment and sheer, bewildered rage. “The second you change back, you come to me. Not before. Now get out of my sight.”
They shuffled into the hall. The door slammed behind them, the sound final as a gunshot.
The three of them stood there, paralyzed by the reverberation. The distant clatter of cleats from the main locker room seemed to come from another planet. Ally looked down at her hands, the manicured nails she hadn’t painted, the delicate wrists.Cheer. Pom-poms. Smiling.
A sound escaped Marcus, a choked, ragged thing that was almost a laugh. “Cultural exchange,” she muttered, her voice raw.
Nate just stared at the closed door, then at his two best friends. “South field’s at three,” he said, the words utterly devoid of feeling. He started walking, the echo of his own normal footsteps a taunt.
Ally and Marcus followed, their soft-soled shoes whispering against the polished floor. The championship photos on the wall blurred as they passed—ghosts of their former selves, frozen in poses of strength they could no longer claim.