the assistant coach
short fiction written february 2026
When Stephanie and her older sister, Anna, are young, they walk home from school together and sit in the living room watching My Little Pony until their parents get home in time for dinner. Anna has an excellent Pinkie Pie impression. But once she turns 13 and starts getting ready for high school, Anna stops playing with Stephanie, no matter how much she begs.
One morning early on in July, Stephanie overhears an argument between Anna and their mom:
“You never play with your sister.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You’ll make a terrible mother if you don’t learn to get along with kids.”
Stephanie holds her breath at the long pause.
“That’s fine with me. Can I go back upstairs now?”
“Anna.”
“I’m not playing with Stephanie. She should get her own friends.”
Stephanie listens on the other side of the wall as her sister starts blasting The Cranberries, and leans against the wall, pretending she and her sister are listening together.
After overhearing that argument, Stephanie stops asking Anna to play with her, and stops complaining to their mom about Anna never playing with her. Stephanie learns to play on her own, and she becomes really good at two things: coming up with stories in her imagination, and hiding in places where she could listen to conversations.
When Stephanie first notices something strange is going on with her sister, it’s just after Anna’s first week of high school. Stephanie walks home from elementary school and expects to arrive at the same time as Anna, but Anna doesn’t get there until two hours later. In those two hours, Stephanie wanders their empty house murmuring to herself.
“What were you doing?” Stephanie asks when Anna’s key turns in the lock and she shows up at the door, looking somewhat sweaty and pink in the face.
Something flashes over Anna’s face. “None of your business.”
“I’ll tell Mom,” Stephanie says.
“Tell Mom what?” Anna says as she walks into the kitchen, cleaning out her lunchbag.
“That you left me alone at the house for two hours,” Stephanie pushes. She can’t see Anna’s face, but she knows that she rolled her eyes.
“Fine,” Anna says, shutting the refrigerator door and turning to look at Stephanie. “I made the girl’s volleyball team. I have practice twice a week now. Happy?”
Stephanie nods mutely and watches her sister retreat into her bedroom again, and then she murmurs boredly to herself again. She had no idea her sister played sports. She couldn’t think of anything she knew her sister to care about. She could hear her stomping around upstairs, and even with someone else in the house, Stephanie felt alone.
The next time Stephanie notices something strange is two weeks later, on a rainy Thursday. Stephanie waits, standing under an overhang and shivering, to be picked up from school. Over the phone, Anna tells her to wait, but that she’ll get a ride home in an hour.
The sleek, blue car pulls up when the rain starts to get heavier. Stephanie is shivering and her feet are sore, but she is polite when she gets in the backseat. Anna is sitting in the passenger seat, and she lazily gestures to the older, tall girl in the driver’s seat.
“This is Sam,” Anna says. “She’s the assistant coach for the volleyball team. Sam, this is my sister, Stephanie.”
“Hi, Stephanie,” Sam says, not unkindly.
They drive in silence, and from the backseat, Stephanie watches in confusion as Anna’s hand slowly reaches over the armrest between her and Sam, and as Sam’s right hand pulls away from the steering wheel to interlace their fingers together. Sam drives the rest of the way with one hand. Stephanie stares.
When they pull up to the empty driveway, Stephanie rushes out of the car. From the porch, she watches her sister linger in the passenger’s seat, mouth moving. Then Anna gets out, rolls her eyes at Stephanie, and pushes them both into the house.
“Is Anna with Sam today?” Stephanie asks at dinner a week later, when Anna still hasn’t arrived home from school.
“Who?” their mother asks.
“Sam,” Stephanie repeats. “The assistant coach of the volleyball team.”
“Volleyball?” their mother asks.
Halfway into October, Stephanie realizes that she is somehow seeing her sister even less than she saw her during the hot summer months. Stephanie catches Anna in the hallway on the way to the bathroom, bored of coming up with stories in her room on a Sunday afternoon.
“When do you play a game?” Stephanie asks.
“What?” Anna says distractedly.
“Volleyball. Can I come to your games?” Stephanie asks.
Anna walks into the bathroom, preparing to shut the door in Stephanie’s face. “No.”
Music starts up in the bathroom. Stephanie wonders what she’s doing in there, and her question is answered when she watches Anna, from her seat at the top of the stairs, return to her bedroom with curled hair and strange eye-makeup. Stephanie wants to ask why she looks like that, but she keeps her mouth shut. She watches, still at the top of the stairs, when Anna leaves the house without saying goodbye.
When Anna returns home, their parents are asleep, but Stephanie is still awake. Stephanie listens from her favourite hiding spot, the laundry room with the door slightly ajar, to Anna moving around the first floor. Her steps are heavy and unbalanced, and she’s speaking to someone on the phone in hushed whispers.
“Her ugly fucking boyfriend was there,” she hears Anna say. Stephanie hears the sound of something pouring into a cup, and then Anna putting it down on the marble countertop.
“No, I know,” Anna says. “He’s a dick, he’s a total dick, and I know he hates me. No, I mean, why wouldn’t he? His girlfriend doesn’t even fucking… like him.”
Anna opens the fridge and shuts it. She turns the tap on. Stephanie shifts her weight to try and wake her foot up.
“No, I’m not…” Anna’s words are slurred. “Okay, shut it. I need to go to bed. Bye. See you for the game tomorrow.”
Stephanie listens to her older sister stomp, steps irregular, up the stairs and into her room. No music starts up, and there is no more movement. Stephanie pads quietly up the stairs a few minutes later and tucks herself into bed.
After school the next day, instead of walking home with Julian, Stephanie tells him that she is meeting her sister at her school, and walks to the local high school. She walks by all kinds of high schoolers headed in the opposite direction, to their own neighbourhoods, to bus stops, to the local convenience store. Some of them are tall and looming, older than Stephanie by what feels like decades, and some of them are younger, more colourful, loud and squeaky like a child’s toy. At the high school, Stephanie enters the first doors she sees, and turns corner after corner until she finds a gymnasium.
She hides at the sides of the indoor bleachers where no one can see her, peering through the cracks, and watches as a team of girls in green uniforms warm-up on one side of the volleyball net, and a team of white and red uniforms warm-up on the other side. Anna is on the green team.
Anna looks taller than she’s ever looked. She stands with her chin raised and her chest puffed, and when Stephanie watches her warm-up, she’s shocked by how high Anna can jump. Higher than anyone else on her team. Stephanie spots Sam standing by the bench on the green side, and notices that she is wearing a knee brace. She sees Anna look at Sam, over by the bench, and say something to her. Anna does this many times.
Before the game starts, before Stephanie can watch her sister play any real volleyball, something strange happens at the bench. A taller, older boy with shaggy hair and dark clothes walks up to Sam, with fists clenched and a frown on his face. Anna notices, too, because she stops warming up and walks towards them.
Many things happen at once: Stephanie notices the boy’s knuckles are ugly and bruised as he fists the collar of Sam’s shirt, Anna rushes forward painted with fury, and a gasp rises from the crowd. Then clean, unbruised knuckles make contact with a square face, and two bodies fall to the floor, colliding on the way down.
Stephanie is glued where she is standing, peeking behind the bleachers, as she hears a group of girls sitting above her murmur to each other: Who just punched who? No way, that freshman, Anna? I thought Sammie broke up with Liam. Do you think that’s why? Holy fuck, is he bleeding?
Stephanie hears a group of boys walk past her in the bleachers. I hope the game starts soon, I want to get home in time to watch the Bills. She hears their footsteps stop, their voices lower in volume. What happened to Liam? Dude, what the hell?
And when their voices fade, Stephanie can finally make out noises rising from the other end of the gym, where figures come into focus and she can see her sister being held back by the hand of a teacher on her shoulder and a boy with blood dripping from his nose shouting something unintelligible, being held back by a teacher as well, one who is trying to usher both of them out of the gymnasium. It takes a moment, but Stephanie follows her sister’s gaze and catches sight of Sam, slouched on a bench against the wall, red in the face, flanked on both sides by older girls rubbing her back. Sam is staring at the ground.
“Sam. Sam,” Stephanie can hear her sister saying. “Sam, are you okay?”
Sam doesn’t raise her eyes, and Stephanie can’t hear the words, but she sees Sam’s mouth move, short and quick and small, followed by Anna shaking the hand off her shoulder and stomping out of the gymnasium. The boy with the bloody face is eventually convinced to leave the gymnasium and Stephanie decides this is time to leave, because even if they do play the volleyball game, she won’t get to see Anna play.
Stephanie is sitting with her legs crossed behind the couch with an old chapter-book in her hand when Anna finally arrives home.
“Suspended?” their mother’s voice echoes through the house twenty minutes later when she and Anna are having a hushed conversation in the dining room. “My daughter, suspended for two days, for hitting someone.” In response, Anna says something Stephanie can’t hear, and then there are two pairs of footsteps up their winding staircase, more whispers, and a door slamming. When Stephanie hears her mother walk into her bedroom and start talking to someone on the phone, she creeps up the stairs and turns the handle into Anna’s room.
Anna is seated on the floor, leaning with her back against the bed, facing the wall. She’s kicking lightly at her nightstand and doesn’t turn to look at Stephanie, even when she shuts the door behind her and steps up to her sister. Stephanie takes a seat beside her, leaving space between them, and looks up at her face. There are tear tracks on her cheeks, shiny and half-dry.
“Anna,” Stephanie says.
“What?” Anna snaps, barely a whisper.
“Do you want to go see the new My Little Pony movie?” Stephanie asks.
And there’s a long moment, a great pause, right before Anna laughs. “There’s a new My Little Pony movie?”
“Yeah,” Stephanie says, staring at her own feet.
Anna shifts so they’re closer together, bodies touching, and sighs. “Yeah, Steph. Let’s go see the new My Little Pony movie.”