Court Positions

"You learn to read car parks in a ward like ours. They tell you who's running late, who's having a difficult week, and who's pretending everything's fine. The people inside are usually harder to decode."

The chapel car park was half-full by the time Dad pulled in, the Corolla's headlights sweeping across familiar vehicles arranged in familiar patterns. The Bakers' white Tarago sat near the entrance, as it always did — Brother Baker had a theory about parking close to minimise the walk, something about efficiency that Dad had once politely disagreed with and then never mentioned again. The Nguyens' hatchback was tucked into the far corner, and I spotted a few others I recognised without being able to name their owners. You learned to read car parks in a ward like ours. They told you who'd arrived, who was running late, whose family was having a difficult week based on their absence.

"Nine o'clock," Dad said. Not a question.

"Should be." I reached for my bag, fingers finding the familiar strap. "I'll text if it runs over."

He nodded, and for a moment neither of us moved. The engine idled, a low vibration I could feel through the seat. Outside, someone crossed between parked cars — just a shape in the darkness, hunched against the cold. I couldn't tell who it was.

"Have a good game," Dad said.

"Thanks."

I climbed out before the silence could stretch any further. The evening air bit at my cheeks immediately — that particular Adelaide winter cold that never quite reached freezing but seeped into you anyway, finding the gaps between your collar and your skin. The smell of eucalyptus drifted from somewhere nearby, sharp and medicinal, mixing with the faint petrol tang of the idling car.

I shut the door, and the Corolla reversed in a neat arc, brake lights flaring briefly before Dad pulled out onto the street. I watched until the taillights disappeared around the corner, two red dots swallowed by the suburban dark.

The chapel loomed against the sky, its silhouette as familiar as my own shadow. Tan brickwork, low-pitched roof, the modest spire rising from one end — not the grand architecture of cathedrals, but something more practical. More pragmatic. A building designed for function rather than awe, for meetings and activities and the steady accumulation of ordinary Sundays. I'd been walking through Chapel doors since I was eight years old. Primary classes. Youth nights in the cultural hall. Seminary at six in the morning before school, stumbling through scripture mastery verses while my brain was still thick with sleep.

I knew which step had the loose brick — the third one from the bottom, left side. Which drinking fountain ran warmer than the others. Which bathroom had the faulty lock you had to jiggle just right. The building had mapped itself onto me over the years, or maybe I'd mapped myself onto it. Either way, standing here now in the cold, I felt the particular discomfort of knowing a place too well. Like wearing a jumper you'd outgrown but couldn't quite bring yourself to donate.

A burst of laughter carried from somewhere inside — muffled, indistinct. The young adults were already gathering.

I hitched my bag higher on my shoulder and crossed the car park, my breath forming brief clouds that dissolved almost as soon as they appeared.

The side entrance opened onto the corridor that ran past the bishop's office and the clerks' room. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, that particular frequency that always seemed to hover at the edge of perception, not quite loud enough to acknowledge but impossible to entirely ignore. The carpet was the same industrial grey it had been for as long as I could remember — hard-wearing, stain-resistant, utterly devoid of character. Someone had pinned new flyers to the noticeboard: a reminder about tithing settlement appointments, an announcement for the upcoming stake youth conference, a faded poster about family history that had been there so long the paper had started to yellow at the edges.

I paused at the noticeboard without really meaning to, my eyes scanning the familiar clutter of announcements and sign-up sheets. There was something comforting about it, in a way. The same rhythms, the same cycles. The wheel turning as it always had, as it presumably always would.

A door opened somewhere behind me, and I heard voices — adult voices, low and serious. I glanced back and caught a glimpse of Bishop Hahn emerging from his office, deep in conversation with someone I didn't recognise. An older man, grey-haired, wearing a suit that looked too formal for a Wednesday evening. They moved toward the foyer, heads bent together, and I caught a fragment of their exchange as they passed.

"—the temple presidency has been very clear about—"

"I understand, but the timeline—"

"—needs to be handled carefully. Only those who've been specifically—"

They disappeared around the corner, their voices fading into the general hum of the building. I stood there for a moment, trying to make sense of what I'd heard. Temple presidency. Timeline. It sounded important — weighted in a way that ordinary church business rarely was. But I had no context, no framework to hang it on. Just words, disconnected and strange.

I filed it away somewhere in the back of my mind and kept walking.

The cultural hall announced itself before I reached it — the rhythmic thud of basketballs on hardwood, the squeak of shoes on polished floor, voices bouncing off the high ceiling and returning muddied and overlapping. The double doors were propped open with rubber wedges, and I paused at the threshold to let my eyes adjust to the brightness inside.

The hall was the largest room in the building, designed to serve multiple purposes with minimal adaptation. During the week, it hosted basketball and volleyball and the occasional wedding reception. On Sundays, the partition walls folded out to create additional overflow space for the chapel. The stage at the far end had seen nativity plays and missionary farewells and at least one talent show I'd tried very hard to forget — Charles had performed a magic trick that had gone spectacularly wrong, and Mum still brought it up at family dinners when she wanted to make him squirm.

The floor was marked with the lines of multiple sports — basketball in white, volleyball in blue, some third game I'd never identified in faded yellow. Fluorescent panels buzzed overhead, casting everything in that flat, shadowless glare that made everyone look slightly washed out. The overall effect was of a space that belonged to everyone and therefore to no one, a room perpetually suspended between one function and the next.

Tonight, it was basketball. Or at least the loose approximation of basketball that young adult activities tended to produce.

About two dozen people had already gathered, distributed across the court in shifting clusters. The Playford and Paralowie wards shared this building — had done for as long as I could remember — which meant combined activities drew from both congregations. The result was a social landscape I only partially understood. I knew the Playford faces, could place most of them in family constellations and calling histories. The Paralowie crowd was hazier. Names I'd heard in passing. Faces I recognised from stake conferences and multi-ward firesides without being able to attach much context.

Someone had set up a folding table near the entrance with a plastic jug of orange cordial and a stack of cups. The cordial was the same brand it always was — cheap, too sweet, vaguely chemical — the kind that had fuelled every church activity I'd ever attended. A couple of young women stood nearby, chatting over cups they'd already filled. I didn't look closely enough to identify them. Just registered their presence and kept moving.

The court itself was a study in organised chaos. A few people were shooting around at the far hoop, taking turns with a casual rhythm that suggested they'd been at it for a while. Others stood in loose groups along the sidelines, talking, stretching, scrolling through phones. The energy was familiar — that particular mixture of social obligation and genuine enthusiasm that characterised most church activities. Some people were here because they wanted to be. Others because it was expected. Most, probably, fell somewhere in between.

I spotted Samuel Baker before he spotted me. He was near the centre of the court, ball tucked under one arm, talking animatedly with a couple of other guys I half-recognised. His body language was pure Samuel — expansive, energetic, taking up space without apology. He gestured broadly as he spoke, the ball bouncing against his hip with each movement, and I could hear the cadence of his voice even if I couldn't make out the words. Whatever he was saying, it was apparently hilarious. At least to him.

A small group from Paralowie had staked out territory along the baseline. I recognised a few faces without being able to attach names. One guy stood out — tall, broad-shouldered, with the kind of build that suggested regular time in a gym. He was laughing at something one of the others had said, his posture easy and relaxed, the body language of someone entirely comfortable in his own skin. I thought his name might be Ryan something. Holloway, maybe. I'd seen him at stake conference once, bearing testimony with the polished delivery of a returned missionary.

"Jerome!"

Samuel's voice cut through the ambient noise. He was waving me over, grinning broadly, the ball now spinning on one finger in a show of casual dexterity.

I raised a hand in acknowledgment and started across the court, weaving between people who'd stopped to talk in the middle of the floor. The hall smelled like dust and sweat and floor polish, with that underlying note of something else — the particular institutional scent that seemed to permeate every church building I'd ever entered, as if they all drew from the same invisible reservoir.

"Mate, finally." Samuel clapped my shoulder as I reached him, the contact solid and unselfconscious. "Was starting to think you'd bailed."

"Traffic," I said.

"On a Wednesday night? In Craigmore?" His eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. "What, did a family of wombats hold up the roundabout?"

"Something like that."

He grinned, accepting the non-answer with the easy grace that made Samuel easy to be around. He didn't push. Didn't probe. Just let things slide past and kept moving forward.

"Well, you're here now. That's what matters." He bounced the ball once, twice, the rhythm automatic. "Still warming up. Game proper starts in fifteen, maybe twenty. Depends how long it takes to sort out teams. You know how it is."

I did know. Team selection at combined activities was always a minor diplomatic exercise — balancing skill levels, ward affiliations, the unspoken social hierarchies that everyone pretended didn't exist. It could take five minutes or twenty-five, depending on how many opinions needed to be aired.

I dropped my bag against the wall near a growing pile of others. Someone's jacket had slipped onto the floor. A water bottle had rolled under the chair, leaving a small wet trail on the hardwood. The usual detritus of communal gatherings.

"Who's here?" I asked, though I could see for myself. The question was more about orientation than information — a way of getting Samuel to narrate the social terrain so I didn't have to decode it alone.

"The usual suspects, mostly." He gestured vaguely with the ball. "Paralowie brought a decent crew tonight. Ryan Holloway and his mates. Couple of the Peterson boys." He paused, scanning the room. "James Hahn's around somewhere — saw him earlier, talking to his dad. Some kind of meeting or something, I don't know. Bishop stuff."

"And Nate?"

"Somewhere." Samuel shrugged, the gesture carrying a complicated weight I'd noticed before. "You know Nate. Doing his own thing."

I did know Nate, in the limited way you know someone you've grown up alongside without ever quite connecting with. We'd served in the same youth quorums, sat through the same lessons, attended the same camps. But Nate had always maintained a careful distance — friendly enough when approached, but never initiating, never lingering. Like someone who'd learned that staying on the periphery was safer than risking the centre.

"How's Charles?" Samuel asked, and I recognised the pivot for what it was — a shift away from family territory he didn't want to explore. "Still surgically attached to his phone?"

"Permanently. Mum's given up trying to confiscate it at dinner."

"Chloe's the same. It's ridiculous. I walked past her room yesterday and she was literally typing with both thumbs while reading a textbook. Multitasking, she called it. I call it a cry for help."

"They're sixteen. Pretty sure that's just how sixteen works now."

"Doesn't mean I have to like it." Samuel shook his head with exaggerated despair. "I'm telling you, if I have to see one more heart-eyes emoji on her screen, I'm going to stage an intervention."

I thought about Charles, about the way his whole face changed when a message from Chloe arrived — that mix of eagerness and self-consciousness he hadn't yet learned to hide. They'd been circling each other for months now, the two youngest Bakers and Smiths gradually drawing together while their families watched with varying degrees of amusement and concern.

"Could be worse," I said. "Could be someone you didn't know."

"True. At least with Charles, we know what we're getting. Weird kid, but decent." Samuel bounced the ball off the floor, caught it one-handed. "Come on. Let's shoot around. I need to calibrate my three-pointer before I humiliate everyone."

"Your three-pointer couldn't hit water if you fell out of a boat."

"Slander. Absolute slander." But he was grinning as he said it, already moving toward the nearest hoop.

The next ten minutes settled into the comfortable rhythm of warming up. Samuel and I took turns shooting, the ball arcing between us in patterns that required no conscious thought. Plant the feet. Square the shoulders. Follow through with the wrist. The mechanics were ingrained from years of church basketball — not competitive, exactly, but regular enough that my body knew what to do even when my mind was somewhere else.

Others filtered through our orbit as we shot. Daniel Vance from Paralowie, who I'd played against before and remembered mainly for his tendency to call fouls that existed only in his imagination. A quiet guy named Marcus whose last name I'd never learned, solid on defence but reluctant to shoot. One of the Nguyen boys — the oldest, I thought, recently returned from his mission — who still had that slightly careful quality returned missionaries sometimes carried, like they hadn't quite figured out how to be civilians again.

I watched him without meaning to, tracking the way he interacted with the space. There was a self-consciousness to returned missionaries that I'd learned to recognise — a heightened awareness of how they were being perceived, every joke calibrated, every interaction weighed. They'd spent two years as full-time representatives of the Church, and some of that never entirely wore off.

The thought surfaced before I could stop it: would I have been like that? If I'd gone?

I pushed it down, focused on the ball in my hands. The familiar leather grain against my fingertips. The slight give of the hardwood under my shoes. Concrete things. Present things.

Samuel was in the middle of an elaborate explanation of some play he'd seen on television when James Hahn appeared at the edge of our conversation. He'd entered through the main doors rather than the side, which probably meant he'd been in the foyer talking to someone — working the room, making himself visible. James had a way of ensuring his presence was registered, though he was skilled enough at it that you couldn't quite call it showing off.

"Jerome. Samuel." He nodded at each of us in turn, his smile easy. "Good turnout tonight."

"Not bad," Samuel agreed. "Paralowie brought numbers."

"Good, good. Should be competitive." James's eyes swept the room with the assessing quality of someone taking inventory. "We'll need to sort teams soon. Keep things fair."

There was something in the way he said it — a subtle emphasis on 'fair' that suggested he had opinions about how the sorting should go. James was the Bishop's son, which meant he'd grown up with a particular kind of expectation attached to his name. Every meeting, every activity, every casual interaction carried an unspoken weight. He was always being watched. Always representing something larger than himself.

I wondered sometimes if that was exhausting. Or if he'd done it for so long that he didn't know any other way to be.

"Whenever you're ready," Samuel said. "Jerome and I were just discussing strategy."

"Oh yeah? What strategy?"

"Pass to me and let me score. It's revolutionary."

James laughed — the right amount, at the right moment — and clapped Samuel on the shoulder before moving on to greet someone else. I watched him go, tracking the way people's postures shifted slightly as he approached. Not deference, exactly. More like... awareness. A recognition that James Hahn occupied a particular position in the social architecture of this space, whether he'd chosen it or not.

"He's intense lately," Samuel observed, once James was out of earshot. "More than usual."

"How so?"

"I don't know. Just... something. Dad mentioned there's stuff happening at stake level, but you know how he is. Never actually explains anything useful." Samuel shrugged. "Probably nothing. Meetings about meetings. The usual."

I thought about the fragment of conversation I'd overheard in the corridor — Bishop Hahn and the grey-haired man, talking about the temple presidency and timelines and handling things carefully. It felt connected, somehow. Part of a larger pattern I couldn't quite see.

But that was probably just my imagination. The Church was always having meetings about something. That was practically its defining feature.

The question of teams arose the way it always did — organically, chaotically, with multiple conversations happening at once and no clear authority stepping forward to impose order. Someone suggested captains picking. Someone else proposed random allocation. A third voice, which I thought might be Daniel Vance, outlined a complicated system involving shoe sizes that nobody could follow.

"Just do shirts and skins," one of the younger guys called out. He was maybe eighteen, with the restless energy of someone who'd been waiting for an excuse to show off whatever gym work he'd been doing. "Keep it simple."

The suggestion landed in the middle of the group and sat there, drawing mixed reactions. A few of the younger players — the ones who hadn't been through the temple yet — looked eager, hands already drifting toward the hems of their shirts. But others shifted uncomfortably, and I saw the room divide along invisible lines.

It was never discussed openly. That wasn't how things worked. But everyone understood the underlying calculation: returned missionaries wore garments, the sacred underclothing received in the temple. Playing shirtless would mean either removing them in public or revealing them to people who might not be endowed. Neither option fit within the unwritten protocols that governed these situations.

I saw Ryan Holloway exchange a glance with one of the other Paralowie guys — brief, loaded with shared understanding. The Nguyen boy was suddenly fascinated by his shoelaces.

"Tell you what," James Hahn said, stepping into the gap with the smooth authority of someone accustomed to managing awkward moments. "Let's keep it simple but appropriate, yeah? We’re not animals. No need for anyone to be stripping down. We'll just do colours. Blues versus everyone else, or whatever people are wearing."

He said it lightly, with a smile that invited agreement. But there was an edge underneath — a reminder wrapped in reasonableness. The younger guy who'd made the suggestion looked confused for a moment, clearly not understanding what the fuss was about.

"It's just basketball," he started. "What's the big—"

"It's fine," James cut in, still smiling. "Colours work. Let's just get organised."

The moment passed. The younger guy shrugged and let it go, probably filing it away as another inexplicable adult concern. But I'd caught the flicker of relief on several faces — the returned missionaries grateful they wouldn't have to navigate the situation, the others either oblivious or pretending to be.

It was such a small thing. Such a minor negotiation, invisible to anyone who didn't know the context. But these small things accumulated. They were the texture of life in the Church — the constant background hum of rules and expectations and unspoken understandings. You learned to navigate them without thinking, or you learned to think about them constantly. I'd never figured out which category I fell into.

Samuel appeared at my elbow. "You're wearing blue, right?"

I looked down at my shirt. Navy, technically.

"Close enough."

"Good. You're with me." He bounced the ball once, decisive. "Let's see who else we can grab before James stacks the other team with all the returned missionaries."

The next few minutes dissolved into the controlled chaos of team selection. People drifted between groups, negotiations happening in fragments of conversation I couldn't always follow. Samuel appointed himself unofficial captain of our side and started recruiting with his characteristic lack of subtlety — pointing at people he wanted, calling out names, physically steering a couple of the younger guys toward our end of the court.

I hung back and let him work, using the time to survey the room properly for the first time.

The young women had gathered along the far wall, a loose constellation of chairs and conversation. I counted maybe eight or nine of them — some I recognised from Playford, others presumably from Paralowie. They weren't here to play, obviously. Young adult activities were technically open to everyone, but basketball had always been implicitly coded as a male space. The women came to socialise, to watch, to participate in the broader gathering without necessarily engaging with the sport itself.

One of them caught my eye as I scanned the group. Megan Ashworth. She was talking to someone beside her, but her gaze had drifted toward the court. Toward me, specifically.

I looked away before the moment could develop into anything that required acknowledgment.

Near the stage, James Hahn had assembled his team with the efficiency of someone who'd done this many times before. I noted the composition: Ryan Holloway, the Nguyen kid, a couple of solid players from Paralowie, and — I noticed with mild surprise — Nate Baker, hovering at the edge of the group with his characteristic air of reluctant participation.

James was talking to them, outlining something with hand gestures. Strategy, probably. Or maybe just establishing the pecking order. With James, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference.

"Right," Samuel announced, loud enough to carry across the court. "I think we're sorted. Blues against whatever-James-is-calling-his-team."

"Winners," James called back, grinning. "We're calling ourselves the winners."

"Bit premature, mate."

"Just accurate."

Laughter rippled through both groups — the easy, competitive banter of people who'd known each other long enough to take liberties. I felt some of the tension in my shoulders ease. This was familiar territory. The jokes, the jostling, the performance of rivalry that was really just another form of connection. Whatever else was complicated about my life, basketball at the church was simple. Run, pass, shoot. Your body knew what to do.

Someone produced an actual referee's whistle from somewhere — where it had come from, I had no idea — and the two teams began moving toward their respective ends of the court. Samuel was still issuing last-minute instructions to our side, a stream of tactical advice that I suspected nobody was actually listening to.

I found my position near the key, rolling my shoulders to loosen them, feeling the familiar pre-game tension settling into my muscles. Across the court, James and Ryan were conferring about something. Nate stood slightly apart from his teammates, his expression unreadable.

Our eyes met briefly. He looked away first.

The whistle blew.