Pacify Her | Paige Bueckers

one | ava

Ava James had it all figured out.

And by that, I don't mean a game plan for her life like most adolescents. She did not look very far into the future often. No, in fact, she typically hyper fixated on things that should've been left to the uncharted imagination. But Ava had always been a go-getter, and being a spoiled daddy's girl may have contributed to her inability to tolerate not getting her way all the time. Hence, her transfer to UConn.

UConn, better known as the University of Connecticut, home of the Huskies, has a pretty reputable basketball program. Though, as of 2024, their men's team has been making some noise in the recent years, the women's team undoubtedly has more individual popularity and success. That leads us to the explanation aspect of Ava's sudden transfer, and believe me when I say you won't be expecting what I tell you.

First things first, Ava is not a basketball player, no. She is the average American woman height of five feet, four inches, and has a curvy build—not at all overweight but unfortunately too fleshy to appease coaches, if Ava ever did suddenly convince herself that she would like to be a basketball player.

Despite who she is on the outside, Ava's life is actually full of inauthenticity. Her face is always caked with subtle looking makeup that's impossible to pick up on, and she edits all her social media pictures. She wears waist trainers all day every day and has the most intricate, blended clip-in hair extensions anybody has ever seen. Every morning, she spends nearly two hours picking at her face, scrubbing religiously and painting her face with all sorts of beauty products.

Somehow, Ava has managed to go twenty-one years without anybody learning any of this. Not that she has any, because she often grows tired of people quickly and is pretty no-nonsense, but even the closest of Ava's past friends haven't a clue about the double life she had been living. But it's okay, really, because Ava believes in "fake it till you make it." She knows that one day she'll be who her heart desires.

To others who see her, Ava is this well put together, grey moral character. She can be friendly, sure, but her lows are much lower than her highs. In high school, she was notable for dishing double what she was served. She slept with other girls' boyfriends, slashed tires of teachers she didn't like, and started nasty, despicable rumors that were strong enough to make students transfer. One could argue that Ms. Ava was in some serious need of soul searching.

Ava sounds unlikeable, I am sure. But we often, as humans, see people who act in indescribable ways and automatically disapprove of them. We don't wonder why they do what they do or try to study their behavior and assess whether it's really mean spiritedness or a simple coping mechanism. After all, the human mind is much more intricate than the human itself. It often exposes things that we cannot consciously decipher.

For Ava, UConn was not too far of a drive from home. She actually lived in Stonington Connecticut, about an hour drive. Still, she filled her car up to the brim, not willing to do the whole back-and-forth gig. She'd been gifted a black 2024 phantom extended series II for a twenty-first birthday. She knew nothing about cars but something was telling her that this one was mighty expensive—and she liked that. It added to the public illusion that she gave.

The hours flew by. Unpacking was actually less tedious than Ava had expected it to be. Maybe that was because she was doing it all on her own. She was getting ready to start her senior year, so if her plan failed, at least she would not be stuck. Oh, shit, I didn't tell you her plan yet, did I?

Depending on how you see it, this may draw back to Ava's morally grey character. Or, it may remind you of the fact that she cannot handle things going any way but her own. As far as Ava had known, she was straight, heterosexual. She never dated a girl, nor has she ever looked at one and drooled. She was not raised in an overtly religious home, but her right-leaning family may have very well contributed to her romantic preferences. Surely, Ava understood since birth that LGBTQ+ romances would be frowned upon, in her home at least.

But everything changed at the end of Ava's junior year, sometime in April. The women's college basketball NCAA tournament had just ended, and there were prominent names from the event. Caitlin Clark, Raven Johnson, Kamila Cardoso, Paige Beuckers...none of them interested Ava, obviously. She had never batted an eye at a woman, like previously mentioned. That was, until she accidentally stumbled across a video on Twitter. One that left her staring at her ceiling at night, wishing it were her.

The video, which was quickly removed from social media platforms, as it would later be revealed that it was a violation of privacy, was of UConn's women basketball stars: Azzi Fudd and Paige Bueckers. Ava felt weird fantasizing about what she'd seen, knowing that one of the girls were hacked and never intended on releasing this video. It felt like she was watching something inappropriate, but her urges were far more intense than her morale. The attraction that Ava saw between Azzi and Paige, the passion, it altered her brain chemistry entirely.

Ava grew jealous as the weeks went on, though she didn't even know who to be jealous of. She craved both Azzi and Paige. She knew that even if she'd transferred to the University of Connecticut, there would be many more hurdles for her to jump through before even getting a chance at either women, if ever getting a chance at either women.

But the thought of not taking the chance at all hurt Ava's stomach far more than the idea of rejection did. And I mean, it's not like Ava had to outright ask either woman if they'd sleep with her, right? She didn't know what her plan was yet, but she was going to make one. That had become her new hyper-fixation, with grades being a subservient thought.

Being an upperclassman and applying for it in time, Ava was given an on-campus studio apartment instead of a normal four-by-four dorm room. Her place was on the third floor, in the middle of the seven floor building. She looked outside the window as she watched crowds of people walk by. UConn was a lot bigger than she was expecting, which only stressed her out that much more. How the hell was she going to find either Paige or Azzi? And how was she then going to appeal to them on that level? Being the household names that they are, they surely have women gawking at them like this already. So Ava needs to do something to stand out in the crowd.