Basketball (or Something Like It) (3 page)

There was nothing scribbled on the walls. Not even traces from where someone made you stay after and scrub it off with a brush and a bucket of soapy water. This place was like something on TV, something not real.

And there were so many basketballs rolling all over the place.

Back home there would be twenty or thirty kids and maybe three or four balls. With everyone standing under the hoop waiting for someone else to miss or someone to make it, so they could grab the ball and dribble around a little, pick a good spot, and shoot. Then get into position, maybe yank down a rebound or just wait and hope the ball came your way again.

But here the kids didn’t have to wait hardly at all. There were balls flying everywhere. Jeremy had just seen two jerks get hit in the head, there were so many balls. Two balls had actually rolled under the bleachers
and nobody even noticed. These kids were so spoiled.

And they sucked.

“You here for the clinic?” Somebody was talking to him.

“Huh?” Jeremy said.

“Are you signed up for the basketball clinic? Are you Jeremy Binder?”

He was one of the coaches. A really tall guy with a clipboard.

“Yes, sir,” Jeremy answered.

“Why don’t you warm up a little?” The guy smiled. He didn’t look so bad. He must have played basketball, if you could imagine him without the big belly and with a lot more hair. Jeez, he was probably seven feet. Anybody could be good at seven feet.

Which made Jeremy think about his father. His father used to tell Jeremy he had some tall genes in the family. Someone way back on his father’s father’s side was like six-ten or something.

Tall genes skip a generation, you know, Jeremy. A white kid needs all the help he can get.

And then his father would start laughing. He was drinking by then. All the time.

No offense, son, but you ain’t no Allen Iverson. You gotta learn to shoot. Like me. Did I ever tell you, Jeremy, I almost made all-state….

Jeremy could remember the story, or less of the
story and more of his father’s slurred speech and watery eyes. But he was forgetting how much he hated that. How much it scared him. For some reason, he was forgetting it all.

The tall guy with the clipboard was still standing there, like he wanted something. Like he wanted Jeremy to say something.

But Jeremy had nothing. Nothing to say. Instead he jumped to his feet and ran out onto the court. There was a ball rolling right by.

Perfect.

It fit into his hand. His fingers bent and gripped the leather. Leather, these balls were real leather. He started to dribble without thinking, and everything started to feel better. The sound of the ball bouncing. The rhythm and the bounce. Against the floor and into his hands. Between his legs, back and forth. Behind the back. Dribble. Head up. Ball low.

“Okay, boys let’s line up. Balls quiet.” It was a different coach. A little short guy with a ridiculous muscle T-shirt and shorts.

Jeremy kept dribbling. Soon his father was gone, the memory was gone, the empty feeling in his chest faded—all he could hear was the ball and the floor and the echo.

“Balls quiet, please.”

Jeremy looked up. That little muscle coach was
pissed already. Jeremy held the ball.

“Sorry,” Jeremy said.

The tall guy with the clipboard was standing to the side. He nodded his head at Jeremy and smiled.

It’s okay, son,
he mouthed.

Jeremy lowered his eyes, hoping it looked like he hadn’t seen that.

I am so definitely
not
your son.

T
he clinics were so stupid. So stupid. It was all drills and suicides; running back and forth; foul line and back, half-court and back, next foul line then full court and back. Hank had come right from soccer, which hadn’t been changed after all but had been moved up an hour and a half.

And all that meant for Hank was he had to change out of his cleats and into his basketball stuff in the car. He didn’t really have time to eat. His mother had a protein bar for him, but it was disgusting. Raspberry mocha fudge. He took two bites.

The clinic was over. Now it was seven fifteen and he hadn’t eaten.

“How was the clinic?” his mother asked him when she picked him up. “How did you do?”

He hated that question. What was he supposed to say?

I did great, Mom. I’m the best one in the whole grade. Just like you and Dad always say: I’m a winner. I’ve got the eye of the tiger. I’m a natural. The tryout will be a breeze.

What was he supposed to say when she asked him that?

Hank was a very good basketball player. It hadn’t been his best day, but it was far from his worst. But how had he been judged this day? The truth was he didn’t know. Hank was tired. He played okay. He made some of his shots. Missed more. He had looked around at his competition.

There was a new boy he didn’t recognize, but everyone else was pretty much the same. All the kids from last year’s fifth grade travel team were there, and a bunch of wannabes. Hank didn’t think anything would be different. Except for that new kid.

That kid was good. He was quiet and kept to himself, but he could handle the ball really well, like some of those city kids they had played last year. He always kept his head up and he could dribble through his legs, but not just for show. It was like it was natural to him.

Oh, wait, and Nathan Thomas was there, and he hadn’t been there last year. He was okay, but not as
good as you’d think. That was kind of funny, Hank thought. Everyone always asked Nathan to play just because he was black. That was some kind of reverse discrimination, wasn’t it?

Hank hadn’t been listening to his mother, but he knew she had been talking the whole car ride home. Even if he didn’t answer his mother, she kept talking. She wanted information so badly she would never let on that she was mad at him. Or that he was rude for not answering.

“So Hank, was Tyler there?”

“Who?” Hank asked.

“Tyler Bischoff.”

Hank had to think a minute. Was Tyler there? Yeah, probably. All he could think of was that new kid. What was his name? Hank hadn’t even seen him at school before. He started calculating. He had heard they were only taking twelve kids on the team this year. It was sixth grade, and things were going to start to get serious. So if this new kid makes it, who will they cut? Hank’s mother was still talking, but somewhere in the last mile or so, her tone of voice had changed. It was squeakier, faster.

“You know, Hank. I take you to school every morning. Take you to soccer. I pick you up from soccer.”

What is she talking about?

Hank looked out the window. It was dark, and he still had tons of homework. His legs hurt. He was tired.

He was really hungry.

“… Take you to basketball. Run back because you forget your Gatorade. Come back and get you.”

His mouth was so dry it burned. That’s right—his mother had run into the middle of the clinic and waved her arms around to show him where she was placing his Gatorade. She must have seen that he left it in the car, under his soccer stuff and his knapsack. But someone had opened it by mistake (even though his name was all over the side and the lid in black permanent marker) and taken some.

He wasn’t about to drink it after that.

“You’d think you’d just say thank you. Just once. Just once, maybe,” his mother was saying as they pulled into the driveway.

“Thanks, Mom,” Hank said. He hardly had the strength to open the car door.

“Hank?” His mother lowered her voice.

He looked over at her.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

And he knew she was. She couldn’t help it. Hank knew his mother just couldn’t stop talking and asking
endless questions. Even though the more she pried, the further Hank had to retreat. Hank couldn’t change that any more than she could.

“T
his is outrageous. You are definitely going to be grounded.”

“He’s home now. It’s okay.”

“How could you do this? How in the hell could you even consider doing this?”

His mother was trying to defend Nathan in between his father’s explosive expressions and sound-bite speeches. “He’s a boy. He just wants to play. It’s just for fun,” she was saying.

“Fun?” Nathan’s father jumped on that one. “Lying is fun? Scaring everyone half to death is fun? Sneaking around?”

Nathan was quiet. He had been caught. He knew he would be. In fact, he was glad he was. It was inevitable, so it might as well come now. Nathan sat on the couch with his knees pressed together and his arms crossed tightly.

“I don’t know what’s worse. The sneaking or the lying? Or the lying about the sneaking,” Nathan’s father shouted. He wasn’t making any sense. When
Nathan’s father didn’t make sense, it wasn’t a good sign.

“Don’t wake up the baby,” his mother shot back.

Nathan’s father let out a breath and, it seemed, a little anger with it. He turned to Nathan.

“You lied. You did something you were explicitly told not to do. You had your mother and me worried. And Mrs. Burke, too. You have to be punished.”

Nathan nodded. It wasn’t that he wanted to be punished. He didn’t like being yelled at, either. There was a strength behind his father’s rage, a power that was scary but, at the same time, made Nathan angry. Like he wanted to fight back.

“Absolutely no video games for a week,” his father said.

“A week?”

“No TV, either.”

Nathan didn’t look up. His mother would take away the Xbox controllers and hide them, but Nathan knew the No TV would never be enforced. It would last for a day or two, and then his mother would be busy and forget about the whole thing.

Nathan nodded again.

“Do you understand why it’s so important that you don’t lie to us?”

Nathan’s mother spoke softly. It was that soft teacher voice, from when she used to work.

“So you can trust me,” Nathan answered.

That seemed to be working. He could practically
feel
it, like something in the air loosening up, dissipating.

“I’m really sorry,” Nathan said. “I’m sorry.”

It was quiet.

“So you really want to try out for this basketball team?” his father asked him.

“Yeah, Dad, I do.”

“Why?”

“I wanna play. My friends are all on the team,” Nathan said.

“It’s not a goal, you know, Nathan. It’s a game. That’s all it is. It’s not going to lead to anything. It’s not going to help you make the right friends or get you into a good school.”

So what if his father was wrong about all of the above?

“I know, Dad,” Nathan said.

“It’s a game.”

“I know that, Dad,” Nathan said. “It’s just for fun. It’s healthy, too. It’s good exercise. We did a lot of running.” He added that one in for his mother.

His father hadn’t said yes yet. Nathan wondered what he was thinking. Maybe he was thinking that Nathan would be led down some terrible road to African-American basketball ruin; that his grades would fall off all through high school because all he
would do was hang out in the gym and practice ball. He would practically flunk out. But he’d be offered a scholarship at some lousy college anyway. Then he’d get his high-school girlfriend pregnant (not that Nathan had one), get married at eighteen, get injured before he’d had a chance to play, and wind up a strung-out drug addict living on the street.

Is that what his father was thinking?

Is that what had happened to Uncle Troy?

Of course, there was one minor piece of information Nathan’s father didn’t yet have.

Nathan wasn’t good.

In fact, he was probably the worst kid at the entire clinic. He had air balled all his foul shots. He missed all his layups. He couldn’t dribble with his left hand at all and not very well with his right. He didn’t get one rebound.

“Look at the bright side,” Nathan told his father. “I might not even make the team.”

His father suddenly stopped thinking and spoke out loud.

“Well, that’s nonsense,” he said.

Nathan took that as a yes.

F
or Anabel, her brother’s tryout dragged on for two boring hours at the middle school. Her father felt he had to stay, even though all the parents were told it was a closed gym. Apparently her father also felt Anabel was not old enough to stay home alone, and her mother was out of town. Again.

“I could go to Caroline Nagy’s house,” Anabel begged.

But Caroline Nagy, it turned out, had thrown up three times when she got home from school that afternoon, so Anabel had no other choice but to wait with her father at the tryout. It was too late to call any other friends.

“You can do your homework. You must have
homework,” her father suggested. And he left her, with her books sprawled out in the hall floor, while he paced outside the gym doors, which were shut. Every now and then they opened, and one of the coaches or kids stepped out to use the bathroom. When the door stuck open by accident, Anabel’s father drifted toward it. For a while he stood in the hall watching, but within a few minutes he was standing inside the gym.

Anabel watched the whole thing. She figured her father would be standing on the sidelines by the locker room within five minutes. Hopefully he’d know enough not to shout out instructions to her brother during the tryout.

“You’ve got to box out, Michael. Box out!”

Guess not.

She had finished her math and Spanish work. She zipped up her binder. The floor was filthy, and dust had stuck to all her book covers. She sat cross-legged staring at the wall across the way and listening to the balls bouncing inside the gym, like a kind of thunking music. She could hear her father’s urgent comments to Michael. Any minute, Anabel predicted, they would be throwing him out of there.

But for the time being, she was alone in the hall. Her mother would call that night and ask if she had done all her homework.

“Yes, Mom,” Anabel would say because nothing
less was expected by either of her parents.