Rules for Becoming a Legend (3 page)

•   •   •

On the morning of the title game between Columbia City and a rough and tumble team of boys out of Madras, Genny Mori took a pregnancy test. She peed on a stick and found she was with child in the Tall Pines fluorescent-lit bathroom. Staying there without her mother, she was supposed to feel like an adult; a grown-up.
There in that bathroom though, she felt younger than ever before. There it was in faint blue liquid at the bottom of a glass vial: the pronouncement she would forever be linked to Todd Kirkus.

Never had she wanted to hear her mother's voice so much as just then; even if it was only yelling in a language she didn't understand, with a frustration that always seemed outsized. Genny never could relate to her mother—her temper, her perfectionism, her odd need to hide socks full of change around the house—but she still needed her.

Genny knew it would be a scandal once it got out. The Mori family was different in that white-bread town. They had moved to Columbia City so Mr. Mori could open up his dental practice across the street from the football field. On Genny's first day of lunch, the kids teased her relentlessly for bringing cold soba noodles. One little girl had even rubbed the back of her hand, thinking her dark color could be washed off.

She became acutely aware of her parents' differences from the rest of Columbia City. Dad and his shy, clipped way of speaking English, never making eye contact. Mom and her habit of sitting on the porch of their little house, sucking up
udon
noodles that never seemed to end, careful never to bite through one because of the bad luck, steam clouding her glasses. People avoided them, even little Genny could tell, and in the end no one came to Dr. Mori's dental office. It was a stress that showed red in his cheeks and caused fights at home until eventually he left when Genny was eleven years old. She heard all sorts of rumors as to where he'd gone. To run a food truck that sold teriyaki bowls to surf bums in California, to Las Vegas to check coats, to the empty steel-cold bellies of railway cars rolling east.

It didn't matter in the end, and Genny Mori decided to hate him instead of wonder where he'd gone. To make ends meet, her mother worked as a line cook at Ling Gardens, a Chinese
restaurant owned and operated by a family of Dutch Americans, the Johnstons. They were happy to finally get a real Chinese in their kitchen, never mind she was Japanese. Sometimes, because her friends loved the $5.99 lunch special that included one main dish (chicken or beef), a side of fried rice, your choice of egg flower or sweet-and-sour soup and a never-ending soda, Genny was forced into coming to the restaurant while her mom worked the kitchen. Ate General Tso's chicken and greasy pork fried rice like everyone else. Chopsticks for a second, for a joke, then onto the cheap silverware, rice by the forkful. Sat with her back to the kitchen, shoulders dancing with the tingling premonition that this was the time her mom caught wind of her being there in time to come out in her hairnet, place a grease-burned hand on her shoulder, ask in that pinched up English to be introduced to her friends.

And yet her luck held. All through high school, through countless trips to Ling Gardens, Genny had avoided just such an embarrassment. She loved the pure shot of glee, one she would find hard to match in intensity later in life, she got as she ran out after her friends. Escape. Booth left behind, red balled-up chopstick wrappers and fallen rice kernels littering the table, bill paid for, but just barely, no tip for that week's shuffle-footed twenty-something townie who served them, out into the parking lot, blast that pop, disaster averted again.

Only once had it come up, and only because of Trevor Wooster—a
boy
brought into their normally girls-only lunch because Bonnie had a thing.

“Can you get us a discount?” he asked Genny Mori, like $5.99 wasn't already flirting with forcing the kitchen to use day-old rice, cut-rate meat, to make cost.

“What, 'cause I'm Asian?” Genny fixed him with her business eyes—a stare she'd become famous for among her peers; it had made Kent Jackson cry in seventh grade after he'd dared grab her
butt—and sipped from her straw. When she took her lips away, she let the back edge of the plastic catch and flick spitty Coke across the table at the idiot. “This is a
Chinese
place. You know I'm
Japanese
, right?”

“No, that's not what I meant, I meant because,” he wiped off his face. Everyone knew what he had meant, even Genny, but this was her way of skirting it.

“Let's just go, OK?” Bonnie said.

So they went. But the Genny Mori force field had been breached. Even though she talked like a Columbia City kid, could get anywhere with her eyes closed, cheered for the Fishermen since the moment she could speak, and was better at Spanish than Japanese, she was still, at the heart of it, a Mori. An outsider. That little pee vial would rock the boat. The beloved Todd Kirkus having a baby with
Genny Mori
? The outrage! The indignity! The nerve!

•   •   •

On that same morning Todd Kirkus was found bleary, sit-down-just-to-think drunk in his hotel room. Something in the easy cycle of winning had been broken. He had spent the night before wandering the University of Oregon campus with minibar bottles of alcohol clinking in his pockets and a pack of cigarettes. Rumor spread quickly within the Oregon basketball community gathered in Eugene for championship week that Todd didn't get back to the team hotel until well after four a.m. With pressure mounting, Coach Kelly had no choice but to suspend him from that night's championship game.

Todd's father, the Flying Finn, an overwound man with a bobbing head, found the coach eating a burrito in the student commons six hours before tip-off. “You pulling the pug on Todd?” he yelled in his slightly muddled English. The Flying Finn owned a restaurant on Pier 11 in Columbia City, and he was known for shouting, “Order up, hot, hot, hot, order up,” in that accent, loud
enough for the entire restaurant to hear. He was a tall man with a slim, wiry frame on which his head, hands, and feet looked huge and extraterrestrial. His great dome was balding and his neck was as thin as a pipe cleaner, hardly seemed up to the job. Whereas the Moris were local controversy, he was local color—the Grand Marshall of the annual Scandinavian Day Parade.

Coach Kelly decided that the loud accent was decidedly less charming in this context. “You mean ‘plug,' Mr. Kirkus?” A bit of hot refried beans dribbled down his chin. He wiped it off with the back of his hand. “You mean I'm
pulling the
plug
on Todd?”

The Flying Finn hopped from side to side in anger over being corrected. He was a relentless promoter of his son. Filming every single game and sending tapes off to college coaches with masking tape labels that said things like,
The Best Ever
, or,
This WILL Change Your Life
, he was a fixture on the sidelines. Yelling for his boy to get more touches. Screaming at the refs to open their eyes already. The sight of his Adam's apple running up and down that skinny neck, pushing out his extraordinarily loud voice, gave Coach Kelly nightmares, literal nightmares. His wife often told him he needed better work/life balance.

“You know what I mean,” the Flying Finn said. “You know what I's saying.”

“He was caught drinking, Mr. Kirkus.” Coach Kelly tried to stay calm but it was hard. He was uncomfortable. First of all he also desperately wanted Todd to play. He doubted the Fishermen could win without him. Second, the beans he'd wiped off on his hand looked like smeared shit. Coach Kelly was stone-featured and could have been handsome if he hadn't known he was so close to being handsome. As it was, he was hyper self-aware, and anything he sensed compromising his appearance bothered him to no end. “It's a team rule, Mr. Kirkus. It's against the law in fact. He's underage.”

“After all my son does for you, you will pull the
plug
?” The Flying Finn emphasized “plug” heavily and Coach Kelly felt the mist of his spit settle on his face.

“Again, it's a policy, nothing doing.” Then quickly, hoping he could pass it off as more normal than he knew it to be, Coach Kelly dipped his head down and licked the back of his hand to get the shit-seeming beans off. “There's no wiggle room on this.”

“You lick your hand when you talking to me? What kind of thing is this? Some insult I don't know?”

As always, the Flying Finn was practically shouting, and this drew the attention of the other eaters in the commons. Coach Kelly's face heated up. He took a napkin and dried off his hand. “There were beans, and it looked like—well.” His words curled in on themselves, as if heated from beneath. He stood up. “I need to get going, Mr. Kirkus. I'm sorry there isn't more I can do.”

The Flying Finn called after him, “Who told on my son? I like to know that!”

Coach Kelly hurried out of the commons. He knew the answer to the Flying Finn's question of course, and it broke his heart.

•   •   •

It had all been so typical. She was sick in the mornings, her feet were swollen, and her sense of taste seemed to be flaring up around certain foods. She told Bonnie about it and her best friend said, “Maybe you're preggers.”

So Genny said, “Stop being a bitch.”

Then Bonnie said, “So says the bitch.”

And they teased back and forth but the idea stuck. Genny Mori bought her home pregnancy test at Mike's Kwiki-Mart three blocks from their motel. It was behind the counter and she finally got the guts to ask for it in a lull between customers.

“I want that one there,” she said, pointing to the one on sale.

The clerk's eyes darted to her forehead, as if he could discover her age stamped there. He bit his bottom lip. “Anything else?” he asked.

Genny glared at him. Noticed the tufts of hair at his ears. The tired folds beneath his eyes. “Cigarettes,” she said. “Give me some of those.”

He snorted, not as shocked as she hoped he would be. He rang her up, put the test in a paper sack. “You come back when you're old enough for those smokes.”

Later, when she discovered she was pregnant, her fingers shaking and wet and gross—because when the hell do you ever practice pissing into a small cup without wetting your fingers?—she also discovered that what she'd always thought she'd do with a baby in her belly, she could never actually do now that there really was a baby in her belly.

A part of her even thought that getting pregnant might be a good thing. It wouldn't be long until Todd blew the lid off the NBA and she moved far away from the Oregon coast with its shiny, spiderweb fingers that spread into places they had no right to go, rotting everything—her father's confidence, her mother's happiness, and her, just her
her-ness
. The baby would bind her and Todd together, and she wouldn't be left behind. Something deep in her bones awoke and all at once a part of her wanted a family. And she wanted out. It still didn't seem like good news exactly, but it did have some of the same coloring.

Bonnie, seventeen and wide-eyed with the bigness of the news she carried in her rusted red Honda hatchback, drove Genny to the student Rec Center where the Fishermen were having their final practice before the championship game.

“Are you sure you should wear a seat belt?” Bonnie asked.

“Why wouldn't I?”

“What if we, well if, if we crash then won't the belt, like, squish it?” Bonnie squirmed in her seat.

“Jesus, and if I don't put the belt on we'll just both die?”

Red faced, Bonnie gripped the steering wheel harder. “I was just saying.”

“Don't crash.”

When they got there, they found Todd sitting in an alley behind the Rec Center on a cement bench with pale, clammy-looking James Berg at his side. Todd looked hangdog tired and the day was cold enough his breaths rose above his head: unmotivated halos. He was staring into his huge hands while James pecked him with little chirping comments like, “
You'll be all right. You're playing college ball next year, who cares? Maybe NBA!
”

Beautiful, news-heavy Genny Mori ran to her man. “What happened?” she asked.

Todd looked up. “Can't play tomorrow, Genny-baby. Got ratted out for drinking.”

It was odd, to see Freight Train like that, his bigness somehow all but melted off. For a man of exaggeration—who once snuck a dead seagull into the briefcase of rival Seaside Seagulls' coach and ended up giving the whole team lice—his reaction to the suspension seemed wet, sad, and chewed. Small enough to fit in a gum wrapper.

Questions swarmed in her head.
Why had he been drinking? Was it with girls? Was it a depressed drinking? Who told on him? Was it with girls? Why hadn't he called
me
to party too? When did he leave my room last night?
Why
did he leave my room last night? Was it with other girls?
“Oh,” she finally managed to say.

He shrugged his shoulders, looked up at James, and said, “Looks like you'll have to win the game without me.”

James Berg lashed out. “All those guys are just jealous. Bet it was Kyle who told. But I don't know who it was. I really don't. They don't tell me
anything
. They think I'll just tell you. Which I would.”

Todd waved off his friend.

Then Genny Mori broke into the conversation and said something she hadn't meant to say, not right then in front of James and Bonnie anyway, but what was she supposed to do when she had something so big and important
inside her
and they were still talking about a basketball game? “I'm pregnant, Todd.”

“Oh shit,” Bonnie said and backed up like she was worried proximity to Todd would jeopardize her safety.

Genny Mori bit her knuckles. So what if it had been a mistake to lay the news on him just then? It wasn't like she instantly regretted it. “Todd?” she said.