Ball Don't Lie (15 page)

It’s All Set,

Counselor Julius said as he and current foster lady, Georgia, walked out from the office together.

Sticky took his hands off the foosball handles and reached down for his bag. By the fourth episode he had the whole checkout process down: prepacked, papers signed, ready to roll.

Looks like you’re gonna be living out in Venice Beach, big
guy,
Julius said, and he shot a smile at Georgia.
You’ll probably turn into a surfer or something
.

Georgia laughed and told Sticky:
Be sure to tell your
friends goodbye. And take your time. I’ll be waiting outside in
the car
. She shook hands with Julius again and walked duck-footed out the front door.

Sticky strolled over to the TV room, stuck his head in.

The other residents were glued to the couch watching a video on MTV. After Sticky’s checkout, Julius had to load everybody up in the foster pad van and make the long drive out to the Getty, their scheduled outing for the weekend.

I’m out,
Sticky said, and gave the group a head nod.

All the residents got up and circled around him, took turns saying their goodbyes. Long-haired Tommy shook Sticky’s hand. Angie and Lisa, fourteen-year-old twins from the valley, stuck out their bottom lips all sad-like and gave tight hugs.
We’ll miss you, Sticky,
they both said at the exact same time.

Be cool,
Jerome said in a Barry White voice. He slapped Sticky five and pulled him in for a quick dude-to-dude-style embrace.

Six-year-old Pedro, who was new to the house and spoke only Spanish, didn’t say anything. He wrapped his skinny arms around Sticky’s legs and clung tight. Wouldn’t let go. Two tears fell down his brown cheeks as Sticky patted him on the top of the head. After a couple minutes, Counselor Julius had to peel Pedro away.

Everybody loved Sticky because he was OG. The seasoned veteran of the house. The resident who knew the system inside and out and could go into detail to some new kid with questions.

What was strange about the whole goodbye scene, though, was that it didn’t include Maria. She was Sticky’s closest companion. His first lady of the foster world. But when everybody else got up to see him off, she stayed with the video. And this was something Sticky didn’t understand. He leaned his head forward, tried to make eye contact and told her:
Hey, Maria, I’m takin off
.

Oh, bye,
Maria said, pretending to be distracted by the video. She put her hand up no-look style and then let it fall back into her lap.

Sticky shrugged and turned to take off, but Maria spoke up:
They’re just gonna bring you back here in a couple months,
Sticky. You know that by now. They always bring us back
.

Sticky shook his head and walked away.

Julius was waiting in the hall with his arms folded. He pulled Sticky into the counselor’s office.
I wanna give you
something,
he said, and he walked around the desk and reached into the closet. Pulled out an Old Navy bag and set it up on the desk.
It’s not that big of a deal, but I thought you
might want it
.

Sticky pulled open the bag and found the old beat-up house basketball. The one he’d learned to play the game with.

Julius pulled the ball out and looked it over.
This thing’s
seen better days, man
. He spun the ball on his finger and looked at Sticky.
Listen, the supervisors are always trippin
about house equipment, so don’t go tellin everybody
.

You could really just give it to me?
Sticky said.

I can’t,
Julius said.
But I just did
. He faked a pass and Sticky flinched.

That’s real cool, Julius. Thanks.

Julius reached out and shook Sticky’s hand.
I’m not
gonna lie, dude, you turned out to be a pretty good baller. Now
hurry up and get out of here. That fat broad is sittin out there
waitin for you
.

Sticky cruised out of the house with the Old Navy bag over his shoulder and a small bag of clothes in his left hand. As he went to pull open the passenger door of Georgia’s minivan, the old Mexican director came speeding around the corner in his little Honda Civic. He pulled up along the curb and cut off the engine. Jumped out.
I barely caught you,
he said, shutting his door. He walked over to Sticky’s side of the van and waved through the window to Georgia. She waved back.

Julius did all the paperwork,
Sticky said.

I’m not worried about the paperwork,
the director said. He looked Sticky in the eye and gave him a firm handshake.
You and I have known each other a long time
.

Yeah,
Sticky said.

I’d like to think we’ve become friends.

Yeah,
Sticky said.

Well, I wanted to tell you this, Sticky, as a friend: Over the
past eight years I’ve seen a few families pick you up only to
turn around and bring you right back. And that’s confusing.
It’s real confusing. But you need to realize that it’s not your
fault. That it has nothing to do with you. In fact I consider myself the lucky one. I’ve had the pleasure of watching Sticky-the-boy become Sticky-the-young-man. And what’s special about
you, son, is not the way you play foosball or basketball or any
other game—it’s who you are
. He pointed to Sticky’s chest.
You’re a good person, Sticky. A good human being.

Sticky didn’t know what he was supposed to say to that so he didn’t say anything. Instead he nodded his head and stared at the pavement.

The director smiled and drummed his fingers on the roof of the van, said:
I hope you never lose sight of that. You
mean a lot to me
. As Sticky climbed into the passenger’s seat, the director exchanged waves with Georgia again. Then he shut the door and motioned her back onto the road.

Georgia merged onto the 10 heading west. She pulled open a big bag of chips, set it in her lap and reached inside.
You’re my fifth foster kid,
she said, shoving a couple chips into her mouth.
This makes two whites, a Oriental, a black and a
little Mexican girl
. She reached back into the bag.
I tell
friends: It’s like the flippin United Nations at my house
.

Sticky pulled the house basketball out of the Old Navy bag and set it in his lap. He examined the tiny rips in the synthetic leather.

Now, I run a pretty laid-back house,
Georgia went on.
You
kids do your chores and don’t give me any headaches, everything’s fine. It really boils down to this: You make life easy for
me, I make life easy for you. I like to think of it as a kind of
business arrangement.

Sticky ran his fingers along the grooves of the ball. He spun it around and stared at the thick black initials of his foster care pad: 7 FLOW. Stuck his fingers in the groove, thumb between the 7 and F, and imagined lofting up a soft twenty-footer over the outstretched hands of some over-matched defender.

My husband’s gone all day. He works like sixty-hour weeks
so you’ll hardly see him. Of course, I work just as hard as he
does. We got in a big fight about that just last night. He thinks
all I do is sit around the house watching TV. I told him: Uh, no,
honey, I don’t think so. I told him: I got a full-time job just the
same as you do—I take care of other people’s kids.

Georgia kept on talking, but Sticky wasn’t listening. He had his daydream channel set on more important things. Like, where was he gonna play ball in Venice? He’d seen some famous court by the beach in a movie. And Julius told him about some gym called Lincoln Rec. He started thinking about other things too. Like, what was the old Mexican director trying to tell him when he was leaving? That he was a good person? And how strange was that? He’d never had anybody talk about him like that. It didn’t make any sense. But maybe that was just part of his job. Something he was supposed to say.

Georgia’s voice turned into background sound. Like the wind rushing in through the rolled-down windows. Like the sound of the traffic report coming in over the AM radio. Sticky traced the letters on the ball and did some other kinds of thinking too. He thought about what Maria said. How he’d probably get dropped back off in a couple months. How if that came true he just wished the director hadn’t said what he said. It seemed like the kind of thing someone says to someone when they know they’ll never see that person again. And he figured if it was true, that this chip-eating lady would one day bring him back too, like the rest of them, then he should at least know in advance. That way he could think up something good to say to the director. Something that might make him feel right about what he said. About Sticky being a good person. Something that might make him feel like it wasn’t a mistake.

Sticky stared out the window and tried to remember all the billboards they passed: Chevron Gas, Gateway Computers, In-N-Out Burger, Staples, The Sports Club/LA. That way he could know what’s up if they ever passed them again, going back the other way.

Pop Songs Echo

through the tiny staff bathroom in Millers. Britney Spears drops bubblegum beats that bounce off the stall walls and into Anh-thu’s throbbing head. When her tune fades, Justin Timberlake takes over. OutKast. Matchbox Twenty. Jennifer Lopez. Their melodies filling the blue-tiled box of a bathroom with cotton candy.

Anh-thu leans on her elbows over the toilet bowl. One hand gripping white porcelain, the other holding back her long black hair. She spits and stares into the water: a rippling reflection of her puffy brown face. She heaves again and coughs. Flushes. Everything is pushing at the back of her watery eyes.

She spits again and stares.

The summer music mix bumps into an old-school Rob Base jam: “It Takes Two.” It’s the third time Anh-thu’s heard this song today and her ears anticipate every shift in melody. She pictures the way customers always react, busting a couple quick dance steps near a mirror or keeping time with a subtle head bop.

She wipes away forehead sweat with the back of her hand.

Shift leader Dori creeps up to the locked bathroom door and leans in with an ear, taps her knuckles.
Everything OK,
Annie?
She fingers the end of her long blond ponytail.

Anh-thu spins around, says through the door in her best smiling voice:
Everything’s fine
.

All right,
Dori says.
Just checking
. She listens at the door a few seconds longer and then heads back out onto the floor.

Anh-thu turns back to the bowl. She digs her fingers into her stomach again and starts to cry. She’s picturing Sticky’s face if she really is pregnant. She’s so nervous her stomach feels nauseous again. She heaves and coughs. She spits. Flushes.

Ten minutes ago Anh-thu was folding clothes with the rest of the girls. Folding and talking about some guy that gave Laura his cell number. They were gathered around the fifty-percent-off table, listening to Laura and cleaning up the two-story mess left by thoughtless customers—people who pull every item off a sale stack, unfold and throw back. Laura was dropping serious insight about UCLA dudes, what a girl has to do to catch their eye. She was doing heavy analysis, but Anh-thu had stopped listening.

Anh-thu was thinking about Sticky again. How her situation might mess everything up. It was her birthday, she was sixteen today, and Sticky would show up with a gift. He’d want to touch her and kiss her. But what if everything was different now?

She tossed an unfolded shirt on a stack of sweaters and hustled for the staff bathroom holding her stomach.

Somethin up with Annie,
Laura said, watching Anh-thu hurry off.

She’s not being normal,
a girl named Julie said.

Shift leader Dori finished folding a sweater and watched Anh-thu turn the corner into the break room. She figured she’d give her a couple minutes before she went over to investigate.

Anh-thu picks herself up from the toilet and moves to the sink. She turns the water on full blast, cups her hands and splashes her face. She rinses out her mouth. She shuts the water off and pulls down a clean towel from the cupboard. As she dries her face, she stares at herself in the mirror. Her hair matted to her forehead. Her swollen eyes and puffy cheeks. This is the way her face looks after a long night of crying.

But when she locks in on her own eyes for too long, starts thinking about her situation, her and Sticky’s situation, that nervous sick feeling comes spinning back into her stomach. She plants a hand against the sink and looks away.

Eminem starts flowing through the speakers: “Lose Yourself.” The song Sticky made Anh-thu listen to over and over a few days back, on the tape deck of a borrowed car.

He drove them up to a small empty lot between two giant houses with tall fences. Somewhere in the Pacific Palisades. There were dense trees and bushes so nobody could look in. Signs that warned in big black writing: KEEP OUT. There were construction postings and idle tractors, a streetlight dug out of the ground and lying on its side. Sticky maneuvered the car past all that stuff and up to the edge of the cliff, where he cranked the parking brake. He and Anh-thu looked out at the stars hovering above the big black ocean. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. Sticky bopped his head with the beat and pulled Anh-thu in close. They held hands and kissed.

At one point, he motioned to the tape deck and told her:
This dude got skills, Annie
.

Anh-thu agreed.

He said:
You know what? I wanna be the Eminem of
hoops
.

Anh-thu laughed.

When Eminem spilled his last line of lyrics and the beat trailed off, Sticky hit rewind and started the song all over again.

Anh-thu feels like crying again but instead she stomps her foot to stop herself.
Quit acting like a little girl,
she says to her image in the mirror, and she grits her teeth.
Just stop it
already
.

She takes a few deep breaths and tries to pull herself together. She tosses the towel in a bin, runs a finger under each eye and straightens her clothes. She takes another deep breath and unwraps a stick of gum. As she pops the gum in her mouth she devises a plan. What’s done is done, she thinks. All she can do is deal. She’ll tell Sticky the situation tonight, and then go from there based on how he reacts. It might not go perfect at first, but they’ll figure out what to do.

A Jewel song comes on, one she doesn’t really dig, but Anh-thu feels okay about her plan. She takes another deep breath and unlocks the door. Then she heads back out onto the floor.