Hoops (8 page)

She felt heat sweep over her, tingling her nerves and turning her own muscles to marshmallow. A strange sensation coiled in her abdomen, pulling tighter and tighter . . . All the result of going from the cold outside to the steamy warmth of the gym, she told herself. It must be.

C.J. stood, hands on hips, his muscles tensed. No one could mistake his frustration, even without the voice. “Do it again, Gordo. On three. One. Two. Three.”

Ellis Manfred stood beyond the end line, holding the ball. On the count of three the other players simultaneously moved, each spinning in a different direction, taking three quick steps one way before reversing just as rapidly. Twice Ellis started to throw the ball, and twice pulled back. It appeared as random, unmotivated movement to Carolyn.

“No. No! No! You’re supposed to fake the defender, not invite him to the prom, Gordo. Watch.” C.J., moving easily despite the brace on his left knee that she noticed for the first time, took Frank Gordon’s spot and, with a wave of his hand, ordered the tableau to reform around him as she’d first seen it.

Again the count of three produced a flurry of movement, but this time, C.J. emerged alone, unshadowed, for just the moment it took for Ellis to send him the ball. He jumped to meet it and continued his leap, carrying the ball with him and gently dropping it into the basket.

The movement channeled power and grace to achieve a single objective. It was beautiful, Carolyn thought with bemusement.

“All right!”

“Way to go, Coach.”

“Yeah!”

C.J. ignored the accolades. He focused on Frank Gordon. “Do you see, Gordo? You’ve got to give him the fake. Even when his mind knows it’s coming, there aren’t many guys who can stop from reacting for that split second. And that’s all you need. You create your own opportunity, and then, by God, you’d better take it or it’ll be gone. Now try again. On three.”

Ellis Manfred spotted Carolyn moving toward the bench along the side of the court and nodded in her direction. She knew he’d pointed her out to his teammates when several heads turned. She stopped.

“One. Two. Three.” Frank Gordon and two or three others started their moves, but the rest held stock-still. “What the—” C.J. broke off the oath and spun around to find the source of the interruption.

Carolyn saw the intense concentration on his face, and felt a pang of regret for disrupting them.

“Oh. It’s you.” Ichabod Crane showed more enthusiasm at seeing the Headless Horseman. “What do you want?”

Carolyn lifted her chin. “I want these students. You’re in my time, Mr. Draper. We had an agreement.”

She saw his irritation. She could practically hear him telling her what she could do with that agreement when it impinged on a practice where he was finally—finally— starting to get his point across.

He turned away. Over his shoulder she could see the players watching him. They were waiting for him to tell her to get lost. She could see it in their faces—some looking forward to it, some dreading it, some just curious. But all of them waiting for it. Knowing it was coming. They’d seen it before.

She straightened her shoulders, ready to do battle, her momentary regret at interrupting forgotten. Slowly he turned back to face her. He drew in air and held it, apparently unaware that the movement drew up the cropped sweatshirt to expose a strip of hard-muscled waist above the low-slung waistband of his shorts.

But she was aware of it. Vitally and basically aware. She tried to keep her eyes on his face, but they wouldn’t cooperate. Her breathing had somehow gotten out of kilter, and her pulse sprinted toward something she couldn’t identify. She fervently wished he would hurry up and expel that breath.

When he did, the sound got lost in the intake of air behind him. “You’re right, Professor Trent. I apologize. We all apologize. They’ll be right there.”

Silence.

He twisted to look over his shoulder at the statue-like players. “You heard me. Showers. Hustle it up. You’ve got books to crack.”

That broke the spell. In two minutes the team manager wheeled a rack filled with basketballs out of the gym and the only two people left on the court were C.J. and Carolyn.

“So, was that satisfactory, Professor?” Neither had moved, ten feet of polished wooden floor separated them, but she could clearly see his crooked grin.

“Will you please stop calling me Professor when it’s not appropriate?”

“Will you please start calling me C.J. when it
is
appropriate?”

Showcased by the sleeveless sweatshirt, muscles cupped his shoulders, indenting before the swell of his biceps. She swallowed the mental and conversational digressions. “It would have been more satisfactory if you’d ended practice on time, Mr. Draper.” She spun on her heel and walked away.

Almost to the door, she could hear the grin in his mock servility when his voice reached her. “Yes, Professor.”

* * * *

The conference room’s large tables and chairs suited long bodies and legs, and the couches and armchairs around the room provided a spot for the sprawlers. After that first meeting she’d brought the players here for three-hour study sessions six days a week for the five weeks since she’d become academic adviser.

She decided that after the first of the year she’d make the daily sessions optional for the established students. Perhaps she’d make some changes in the schedule, too. But the structured schedule helped the freshmen and Frank Gordon.

Carolyn frowned as she looked at Frank hunched over a copy of the
Canterbury Tales
. He was in a lower level English class than she’d have expected for a junior, although that happened sometimes when a student lagged behind in one area. But this was mid-November. Shouldn’t he be farther than that by now? And the boy looked miserable.

In fact, she thought as she looked around, they all looked miserable.

One of the upperclassmen kept flipping back through the pages he’d just read as if trying to reassure himself he’d actually seen the words. Ellis Manfred doodled over sheets meant for a midterm paper’s outline. Thomas Abbott made no pretense of studying as he moodily stared out the window. Even Brad Spencer’s usual cocky good humor seemed to have vanished as he started an algebra problem time after time, wadding each failed effort into a ball and lofting it toward the wastepaper basket. His latest effort spun on the edge with a thin, metallic sound, then dropped to the outside, landing on top of three others.

“Will you stop that? It’s bad enough to have your misses all over the basketball court. Can’t you spare us in here?” inquired a usually even-tempered upperclassman named Jerry.

“Yeah? How about your less than brilliant performance last night, huh?”

“Stop it. Both of you,” Carolyn ordered, cutting across the rising tension. “Will someone please tell me what’s the matter with all of you today?”

Ellis, she’d learned from Edgar Humbert, played a position called point guard. That was a position of leadership, he said. She could believe it. Every one of the other players looked at Ellis now, waiting for him to explain.

“We got beat last night, Professor Trent. In our first game of the season. By a team we should’ve beat.”

“They were dog meat,” muttered Brad.

“What does that make us?” asked Jerry with heavy sarcasm. “They beat us by twenty-two points.”

“It’s a good thing you didn’t go last night, Professor Trent,” said Frank.

Carolyn knew he meant that, but she felt a sudden shaft of guilt for not going. She’d considered it, but she hadn’t wanted her position on the new basketball program misunderstood.

“We stunk.” Thomas Abbott’s forcefully delivered opinion drew some nods, but also a few smiles. The mood eased.

“Coach chewed our—” Brad swallowed the accustomed word and found a substitute “—fannies after the game.”

“And this morning,” added Jerry. “We had 6:00 a.m. practice,” he explained to Carolyn. “He started off by holding up the ball and saying, ‘This is a basketball, gentlemen. Just so everyone knows what we’re talking about.’ ”

Together they winced at the memory.

She looked around at the faces, still glum, but not quite as miserable as before. “I can see you’re not thinking about anything but basketball, so you might as well get out of here.” They noisily welcomed the thirty-five-minute break.

Except Frank, she noted. He was in earnest conversation with Ellis and Brad when she left for her office. She wasn’t too surprised when the three of them arrived there a few minutes later.

“Professor Trent,” began Ellis, not quite meeting her eyes. “We were wondering if you might have ideas to help us. See, we—” he waved to take in the three of them “—are having some difficulty adjusting to college classes and . . .”

Brad picked up his flagging teammate. “But it’s different for all three of us. I’ve got this math cr—” again Carolyn saw him push back one word and select another “—crud that just doesn’t connect in my head. Ellis here is being driven to distraction by some history wacko.” She hid her smile at the description of Professor Wemler. “The guy’s demanding he know all the ins and outs of the Battle of Waterloo. And Frank’s got this old English book to read, only it turns out it’s not English at all.”

She studied the three faces in front of her. The players had accepted her to varying degrees and according to their individual personalities. They groaned over her supervision of their work, but mostly they complied. Only Brad caused real concern with missed assignments or meetings.

But Frank still seemed shy of her for some reason. On a shrewd guess she’d say that Frank really wanted the help now. But he didn’t want to approach her or Edgar Humbert directly, so his teammates agreed, or volunteered, to serve as camouflage. If that was the way they wanted it, okay. But how could she best help Frank without exposing their ploy?

She waved them to chairs and came around the desk to perch on the corner. “Maybe we can address all three of your problems through something you already know very well—basketball.”

“Basketball?” repeated Brad with more skepticism than hope.

“Yes,” she said, putting more confidence behind the word than she felt. She wasn’t at all sure this would work. “Take your math, for instance. Statistics are math. And I often hear you reciting statistics. Those numbers need more than simple arithmetic, don’t they? You need formulas to figure out things such as averages and . . . and . . .”

She fervently wished for more knowledge of basketball at that moment.

“Percentages,” supplied Ellis. “The way you figure that out is a sort of algebraic formula.”

Brad looked at him with wide eyes. “Yeah,” he said at last, “I guess it is.”

Emboldened by that success, she picked up steam. “And your Battle of Waterloo, Ellis? That’s just remembering strategy. That’s your responsibility on the basketball court, isn’t it? And you never forget that. So just try to think of history the same way.”

She turned to Frank, feeling a little like the Wizard in
The Wizard of Oz
, handing out diploma, heart and courage to the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion.

“Now, with the
Canterbury Tales
, what you’ve got is a language problem. You think it doesn’t seem like English. But sometimes you players speak a language I’m sure isn’t English, but it is. Only it’s basketball English. Think about all the terms you use that have to do with basketball.”

She racked her memory for phrases that C.J. had used. “Like pick-and-roll, or hoops, or point guard, or gym rat. All English, but each with a special meaning within the context of basketball. That’s what’s happening in the
Canterbury Tales
. So what you have to do is try to pick up the meanings from the sound because their spelling was very different then, so sometimes you won’t recognize the word until you hear it. And the context should help.”

A glimmer of hope showed in Frank’s eyes.

“Then, whatever words you can’t decipher, I’ll try to help you with. Why don’t you do that for two or three chapters tonight and bring a list, and we’ll go over them in the morning between your classes.” She held out her hand. “But only if you promise to do the same for me with basketball words. Is that a deal, Frank?”

He smiled as he shook her hand to seal the bargain. Then the ringing of the telephone cut their thanks short. Marsha Hortler said Stewart wanted to see her in his office.

When she got there, Marsha ushered Carolyn right in. But instead of Stewart, only C.J. Draper stood looking out the window at the Meadow.

With his hands dug into the front pockets of his jeans and his broad shoulders hunched slightly, he reminded her of the players. She wondered if, as he stared out at the almost-bare trees, his face held the same miserable expression theirs had.

An overwhelming urge to comfort him swept her into speech. “I hear last night’s game was difficult. I’m sorry—”

“How the hell would you know? You didn’t bother to come. Guess that’s to be expected—it wouldn’t add a line to your résumé.”

He crossed from the window and dropped into one of the chairs in front of Stewart’s desk. Dark smudges from lack of sleep dulled his eyes.

She stood stock-still. His words slapped at her, creating a stinging hurt that jolted her. Even more shocking was her impulse to reach out and smooth away his frown.

The desire to console and soothe him had no rational basis, but that wasn’t what stopped her. His words stopped her, along with the certainty that he’d spurn any such gesture.

“I just bet you’re sorry,” he added harshly. “It would speed up your little program of getting rid of me and basketball if we can’t win a game.”

The door swung open and Stewart strode in, preventing any response, even if she’d been able to make one. He gave her limp shoulders a quick hug, then moved to his desk chair.

She felt groggy, as if she’d suffered a blow to the head. Slowly she sank into a chair.

“Tough loss last night, C.J.,” Stewart said.

Carolyn waited for the explosion to rattle Stewart as it had her, but none came.

“I wouldn’t mind losing if they’d just played some kind of game. They played like they didn’t hear a word I’d said in a month of practice, Stewart.”