Playing Without the Ball (17 page)

Randy and Josh are sitting there, with a combined scoring average of 0.0. Alan waves Randy in, maybe because he has new sneakers. That’s the biggest difference between them.

Score’s tied. I grab Peter’s arm. “Cover their center,” I say. “Box out.”

Colasurdo goes to the line. Peter and I take the inside spots on the key.

He makes the first one to put them up by a point. The second one bounces high off the back of the rim. I get a hand on it, but can’t bring it down. Their big guy taps it back. Colasurdo is standing by the free-throw line. He comes down with the ball and drives the lane. I’m screened and can’t get to him.

There’s a collision, but the ball is floating toward the hoop.
Beth is on her butt, sliding backwards off the court. The shot goes in, but the referee is waving it off, signaling a charging foul on Colasurdo. Beth raises her fists over her head and shouts, “Yeah!”

I walk over and pull her up and we bump shoulders. “You are tough!” I say.

So we’re down by a point with nine seconds left, but that’s plenty of time, and we
are
going to win. Robin inbounds the ball to me and I dribble up fast. They try to trap me at midcourt but I get through it, take two more dribbles, and shoot.

It hits. Nothing but net, as they say. I put up my fist and holler, and the whole team comes racing over and mobs me. Alan smacks my arm really hard and Beth climbs onto my back. Incredible.

The other team is stone-faced and quiet. The difference between a win and loss in a game like this is immeasurable.

We’re back in first place, and we control our own destiny. We’ve gotta beat these guys again, and we’ve gotta beat Kaipo. And we’re gonna do it. It’s gonna mean something.

“Days Later”

When you said you’d vomited

all day on Saturday

I wished I could have been there

waiting in another room

till you returned

weak and spent

but freshly rinsed

teeth brushed

in need of rest

and sips of water.

I would have fetched it from the kitchen

with an ice cube.

by Jay McLeod

I have this dilemma. There’s Spit, who I’ve been sleeping with, both literally and figuratively, for about two weeks now. Then there’s Julie, who I haven’t seen for that same two-week span
and may never see again, but who I very much desire to see. And there’s Beth, who has maybe thrown a few signals toward me and would not make a bad girlfriend at all. She’s certainly the most stable one of the bunch. I wonder sometimes if I’ve really made a dent in her consciousness, if she ever thinks about me when I’m not in her presence. I’m thinking I might try to find out.

It’s Monday and I’m watching Spit’s band practice. They’ll be here again all weekend. She catches my eye after a couple of songs and points to the spot next to her on the stage, but I just grin and shake my head. Soon I’ll get up there again.

Late at night sometimes I have this fantasy that I’m up there singing for real, belting out some great rock and roll songs before a packed house. And then I go into a lounge singer mode, but classy, and sing some desperate love song directly at Julie to win her over. I figure the odds of that actually happening are about one in fifteen million.

When Spit finishes, she comes over and sits down. “Long time no see,” she says. It’s been since Thursday.

“It’s been brutal without you,” I say.

“I bet.” She smiles. “You must have been counting the seconds.”

I fold my arms. She’s in a good mood. This seems like the right time to break this off. It already feels like it never happened.

“So, Spit,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“Can we … talk about this?”

“This?”

“What we’re doing.”

“What are we doing?” She gives me a kind of amused look,
like she knows what I’m trying to do and knows that it’s torture. Then she makes it easy for me. “It’s not like I think we’re in love,” she says.

“No. But … it feels kind of destructive. Like we’re losing sight of what brought us together in the first place …. And it wasn’t sex and drugs.”

She puts two fingers up to my mouth and pinches my lips. “You’re getting smarter, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Okay,” she says. “You’re off the hook. No more sex buddies. I’ll go back to hugging my pillow.”

“Hey, the human body can go a good long time, remember?”

She laughs and shakes her head. “Who ever told you
that?”

I wake up early Tuesday and go play some ball. It’s a slow game—bankers and lawyers, mostly—but Dana and I play our one-on-one game-within-a-game like before. I can see that my play has improved, because she’s less effective against me and I’m more so against her. Plus the dynamics have changed a little. I can cover her and bump her without a constant sexual reference point. I can take her on as a basketball player. She’s too far over my head to even think about any other relationship.

She says she’s jumping well again, having ironed out the kinks. “Five-ten at East Stroudsburg last weekend,” she says. “I’m jumping up at Dartmouth on Sunday. Great surface. I may get six feet finally.”

She says only five high school girls in the country went six feet or better last year, none of them indoors. “That’s my entire focus for the rest of this year,” she says. “I’m living like a monk until June.”

We don’t have a game Thursday night, but I’ve got nothing to do, so I walk over to the Y anyway. The Presbyterians are warming up on this end. I look around the gym.

“Hey, you,” says a very sweet voice, and I see Beth walking toward me. And it isn’t so much what she says, but the way she says it: two very distinct words, sort of teasing, but also affectionate and melodic.
Hey, you
.

“Hi,” I say. I feel so unencumbered.

“We’re up there,” she says, pointing to the bleachers. I see Alan, Robin, and Anthony. “We wanted to call you, but nobody knew your number.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I live by myself.”

“Oh. Somebody told me that. I guess I didn’t believe them.” She pulls my arm gently. “Come on,” she says, and we go up to the bleachers.

Alan and I shake hands by punching each other’s fist. He’s trying to grow a goatee, but it’s pretty sparse. It’s as long as the hair on his head, though, which is about a quarter of an inch. I notice that he and Robin are sitting leg to leg, even though there’s a lot of room up here.

There are no black girls in our grade, and I think only four in the school. But I’ve never heard any negative comments about black guys going out with white girls, at least not significant ones. Maybe the parents feel otherwise.

Beth is on my left, and I catch her eye and just tilt my head toward Alan and Robin a little and give a questioning look.

She raises her eyebrows and gives a tiny nod, just a slight bobbing of her head.

Somehow that puts me more at ease, like if two people from the team can pair up, then it’s not so unlikely that two more would. I check her out as subtly as I can: lean, strong legs under tight denim, a small pair of old running shoes, nicely rounded—

Bam
, the ball rattles off the fourth row of the bleachers because of an errant pass. I jump a little, then laugh. Beth just gives me a look.

After the second game, we head for the door, and Alan says, “Where are we going?”

“The church is open,” Robin says. “We could play pool or something.”

So we head in that direction. Beth and I lag behind, and the others are soon about a block ahead of us.

“Do you feel like playing pool?” she asks.

“If you want to,” I say. “Actually I’m kind of hungry. I was thinking of going to the diner.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m kind of hungry, too.”

“You don’t mind if we don’t catch up to them?”

“No. I’d rather hang with somebody else for a change.”

“Yeah?”

“My parents give me a hard time about anybody who isn’t into church,” she says. “And I don’t have the balls to rebel.”

She walks real close to me, not with her arm around me or anything, but kind of shoulder to shoulder. When we reach the diner, I ask, “Are you hungry, or did you just say that?”

“I could eat something. I’m not starving.”

“Me either.”

“Wanna do something else?” she asks.

“Sure.”

We walk past the diner and she says we could go to her house. So we walk to the end of Main and turn up Monroe about half a block.

She calls hello to her mom as we enter through the back door. Her mom comes right into the kitchen and says hello.

“This is Jay,” Beth says. “From the youth group.”

“Hi, Jay,” she says. She smiles, but she looks me over good. “Are you new?”

“Yeah. New to the youth group anyway. I been in town awhile.”

“Oh. And where do you live?”

“On Main Street.”

“North Main?”

“No. By Ninth Street.” In other words, in a crummy apartment. There are no houses on the downtown part of Main, just apartments over stores and offices.

We go to the basement and put on the TV, but we don’t watch it. She sits about four inches away from me on a couch.

“What’s the deal with you living alone?” she asks.

I look up at the ceiling and let out my breath. “They both left,” I say. “My mother is … not real mature, I guess. She took off when I was little, and she never tried to get me back. My father raised me. He’d been talking about quitting his job and bolting to California for years, but he didn’t want to jerk me around any more than I’ve already been. Last year I told him I was ready to let him go. He thinks I’ll be out there with him this summer, but I’m not so sure. He figures eight years as a single parent was more than enough.”

“So you really live by yourself?” she asks.

“Yeah. And I work in a bar.” I lean in and whisper, “Don’t let your mom know.”

She giggles. “I’d get grounded just for talking to you.”

“I’m bad, huh?”

“You bad.” She gives me a punch in the knee.

“So,” I say.

“So.”

I put my right elbow—the one next to her—up on the back of the couch. It’s not exactly a move, but it puts me in position to make one.

“Can you do me a favor?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say softly. “Anything.”

She blushes a little, looks down. “Well …,” she says, “how well do you know Brian Kaipo?”

J
ulie shows up around 10 on Friday night as I’m setting a plate of french fries on the bar. We’re not real crowded, but I don’t think she sees me. I’ve been finding reasons to be out of the kitchen, watching the door every time it opens.

I see Nancy first, and my chest tightens just a little, my breath halts. Julie’s behind her, glancing around. Then her eyes rest on me; there’s some acknowledgment. I lean forward and bring a bottle of ketchup up to the bar. “You need anything else?” I say to the guy, who’s maybe twenty-five, already losing his hair.

“No thanks,” he says.

I tap the bar with my fist and head for the back, not turning to Julie. The band is on a break, sitting at a table near the kitchen. I put a hand on Spit’s shoulder. “Can I talk to you a second?” I say.

She follows me into the back.

“Julie’s here,” I say.

“Oh.”

“You think that means anything?”

She laughs. “Of course it does. You think this is the only bar around?”

“It’s one of the few she can get into.”

“Don’t you believe it. She’s here ’cause you’re here.”

I squint a little, put my fingers to my chin. “Yeah, but why? As if I’m the only guy who would be interested in somebody who looks like that? I don’t think so.”

She shakes her head, gives me that look that says God, you’re dense. “You really think that’s all there is to it?”

“What?”

“Looks? Maybe she values sincerity or something, or a sense of humor?”

“You mean mine?”

“Yeah,
maybe.”

“She hardly knows me.”

“She’s not stupid.”

“No. She’s not.”

Spit leans into me, then gently breaks away. “You ever think about why you want
her?
… Besides her ass, I mean.”

I shrug. “I don’t know. Is that the sort of thing I have to answer? I mean, even to myself?”

“No. Not if you’re not ready to. But I have a pretty good idea.”

“What?”

“She seems like someone you could meet on equal ground. Find some balance; support each other.”

We look at each other for a few seconds, one of those understanding looks that secure the bond between us despite everything.

“Listen,” she says, “I gotta go back on. Here’s the plan.” She
starts grinning so stupidly that I know she’s going to bust my chops, but I’ll take it. “You come up onstage with me and I’ll go, ‘Julie, this young man can’t live without you. Do you have it in your heart to forgive him?’ Then we’ll go into a long medley of Barry Manilow songs until she melts into tears.”

“You got it,” I say. I must be turning red from blushing, but I love it when she yanks my chain. “Spit?” I say, and she turns from the doorway.