by Dana Czapnik
There is no silence like the silence in your own head when you allow it space to be silent. No sirens. No honking. No ka-klunk ka-klunk. No shouting from the games on the other courts. No music. No playground screams. No stroller wheels. No creeping thoughts. No wondering. No melancholy. No happiness. Just: ball on pavement. Silence. Air. Thwip. Ball on pavement. Ball on pavement. Feet on pavement. Ball on pavement. Silence. Air. Thwip. Again.
There is a meditation in this. A nirvana. I cannot find it anywhere else but here. A ball. A hoop. And me.
* * *
“Hey! Hey!” some kid shouts behind me, loud enough to crack open the silence. But I don’t think he’s talking to me, so I don’t turn around. Ball on pavement. Silence. Air. Thwip.
“Hey, you! Girl with the ball!”
I know I’m the only girl on the courts. I surveyed the place when I first arrived, which is the thing you do when you’re most often the only one of your kind. Assess the situation. Know who is where. Know where the exits are. Ball on pavement. Ball on pavement. I don’t move to chase it down. I listen to the way it sounds as it rolls toward the chain-link fence, picking up dirt along the way. I turn around to face him.
“Hey, we need an extra player—one of our guys twisted his ankle.”
“So you want me to play?”
“Yeah, why ya think I’m askin’?”
Do I stay inside the glass of a quiet moment or let it shatter?
“Sure.”
I go grab my ball and trot over to the court. Fear and excitement fuse in my belly. Dear delicious dopamine. My new team’s under the basket, missing loosely attempted bank shots.
“I’m Eddie. What’s your name?”
“Lucy.”
“These are the guys. That’s Marco, Chris, and One Trip.”
I shake all their hands. “One Trip?”
“One trip up the court and he’s sucking wind.” Eddie laughs and covers his mouth.
“Don’t listen to him. I’m Drew.” One Trip shakes my hand.
None of them have T-shirts on, so I assume we’re skins. I take my shirt off and throw it to the side of the court with my ball.
“I was gonna tell them to switch with us so we could be shirts for you,” Eddie says, unfazed.
“Nah, it’s cool, I can play like this.”
My Nike sports bra is green and rimmed with sweat. I’m wearing blue mesh Champion shorts with the waistband folded over so it’s more comfortable. In between is my pale belly, which isn’t a belly at all. It’s flat and taut and strong and thick, and when I dribble the ball, anyone who wants to can see my obliques work like they should.
* * *
Shirts have ball. Chris points to a kid who’s a little smaller than me, wearing red shorts and a pine-green tee. I’m sure they stuck me on the worst player on the opposing team. That’s usually how it goes when you play with all guys. I haven’t been watching the game at all, so I have no idea what caliber of ball players any of them are. So rather than pushing real hard on defense immediately, I hang off my guy a bit to see what kind of goods he’s got. Then I can determine how much effort I want to put forth.
He passes the ball to a teammate from the baseline. Trots up the court, his chin up and neck straight. Composing himself to look like a guy who’s confident in his athleticism and not totally crushed by the fact that the opposing team thinks he sucks so bad they got some random chick covering him. He smoothly accepts a pass. Tries to do something fancy with it. Dribbles the ball between his legs a few times. Briefly loses composure. A life below the rim. I could steal it easy. His ball handling’s shaky. But then everyone on the court will know that I’m not some trifle and they’ll get angry that a girl just made them look like asses and I’ll get double-teamed with a heat and my game will be done. The trick is to let the pot boil slowly. Like the way you cook a frog. The frog doesn’t escape from the pot because the water starts out cool, and by the time he realizes he’s being cooked alive, it’s too late. His body has already begun to shut down. That’s the only way to play guys who are less talented than you on the basketball court. Sneak up on them. Let them think you’re just average or “good for a girl” and then slowly, slowly, slowly begin to let your true self shine. That’s the only way to avoid feeling the jealous, embarrassed rage of a dude who’s been beat.
So I let the kid get control. Smartly pass it to a teammate. And I just trot alongside him while he makes useless cuts through the lane. Creating busy work for himself so he feels like a part of the team.
I hang out like that for the next few possessions. Keeping quiet on D. Passing the ball to my teammates by our basket but not shooting. Just playing the supporting role for a while.
Now the ball’s at the top of the key. The guy handling it has some skills. I keep tabs on him in my side view. He stutter-steps and starts driving, but he gets doubled by two of my teammates. Green shirt—the kid I’m guarding—races to give him an open pass. But I’ve been hanging back for a while, and the pot’s been simmering. I got too much juice in me at this point to let him have it. I easily pick off the ball and start racing cross court. Eddie sprints ahead of me and claps. The hell? My guy’s so far behind me he’s in the seventeenth century. Think I can’t make a lay-up? Shit. I bullet him the ball. He lays it up nice with his left. Points at me as he trots backward on D like he’s in the NBA. I half-smile. I’ll give you the courtesy of a pass once, my friend. But from now on, I’m taking that shot.
Me and Eddie start feeling the flow. He’s figured out he can trust me. I can handle all his passes, I communicate well. He’s a real slick ball handler and can read the court. Of course he’s a ball hog, too. Which hurts us when he gets caught in traffic. But he’s flipped me the ball a couple times to get out of trouble, and I’ve made something of the opportunity. The two of us have pretty fresh legs. He’s in good shape, so we’ve been able to take over the game. The longer we play together, the more fun it gets. It’s a beautiful thing when that happens unexpectedly—when you find a teammate you click with immediately.
And then it happens. That feeling that flashes during games if I’m lucky. I. Can’t. Miss. Shots fall for me like meteor showers. It feels like a warm day, when you’re lying in the grass with your shoes off and the sun hits the bottoms of your feet for the first time all year and the whole Oh, what it is to be alive thing takes over your body. The standard basketball weighs twenty-two oh-zees. But right now, it’s weightless. It floats. Oh, what it is to be alive.
Shirts keep trying new defenders to see who can stop me. So far no one can. The kid who’s guarding me now is slow but he’s bigger than me, and he’s giving me the first sign of some trouble.
Eddie sets a pick and I take it, riding the gravitational slingshot off his left shoulder. Marco passes me the ball, and I dribble twice into the paint before pulling up and floating a jumper. My guy catches up to me and jumps in an attempt to block my shot, but instead he smacks my forearm. So loud you can hear it all the way in the Heights. The shot goes around the world twice and then falls in.
“Awwww, shit!” Eddie screams, his hands cupped over his mouth. “And one! And one!”
I frown and shake it off. I’m not gonna be some pussy and insist on a free throw. I wave him off.
“She’s like, ‘Ain’t no thing, ain’t no thing.’ Ha ha!”
I look at all the boys’ faces. Eddie’s laughing and enjoying himself. I’m on his team. He doesn’t feel threatened. Plus he’s had some moments to shine. He’s not going to walk away from this game feeling emasculated. But the kids I’ve practically posterized . . . they’re beat looking. Angry. I guess one could argue that they’d be that way no matter the opponent. But I’ve watched enough basketball and I’ve played enough basketball to know the difference between a kid who’s been legitimately beat by a guy and a kid who’s been legitimately beat by a girl. There’s a subtle difference, but it’s there. Guys that I’ve schooled: to them I’m either a sideshow circus freak if they’re generous about it or a
chick who’s land-grabbing a piece of their turf if they’re not. Like, Stay in your lane, bitch. Rare is the guy who sees me play and considers me a better peer.
To save face, I bet every one of these guys is going to walk off the court and tell themselves they didn’t play me as hard as they would have if I were a dude. You can’t rough up a girl, so they played light D on me. That’s what they’re going to say to themselves. But the way my body is handled on the court tells me that the opposite is true. I can take it, so it appears from the outside like I’m not getting tossed around like the rest of them. But I am. They can tell themselves whatever they want. It doesn’t matter. I beat them fair and square. That is the truth. And not a single one of them is going to talk to me after the game. Or ask me out. Even if they find me cute. Because I will have made them feel bad in a way they’ve never felt before. Besides, if I really cared about being perceived as cute, I would make more effort to be cute. I’d blow-dry my hair straight and I’d pluck my eyebrows and I’d wear contouring makeup that accentuates my cheekbones. And I’d go shopping to find jeans that hug me in the right spots and shirts that bare my midriff and I’d hang on to chain-link fences and stick my butt out and watch the boys play and suck on lollipops and expend a lot of mental energy pretending I don’t like getting dirty or sweating or taking a charge. Because isn’t it just so much easier for everybody when a girl fits into a nice little girl category—good girl slut tomboy girly girl smart girl ditz—instead of being a fully fleshed-out person who is in constant conversation and sometimes argument and sometimes war and sometimes peace with all the various fractious parts of herself. I have to live in a world where the whole human being that I am will make other people uncomfortable and find a way to not be bothered.
* * *
After the game, we all shake hands. “Good games” all around. Nobody gives me any special treatment, and I’m thankful for that. I’m one of the boys now. Never mind that I’m not one of the boys. Eddie wants me to stick around, to play another game, but I tell him I gotta go. I put my T-shirt on and wipe the sweat off my face with the bottom. It was a good game. But the silence in my head is gone, and it’s been replaced by my own noise. I’ll give Percy credit for one thing: He never got angry when I beat him at ball. And I was never one of the boys. I was always Lucy—best friend, confidante, baller. I dribble my ball as I walk and bank it in a naked basket on my way off the courts. I fling my backpack over my left shoulder, and the hard cover of my yearbook digs into my shoulder blade.
* * *
Earlier today, Lauren Moon cornered me by my locker and asked me to sign her yearbook. I would have been stunned by anyone besides Alexis and maybe some of my teammates asking me to sign their yearbook, but Lauren is into that. She’s a politician that way. She’s nice to everyone. Other than the fact that she stole Percy, I really can’t say anything bad about her. She has a few close friends in her clique, but she’s not exclusionary the way you might picture the most popular girl in school to be. So it didn’t surprise me that she’s asked everyone in our graduating class to sign her book.
But what was surprising was that she actually asked me to swap yearbooks for one entire period so we could have time to write a note to each other. This is a very strange ritual I’ve seen all the girls participate in. They exchange books and then find nooks and crannies within the school where they write emotional novels to each other inside whatever is left of the empty pages. Since the yearbook has come out, I’ve walked by several of them smiling to themselves, crouched in corners of the stairwell, a yearbook open in their laps, writing vigorously in ballpoint pen. Sometimes one of them gets annoyed at the other for taking too long with their yearbook because they want to get others to sign it too. This is the ultimate expression of popularity—when a girl keeps your yearbook for too long because she’s writing a lengthy tome on how much she values your friendship and others want to have the opportunity to do the same. I guess I’m as confounded by girls as I am by boys.
Violet says she wasn’t one of the boys or the girls in high school either. She says she was a woman apart. And that when a boy is a loner, he’s seen as interesting or a challenge. There’s a romance in his reticence. But a loner girl is an awkward mystery.
Alexis and I made a real production out of imitating the girls in our class after school one day. She took my book home, and I took her book home. When I got back to school the next day, I saw she had written me, like, a two-pager in her standard Alexis voice, lyrical and funny and unexpected, whereas I thought we were being ironic, so I wrote “U R 2 Good 2 B True” in tiny letters in the upper left-hand corner of her blank Signatures page. When she asked for her yearbook back, I told her I was still working on it, and she joked with me, like, “Look who’s being all emotional now.” And I spent my entire free period hiding in the library, trying to figure out how to write something both honest and sincere without being corny, because Alexis has no tolerance for corny. And the thing I figured out as I was writing to her was that I’ve always thought of Percy as being my best friend. But all this time, it turns out it’s been Alexis. And I have no idea if we’ll continue to be best friends forever and ever, or even through all of college, since she’ll be at Barnard and I’ll be all the way across the country. But maybe when I’m home over Thanksgiving, she’ll come over to my place, and we’ll go up to my roof and listen to Midnight Marauders over and over and over as we always do and we’ll catch up, and maybe by then we’ll have it all figured out. Or maybe not. Either way, I know we’ll laugh.
While I had Lauren Moon’s yearbook in my possession, I took the opportunity to read it a little, see what it’s like to have a yearbook filled with notes from everyone in school—from all the popular senior girls and guys to even little freshmen who are obsessed with you, grooming themselves to be the next popular girls. While flipping through all the pages, most of which were marked up with someone’s notes, it occurred to me that Lauren was probably doing the same thing with mine, and maybe feeling sorry for me that all I have is one lengthy note from Alexis and a few notes from Jamila and the twins and Charles. And one nasty note from Brian Deed. I’m not even sure how he got his hands on my book. I’d tear the page out, but the thing is, he wrote it across a picture of me holding up the 1994 Ivy Prep League championship trophy. It’s the only picture I have of that moment, and I love it because I’m smiling really hard in it and all the stray hairs around my face are backlit by the auditorium lights and my arms look ripped and Alexis has her hand on my shoulder and is reaching up to touch the trophy. And who cares about winning some stupid private-school-league high school championship, I guess. Right? But, if I’m being honest: me. I care. A lot. I doubt I’ll ever even look at this yearbook again after I’ve graduated, but who knows how I’ll feel in ten or twenty years from now. And one day maybe I’ll have kids, and the only picture they may ever see of me holding up a basketball trophy will have the word “FEMINAZI”—yes, all caps—scrawled across my face.
I picture him doing this in private. Not with a group of boys. No matter how dumb and immature the rest of his cocky, jocky clan are, none of them would find this funny or remotely okay. I can picture their reaction to him writing this on my picture. They’d look at him with a condescending disgust, like, You child, and they’d think of him differently from then on. He’d have less sway, less power among them. And Brian knows this, which is why I’m sure he wrote this little note to me in secret. I can picture him with my yearbook, writing it quickly so no one can see and dumping it back on the pile he found it on and going about his day. I bet he hasn’t thought of it once since he did it. His tiny triumphant act for himself. He thinks I’d never show it to anyone of consequence because I’d be embarrassed someone would do that to me and so it would remain our powerful little secret. Just between us. But I did show it. I showed it to Alexis. And through her I almost exacted my revenge. Through massive amounts of subterfuge and a very elaborately planned reconnaissance mission, Alexis was able to get her han
ds on Brian’s yearbook for about ten minutes during our lunch period yesterday and got it to me hanging out in the student lounge. But as soon as I got it into my hands and was narrowing down which retort to use—“Enjoy blowing out your ACL playing intramurals at Yale” or crossing out his Most Likely honors and writing in “be a white collar criminal”—I decided instead to write a small note wishing him luck at college.
Alexis said I lost my nerve, that I’d become a little too soft, that the old Lucy would’ve done it. But it’s just . . . I’ve decided that there’s a difference between being a good person and being a not-bad person. Being a not-bad person is easy: no murdering, no stealing, no cheating, no slashing tires, no throwing people in front of the train, no treating the people you sleep with like dirt, no writing “FEMINAZI” across the face of a classmate in their yearbook. But being good requires a bit more thought. A bit more work. Maybe that’s ultimately unsustainable, which is why the world is mostly full of not-bad people. The good people and the bad people are the outliers. I think I didn’t exact my revenge because I want to make an earnest attempt at being better than just a not-bad person. And I’m sure that probably requires something more than controlling my impulse to write a witty but vengeful note in a classmate’s yearbook. But it’s a start.
Flipping through Lauren’s book was an interesting exercise. It seemed like the whole school had signed it. But most of the notes were pretty short. There were a lot of anonymous notes saying some variation on “You were the hottest girl in school,” and she got one note that said, “I’ll miss that ass.” There were lots of variations on “Love U” and “I’ll always love you.” A few of her girlfriends wrote a few paragraphs here and there with mentions of inside jokes preceded by the phrase, “Always remember . . .”