I never listen to what anybody around me is saying. I just watch the game.
When the halftime buzzer sounds, I stand up to stretch my legs. The Hornets are down by three points—against Lamar Middle School, our main rivals. Pete has missed a few open shots, but the truth is, Lamar is double-teaming him, sending two players to guard him at the same time, and Pete keeps trying to force his way past them. He gets called for a few dumb fouls and spends most of the second quarter sitting on the bench. “I hardly broke a sweat,” I hear him complain to Mr. Tomski at halftime.
“Keep your hands to yourself,” Mr. Tomski says.
Mabley comes down to the court to say hello. I show her the score sheet, and how you have to mark it up. While we’re talking, a ball bounces against my legs and rolls away. “Come on,” someone shouts. “Get me the ball.” It’s Pete, still in a bad mood, waiting by the three-point line.
“Don’t talk to him like that,” Mabley calls over. “Get it yourself.”
But I’ve already chased down the ball and passed it to Pete, who gives Mabley a funny look and turns his back on us.
“I have to go,” I say to Mabley.
“You don’t have to do what he says,” she tells me.
“I sort of do.” And I run off to chase down more balls. At least Mabley got to see what Pete’s really like. I have the feeling that she’ll like me more if I don’t complain about it.
In the second half, Pete plays much better. He starts passing more when they double-team him. We get some easy layups. So the defense has to switch back, and Pete makes a few shots, too. He looks like a different kid. Instead of angry and hunched over, he seems relaxed, almost lazy—the expression on his face has changed, too. He keeps calling out encouragement. When one of his teammates falls down, he helps him up. He pats the kid on the butt.
The Hornets win easily, and after the game Mabley runs down to the court and gives Pete a hug, even though he’s sweaty. You can see the sweat patches on her clothes, and she laughs about it. Everybody’s in a good mood. Mom comes to pick me up and talks to Mr. Tomski for a few minutes before driving me home.
“I’m proud of you,” she says. I’m sitting in the back seat, and she turns to look behind her, before pulling out of the parking space. “You’re a part of the team. You won, too.”
But that’s not what it feels like. “I’m not, not really. You know what they call me, right?”
“What do they call you?” she asks.
“Ball Boy. You want to know why?”
She glances at me in the mirror, and I look away.
I want to say, because of you. Because you called me your basketball boy and Pete overheard you. Because they think I’m a mommy’s boy, which isn’t even wrong, though they don’t know that. Because I’m twelve years old and we still sleep in the same room. Because I haven’t seen my dad in six months. But I don’t say any of those things, I just say, “All I do is I run around and get the balls. I don’t do anything.”
“That’s not true,” she says. “That’s just not true. You’re a part of the team, too.” But I can tell even she doesn’t really believe it.
Eighteen
SOMETIMES I IMAGINE that I’m playing in one of the games—taking the shots that Pete makes, and making them, too.
Or time is running out on the clock and the Hornets are down by one, when Pete passes me the ball. “Come on, Ben!” he says. “Just shoot it!”
Then I dribble up to the basket and shoot. If the ball goes in, I can hear a thousand kids cheering. If I miss—well, if I miss, I have to shoot again until the kids start cheering in my head.
One day, after lunch, I’m shooting around by myself. A big cloud overhead sags above the treetops. It’s not warm or cold, just one of those days when the sky seems to send back echoes. I can hear the ball twice at every dribble: the bounce and the echo. There’s nothing really on my mind.
“Mind if I join you?”
I turn around, startled. Sam steps out from behind the tree. He’s wearing work boots and big blue overalls, and he walks a little the way my dad used to walk after going jogging—as if his hips hurt.
“Pardon?” This is what Granma has taught me to say.
“Here, let me see that ball.”
He takes a shot, which bounces off the rim and rolls into the grass. I walk over to pick the ball up and throw it to him; he kind of leans back, shoots, and holds his hand out afterward—his shot has a long high arc. For a few minutes, I chase down the ball and keep passing it back to him, and after a while, he says, “All right, kid. I’m all warmed up now. Let’s see what you got.”
I start dribbling, and he crouches down low and slaps the ground. When I shoot, he blocks it, and I scramble for the ball and get there first. His boots are really too heavy to play in, and I guess he’s not trying anyway, because the next time, he lets me drive past him and I lay the ball in.
“Point to you,” he says, and passes the ball back to me. “You make it, you take it.”
The next time I shoot, the tree branch gets in the way, a few leaves flutter down, and Sam ends up with the ball under the basket. He jumps and slaps the backboard and lays it in.
“Home court advantage,” he calls it.
We play like this for a while; nobody keeps score. Sometimes he lets me shoot and sometimes he doesn’t—all he has to do is stick out an arm to block my shot. But I’m quicker than he is and “keep getting under his feet,” that’s what he says. He tries to push me off with his elbow, but I sneak under that, too. When the bell rings, he’s sweating and breathing heavily; he wipes his forehead with the end of his shirt.
“I’ve got to go,” I say. “That was the bell.”
“Pass me the rock then,” he tells me, and I throw him the ball. He shoots a jump shot and watches it go in—the net is ragged, but it flicks like a tail when the ball slips through. “You made an old man happy,” he says.
As I walk back to class across the field, I turn around—he’s still out there, shooting by himself, and when he misses, running in his sore-hipped way to get the ball and shoot again.
It’s getting warmer every day. Over the weekend, I start playing out in the garden again—sitting in my den in the bamboo hedge. Granma’s house is small; the hedge is the only place I can be alone.
I keep hoping Mabley will come out to use the trampoline. I think, if she comes, I’ll ask her if she wants to hang out. I guess I could just go around and ring her doorbell, but if she wants to see me, she knows where I live. I don’t want to bother her. That’s what it was like with Jake—he never came up to my apartment unless I called him or something. It was always me who took the elevator down, to knock on his door. I don’t know why, that’s just how it worked. But I didn’t mind with Jake, because I knew he liked me.
For a while, it’s sunny, then it’s not. I get cold, sitting between the bamboo stalks, reading a book; the leaves are still damp. Around four o’clock, Mom brings out a bowl of trail mix and a mug of hot chocolate. I’ve made a little table out of a plank of wood. But Mabley doesn’t come, and eventually it gets too dark for me to read.
On Monday morning, though, on the ride to school, she makes a point of sitting next to me. “Where do you go for lunch every day?” she says.
“I don’t know. I just wander around. There’s a bench out by the football field where I sometimes sit.”
“Why don’t you eat with us anymore?”
I look at her—she’s got what my granma calls “a good face,” but the last time I complained to her about Pete she got mad at me, and we stopped talking for a while. Instead, I tell her, “I kind of feel like, what’s the point. I’m not sure how much longer I’m gonna go to this school anyway.”
“What do you mean? Are you going back to New York?”
“I want to go to London. That’s where my dad is.”
I don’t know why I tell her this—it just comes out.
“Don’t you like it here?” she says. She’s sitting right next to me
, just a few inches away, but I can’t meet her eyes and look out the window instead. We’ve passed under the highway; there are houses to look at, a lot of construction going on, a woman on a stepladder painting a screen door, two guys in overalls blowing leaves around.
“It’s not that, it’s just . . .”
“Is your mom going, too?” She sounds almost hurt, or puzzled and upset.
“I don’t always know what’s going on with them.” Somehow this sounds like a grown-up thing to say.
“Do they talk on the phone a lot?”
“He calls me sometimes. And then afterward he says, Put your mother on the phone. They don’t usually talk for very long.”
But then the bus pulls in and the engine rattles off. Everybody gets out. “Do you want to have lunch with me today?” I ask her. There’s always a squeeze as you try to get out the door—kids carrying bags, sliding off the bench seats, pushing and stumbling as they get off the bus. It’s like everybody just woke up.
“Sure,” she says. “See you in the cafeteria.”
“I’d rather go outside. I can show you where I eat.”
“Okay.”
That’s all—we drift apart in the different streams of kids.
We meet up a few hours later in the cafeteria lunch line. I buy my carton of chocolate milk, and Mabley pays for a plate of chicken, sweet corn, and mashed potatoes. She carries it all out on a plastic tray.
It’s a bright warm day. The trees are starting to grow new leaves; the light when you walk underneath them feels green. We pass the picnic tables, and Mabley asks, “Where are we going?”
“Just wait,” I say.
Mabley makes me nervous. I don’t always know what to say to her. Sometimes, when I’m alone, I imagine talking to her in my head, asking her interesting questions, like, do you ever think about living on your grandparents’ ranch in San Antonio, and answering the interesting questions she asks me. But somehow when I see her again, we never have these conversations.
I lead her past the old bike rack and behind the tree and put my lunch bag down on the bench by the side of the court. “This is where I come.”
She sees the basketball underneath the bench and picks it up. “I never knew about this place,” she says, and starts bouncing the ball. Then she walks slowly up to the basket and takes a shot, pushing the ball with two hands. It hits the front of the rim and rolls away.
“Not like that . . .” I start to say.
“It doesn’t matter,” she tells me. “I’m hungry.”
I get my lunch bag from my satchel and sit next to her on the bench. She has the tray on her lap; it wobbles a little on her knees when she cuts her food.
“How do you know Pete?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer for a minute; she’s busy eating, and I can see her jaw move under her cheek as she chews. Eventually she says, “I guess I’ve always known him. Our moms are friends. They used to . . . when we were babies, they used to put us in the bath together—that’s the kind of story they like to tell, to embarrass us. But I don’t care. He’s like a brother.”
When I don’t say anything, she says, “Is Pete the reason you don’t come to lunch with us anymore?”
“I don’t think he likes me.”
“Pete’s just . . . His dad is one of those real yes-sir, no-sir types of dads. When I’m at his house, Pete has to, like, open the door for me, that kind of thing. I guess he feels like, at school . . .” But then she looks away. “He says to me sometimes, You’re always nice to everybody. It drives him crazy. He gets a little jealous.”
The sun comes through the trees and makes little patches on the bench. I’ve stopped eating my sandwich, but I take a drink of milk from the carton. It sounds like the milk in my throat must make a noise like a bowling ball going down, but really all we can hear is Sam’s lawn mower, the John Deere tractor, driving across the football field about a hundred feet away, and some birds in the trees.
“Come on,” Mabley says. “Let’s shoot around. This chicken’s disgusting.”
“All right,” I tell her, putting my sandwich away. She passes me the ball and I take a shot from the free throw line. It rattles in, and she catches the ball and tries to throw it at the hoop. She sort of throws it like a football, and the ball bounces right back at her off the bottom of the rim.
“You have to give me my change,” I say.
“What?”
“That’s what the kids on the team say during warm-ups. My change—if somebody makes a shot, you have to pass it back to them.”
“Why?”
She stands under the basket, holding the ball like a sack of groceries, and blowing the hair out of her face.
“That’s just how it works. I get to keep shooting until I miss.”
“Whatever,” she says but passes me the ball, and I shuffle across the lane and shoot again. Again it goes in, and she passes it back to me, and I bend my legs again and shoot.
“But you never miss,” she says.
There’s sweat in my eyes, but I feel like if I look down, or think about what I’m doing, I’m going to fall. Move and shoot, move and shoot, that’s what Sam says. Finally, one of my shots hits the back of the rim and caroms into the grass under the trees.
“What am I doing wrong?” she asks.
So I pick up the ball and show her how to hold it—with your hand held back, resting on the palm. “You use the other hand to guide it, like this.”
That’s how Sam showed me. She tries again but misses anyway.
I chase down the ball and give it to her again. This time I pull her hand back myself, so the ball rests on the middle of her palm. Then I take her other hand (it’s a little sweaty; she’s got very small fingers) and lay it against the side of the ball, to keep it in place. “You want to follow through like this,” I tell her, letting my wrist roll over as my arm straightens. “Just keep it as simple as possible—it’s mostly in the wrist.”
She tries again, and the ball floats up and barely touches the rim. It sort of rests on the edge for a second, then trickles in. “Hey, whaddya know?” she says, clapping her hands. Then the bell rings; lunch is over and she grabs her backpack and tray from the bench.
“You coming, Ben?” she asks me. We walk back across the football field together—Sam has finished mowing, the lawn mower is sitting quietly in the end zone. Cut grass lies loosely on top of old yard markings. “When are you moving to London?” Mabley asks. “I don’t want you to go.”
“I don’t know. My dad . . . it’s just something I talk about with him. He has to get settled in first. They’re . . . his company, he has to work pretty hard.”
“So what’s the point of moving there?”
“It’s not really up to me. My parents just . . . do what they want.”
I feel bad about lying to her, even if it maybe isn’t lying. Maybe I will go to London, and all this, this whole place, and people like Pete, and the school, will just be somewhere else I left behind. But then I’d have to leave Mabley behind, too.
She takes her tray to the cafeteria, and I follow her inside and wait by the door. But after that she has to stop by her locker—she’s got math in the afternoon, and I say goodbye and shoulder my bags again and head over toward French.
Nineteen
ON FRIDAYS, when they have a game, all the players wear jackets and ties to class. It’s a kind of uniform that shows they’re on the team. You can tell how proud they feel, just walking down the hallway or sitting at lunch. The worst player on the whole team is this kid called Blake in my social studies class. He’s tall and pimply and really skinny and everybody pushes him around—he falls down a lot. But none of this makes him a nice kid. He spends so much time staring at his reflection in the window that Mr. Tomski finally tells him “to quit messing around with your tie.”
When the bell rings, Mr. Tomski calls me aside while the rest of the kids file out. “You’re a part of this team, too,” he says. “The manager is an important part of the team.
If you want to wear a jacket and tie, you can.”
But the other players will just make fun of me, especially Pete. I can’t say that, so I just say, “That’s all right. I don’t mind.”
“Well,” Mr. Tomski says. “It’s something you can think about. I’m not going to make you, Ben, but I’d rather you did. I’ll leave it at that.”
Maybe he said something to my mom, or maybe she noticed anyway, because next week, as she walks me to the bus stop, Mom asks, “How come some of the kids wear a jacket and tie to school on Fridays?”
“Because there’s a basketball game.”
“How come you don’t wear a jacket and tie?”
“Because I’m not on the team.”
“You are, too.”
“Mom, I’m not. I’m just the manager.” She looks at me and then I say, “I’m just the ball boy.”
“Who says that? Who calls you that?”
“Everybody does. It doesn’t matter. It’s what I am.”
But Mom pulls me by the arm and stops me on the sidewalk. “Now I want you to listen to me.” I keep hoping none of the other kids walk past. “There’s one thing I learned from your father,” she says. “You don’t have to let anybody push you around. You hear me?”
I don’t answer, and she pulls at my arm again. “You hear me, Ben?”
“I hear you.”
“Next Friday, I want to see you in a jacket and tie like the rest of them. Is that understood?”
“Yes,” I say. She lets go.
As the weather warms up, Mabley starts playing outside again, after school and on the weekends, just jumping on the trampoline. On Saturday she sees me in the bamboo bushes and tells me to come over. So I wriggle through the hedge and into her backyard, a little scratched up and covered in leaves.
“There’s been—something—bothering me,” she says, still bouncing up and down.
“Can I come on?” I sit down to take off my shoes.
“Wait a second. I want to show you something.”
First, she starts jumping higher and higher. “To get some momentum going,” she says. I don’t know how high she gets, but she can see over the bamboo hedge into Granma’s yard. She tells me what she sees: my mom’s beach towel with a book lying on it, and a soccer ball in the grass. Her next trick is to touch her toes in the air, with straight legs. Mabley does that a couple of times and then sort of gathers herself again. She looks like she’s concentrating hard. Suddenly she pushes off just as her feet touch the trampoline, and shoots into the air. Her legs swing out in front of her, and for a second she seems to be hanging upside down. Her head points at the ground. But then she somersaults over and lands on her feet.
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