The Right Hook of Devin Velma

by Jake Burt

  When I peeked around the corner into the kitchen, I saw her. She was standing at the counter eating fruit salad. Immediately, my mind broke.

  Turn around and walk away!

  NOPE.

  Hide behind the doorframe!

  NOPE.

  Say hello as awkwardly as you can!

  SURE!

  “Hi morning!” I squeaked.

  Sofia turned to look at me and smiled.

  I almost collapsed.

  “Heya, Addison! What did you think of the game last night?”

  She reached up to brush a strand of her hair from her eyes. Her fingernails shimmered with purple nail polish.

  Run!

  NOPE.

  “I…”

  Say you liked the game. Say you liked the game. Say you liked the game.

  “I … like … your nail. Nails. Fingernails. You have nice fingernails, and the Warriors won. The Warriors won, which means the Clippers lost, and you dance for the Clippers. I’m sorry. You shouldn’t clip your fingernails, by the way. They’re purple like grape juice.”

  She giggled. I grabbed on to the kitchen counter for dear life.

  “It’s okay, Addison. Did you want some fruit salad? Something else? Mom’s not awake yet, so if you and Devin are hungry, I could whip up something before I head out to my Saturday-morning class.”

  “No fruit salad,” I croaked. “Tickets.”

  “Tickets?” she asked.

  “Not for breakfast. For the game, on the fourteenth. Valentine’s Day. To see the Clippers play the Hornets. Three tickets. Please.”

  I closed my eyes, then opened one just a crack to see if she understood.

  “You guys want to come see me dance? Addison, that’s great! We get a few blocks of tickets set aside for family and friends each game. I’ll claim mine for that night! I was worried nobody’d be able to come this year, what with Dad’s heart and everything. You’ve totally made my day, big guy!”

  Then she glided up, kissed me on the cheek, and walked out of the room.

  Last year, I passed out once. It was right after basketball practice, and it was incredibly hot—like, wring the sweat out of your jersey and watch it evaporate on the concrete hot. Coach had us doing suicide sprints, and after five sets, I wasn’t feeling too well. When I sat down, my vision got blurry, like someone had shaken up a Coke and poured it into my eyes—little black fizzes and pops starting from the outsides and filling up everything I could see. I woke up five minutes later with Coach holding a wet cloth to my head. Heat exhaustion, he said.

  This was definitely another Coke-in-the-eyeballs moment.

  The next thing I remembered was Devin leading me to a chair, sitting me down, and pouring me a glass of water.

  “You’re totally pale, bro,” he said. “Are you gonna throw up?”

  “I did it,” I whispered.

  “What? You threw up?”

  “I did it,” I repeated, louder. “I got the tickets.”

  “I knew you could do it! Did she figure out what we’re trying to do?”

  “I don’t … I don’t think so.”

  “What seats did you ask for?”

  I blinked.

  “Seats?”

  “Yeah. Like, what row? What section? We talked about this, remember? It’s gotta be someplace where I can get down to the front row before the third-quarter TV time-out. That’s when they do the Kiss Cam.”

  “Row? Section?”

  Devin slapped the table. “Addi! Duh! If you didn’t tell her what seats to get, you’re just going to have to talk to her ag— Addi? Addi?”

  Coke.

  Eyeballs.

  YUP.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE DEVIN IS IN THE DETAILS

  “Row fourteen, section three-nineteen! Are you kidding me?!” Devin screamed. He had the tickets in his hands, and he was moving them back and forth in front of his face. I think he expected the numbers to change if he could only make his eyes focus a certain way.

  “Yes, Devin. That’s the section they reserved for friends and family of the dance team,” Sofia said. Her arms were crossed, and she was tapping a foot impatiently. I was squeezed up on the recliner, my knees pressed to my mouth so that I wouldn’t give in to the urge to tell her how well she pulled off “effortless irritation,” or something equally dumb.

  “But it’s so far from the court!”

  “Yeah, you’d think that in addition to our minimum-wage salaries and our nonexistent benefits, they’d give us courtside tickets with the players’ wives. What were they thinking? I’ll just call up the owner right now and tell him there’s been a mistake.”

  “Really?” Devin asked, his frown instantly replaced by a sugar-sweet smile.

  “No, Devin! Of course not!” Sofia shouted. Then she narrowed her eyes. “You know, little brother, I’m beginning to think something’s going on here. I know you don’t care about the Hornets, and it has never mattered where you sat before. What are you playing at?”

  “Nothing!” Devin said, unblinking. “Addi mentioned during the Warriors game that he wanted to see you perform, and I said he should ask you if we could go! Right, Addi?”

  My eyes nearly popped out of my skull, I stared so hard at Devin. I couldn’t tell whether to be furious at him for bringing me into it again, or impressed that he was able to lie so smoothly. I think I managed to move my head enough to make it look like a nod, though.

  Sofia puffed a curl of hair out of her eyes. “Well, whatever your reason, those are the tickets you’ve got. You’re stuck with them. And I expect you to watch our performances. All of them, Devin.”

  “Fine, fine,” he said, and he turned back to his phone as he waved her away.

  When she was gone, I uncurled myself. My knees and ankles cracked, I had been balled up so tightly.

  “That was close,” I muttered. “She knew something was up.”

  “Look,” Devin said, and he pointed to his phone. I leaned down to squint at the screen. There was a map of the Staples Center arena, and Devin had zoomed in on our row and section. It was up really, really high—what my dad called “the nosebleed seats.” The court, and Jeska and Bradford, were going to be tough to get to.

  “We’ll have to leave our seats…,” Devin paused, whipping out a pen and doing some more exploding-sheep calculations. “At the very end of halftime. Probably need to sneak around to the Eleventh Street entrance side, make our way down, shoot between one-thirteen and one-fourteen, then cut across. You’ll need to stand on the other side of the court to get the picture, so we’ll split up right behind the press section, here.” He pointed again to the map. It all looked like colored blocks to me; I hadn’t been to the Staples Center since Devin’s ninth birthday party, and I wasn’t very good at remembering places like that.

  “And what about security? Won’t they check our tickets when we try to get into the better sections?”

  Devin tapped his temple. “Another reason why we’re headed down at the end of halftime. Everybody’s getting back from the bathroom and concession stands. With that many people moving, we should be able to slip past.”

  “And if we can’t?”

  Devin stood up, squinted, and pointed off in the distance.

  “There, mister! Down there! I see my parents. They have my ticket. Want me to go get it and come back to show you?” He smiled. “Right? They’re not gonna make you bug your parents and bring a ticket back, and they don’t want to deal with an angry mom or dad, so bingo.”

  “Speaking of angry parents, what do we do when … Wait, who’s bringing us to the game again? I could ask my dad.”

  “No. It can’t be him. Probably my mom, or maybe G.”

  “Why not my dad? I think he’d like to see the game, and between my mom and him, he’s the least likely to strangle me for trying this.”

  “Because of the BBS.”

  “The what?”

  “Bathroom buddy system. That’s how we get away from whoever brings u
s to the game. I say I have to use the bathroom. My mom would never let me go alone, so she’d demand that I take you with me. Problem solved. If your dad is there, he might come with us, and we’d never get away.”

  “And when we don’t come back until after the TV time-out, and your mom sees you on the Kiss Cam pulling your shirt up?”

  Devin shrugged. “I’m not worried about that part. If I get to Jeska and Bradford, I’ve already won.”

  “Assuming Bradford doesn’t see you behind his wife and chuck you right out of the Staples Center.”

  “Are you serious? That would be even better! Think of the pictures we’d get!”

  I shook my head.

  “And there’s nothing I can say to get you to drop this whole thing?”

  “Not unless you rip that Addi face mask off, reveal that you’re actually Jeska Monroe-Stone, and let me take a picture of you with my belly.”

  So that was a no, then.

  Devin socked me in the shoulder playfully. “Don’t look so nervous. Maybe you did blow it on the playground, but I’ve already forgiven you. You got the tickets, right? And sure they’re crummy, but we’ll manage. I have total confidence that you’ll come through for me. That’s what we do for each other, remember? Like in kindergarten?”

  I nodded. I didn’t remember much about Ms. Wentz’s kindergarten class, but I did know that even back then, Devin was watching out for me. Maybe he saw some sort of connection—he was the smallest kid in our class, and I was already the tallest; teachers often mistook me for a second grader. One of the librarians even thought I was a third grader once, and she gave me a huge stack of books to take to my mom’s classroom. Mom got it sorted out for me, but not before I had missed carpet time and snack. That was a big deal, because if there was one thing I couldn’t afford to miss, it was snack.

  Part of being so big was that my body was always demanding fuel. It still does, so that it can move these branchy arms and pencily legs around. I probably thought about food as much as the other kids thought about playtime, or about Pokémon. So when my dad forgot to pack my lunch one day in October of ’09, it was a disaster waiting to happen.

  It didn’t have to wait long, though.

  Before lunch, we had recess. When I went to my cubby to get my basketball from my backpack, I noticed my brown bag wasn’t in there. Right away, I knew how bad that was; Marielle Brown had forgotten hers three times the week before, and I could remember the pinchy, rhino-faced look Ms. Wentz got when she had to dial up Marielle’s parents and have them leave work to bring in food. That had turned into a shouting match, on account of Marielle’s mom yelling something through the phone, and Ms. Wentz screaming back about our school’s “no-share” policy. By the time the whole thing was done, half the class was crying, and Ms. Wentz stormed out of the classroom for fifteen minutes of “me time,” leaving the assistant, Mr. Galbraith, in charge.

  It took three Elephant and Piggie books, a puppet show, and two rounds of water in the special butterfly Dixie Cups for him to calm us down.

  Desperate to avoid that kind of scene, I scanned the classroom. My eyes settled on the snack closet almost immediately, and my stomach gave me a rumbly thumbs-up. As sneakily as I could, I slipped behind the drying racks and waited for Mr. Galbraith and Ms. Wentz to follow the other kids outside. Then I made my move.

  Whoever had built the closet had a pretty good idea—put the handles of the double doors up high where kids couldn’t reach them. They just didn’t account for me. I strained on my tiptoes, reached up, and snagged a handle, which unlatched and let the blue-and-orange door swing wide.

  Before me was a banquet … and all of it was colors that I liked to eat. There were the browns, of course, but also beiges, tans, and dull yellows. Not a leaf of green to mar the view. No beet-reds or carrot-oranges or cabbage-purples anywhere in sight. I scanned the shelves, eyes roaming over Cheerios and Life cereal, applesauce cups and pretzel sticks. My plan had been to just grab a few things and take them to my backpack. Yes, it was stealing, but the food was for hungry kids, right?

  And man, was I a hungry kid.

  Before I could even finger a Frito, though, I heard a commotion at the door. Ms. Wentz was bringing back a group of girls who had forgotten the sidewalk chalk, and I’d only have a few seconds before they’d come in and see me standing there, snack closet open wide. I wasn’t even supposed to be inside without a teacher in the first place, so it wasn’t like I could just close the closet and back away. No, I only had one place to go.

  Inside the closet itself.

  There wasn’t much room on the bottom shelf, but I crammed in, grabbing the lower lip of the doors and pulling them shut behind me. They locked with a click. I was curled into a tight ball, arms wrapped around my knees and head between my legs like we did for earthquake drills. Even so, I could see into the classroom through the little crack between the doors. Ms. Wentz hadn’t noticed me—if she had, I’d have been yanked out of there faster than I could blink.

  So I was safe for now, but I was also stuck.

  I’m sure there were dozens, maybe hundreds of times I could have called out, or kicked at the door until someone opened it up and found me. But I was too scared; I didn’t want to get into trouble. And being scared? That just made me hungrier.

  The bottom shelf, it turned out, was where the Goldfish crackers were kept. They were in these tall cartons, kind of like the ones for milk, only much bigger. I was surrounded by them—my back was even crushing a few behind me. As the other kids came in from recess and started eating their lunches, I realized I couldn’t hold out any longer; my stomach was growling so bad that I was worried it’d give me away all on its own. So I started eating Goldfish.

  Lots and lots and lots of Goldfish.

  It would’ve been bad enough if I could have just reached into the containers and dug out handfuls of the crackers to shove in my mouth. But no; because of my weird position, I couldn’t get at the tops of the containers, and I’d never been good at carton physics anyway. Instead, I had to work my fingernail at the side of one of the boxes until I had poked a hole through. Once I did, I could tear it a bit more until Goldfish started flowing out into my palms.

  By the time lunch was over, I had poked holes in every carton that I could reach, eating until too many dumped out onto the floor. Then I’d move on to the next one. My stomach had stopped rumbling, but my mouth was completely dry. I had run out of spit, like, fifty crackers ago, so even if I had wanted to call out for help, I couldn’t. I would’ve just wheezed fish dust all over the place.

  It was almost as I had resigned my six-year-old self to living the rest of my life in a snack closet that I heard a little tapping at the door. I moved my eye to the crack and peered out. There was Devin, his huge head and glasses dominating my view. I didn’t know him very well at that point, so I started crying, thinking I was doomed.

  But I was wrong.

  “Hey,” he whispered.

  “Hey,” I managed, crumbs clinging to my lips.

  “I could hear the closet munching.”

  I blushed. “You’re not gonna tell, are you?”

  “How’d you get in there?”

  “Dunno,” I lied.

  “Are you hiding?”

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t have a lunch.”

  “Ooooh,” he cooed sympathetically. I saw him glance back at Ms. Wentz.

  “But I wanna get out,” I added. My back was hurting where the cracker cartons were poking, and I had to go to the bathroom.

  “You’re gonna get in trouble.”

  I sniffled, and new tears came, mixing with the cracker dust on my cheeks to form a sticky paste. My shoes crunched as I shifted in the drifts of Goldfish that had built up around me. “I know,” I said after a bit.

  “’Cept maybe not.”

  He smiled, pushing the tip of his index finger in through the little opening. I reached up and touched it with mine. It felt warm.


  “I got you, Addison,” he said.

  “Huh?” I whispered, but he was gone.

  I pressed my eyeball right up against the crack, trying to figure out what was going on. I looked over at the sinks, at the cubbies, and at the blocks area, but couldn’t see Devin. Then, though, I spotted him … he was marching right up to Ms. Wentz. Terrified, I saw him grab her elbow. She leaned down, her necklaces dangling in front of Devin’s face, and followed his finger as he pointed at the closet. Her look of amused concern disappeared instantly, swallowed up by her rhino face.

  I tried to shove myself as far back into the corner of the closet as I could, but all I did was manage to crush more cartons of crackers. The doors opened in a rush, and I spilled out … along with a tidal wave of Goldfish, like I was the whale caught in the nets that the fishermen were dumping out along the docks. I heard the whole class gasp, two dozen kids all surging forward to crowd around. Mr. Galbraith exclaimed, “Sweet merciful Mary!”

  Ms. Wentz was trembling.

  “Addison Gerhardt! Explain yourself!” she shouted. I tried to sit up but slipped around in the crumbs and landed back on the seat of my pants, squishing an entire school of Goldfish. I started to respond, but those crackers got their revenge, hiding my voice away in a gooey lump of throat dust.

  “Stealing food? You? Shy, quiet Addison? You don’t say more than a dozen words in the first month of school, but you’ll pull something like this? Wait until your mother hears! I’m going to call her right—”

  I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell her I wasn’t quiet, or shy, and that I was only stealing because I didn’t have a lunch, but no words came. It might have been the Goldfish. It might have been everyone staring. It might have been my first freeze.

  It was definitely Devin’s first time bailing me out.

  “Um, Ms. Wentz?”

  Devin tugged on her sleeve, then did it again, harder.

  “Not now, Devin!”

  “Ms. Wentz, I think Addison is scared. You shouldn’t yell.”

  All those heads that were staring at me suddenly shifted to Ms. Wentz. Nobody had ever told her what to do before. She was so shocked she didn’t respond, so he continued.