by Sarah Dessen
There was a thunk, followed by a series of bounces, each one sounding more distant. A moment later, someone said, “What kind of a throw was that?”
“Dude, you didn’t even try to catch it.”
“Because it wasn’t anywhere near me,” his friend replied. “Were you aiming for the street?”
The guy glanced at me, then laughed, like I was in on this joke. “Sorry again,” he said, and then he was jogging across the deck, out of sight.
I was standing there, still trying to process all this in my half-awake state, when I felt my phone buzz in my back pocket. So that’s where it was, I thought, remembering how I’d been searching my room for it just before bed the night before. I pulled it out, glancing at the screen. As soon as I saw my mother’s number, I realized that in the chaos of the previous day, I’d never called her back. Whoops.
I took a breath, then hit the TALK button. “Hi, Mom,” I said. “I—”
“Mclean!” Bad sign: she was already shrieking. “I have been worried sick about you! You were supposed to call me back twenty-four hours ago. You promised! Now, I understand that we are currently having some issues—”
“Mom,” I said.
“—but we’re never going to be able to work through them if you don’t respect me enough to—”
“Mom,” I repeated. “I’m sorry.”
These two words, like a brick wall, stopped her. In my mind, I could just see all the other things that had been poised on her tongue, piling up like cars on the freeway. Crash. Crash. Crash.
“Well,” she said finally. “Okay. I mean, I’m still upset. But thank you for saying that.”
I glanced outside, the phone still at my ear, just in time to see the guy who’d chased down the ball take a shot at the goal. It wnt up and wide, banging off a nearby tree before bouncing back to the driveway, where Dave Wade, in jeans and an unzipped blue rain jacket, scooped it up in his arms. He shook his head at something his friend was saying, then took a jump shot. I was watching his face, not the backboard, as it clanged off the rim. He didn’t look surprised.
“I do have to tell you, though,” my mother said now, over the still-tentative silence between us, “I was very hurt you never called me. I don’t think you realize, Mclean, how hard it is to always be reaching out to you, and to continually be rebuffed.”
Dave’s friend went up for a layup, stumbled, and sent the ball into the backyard. “I didn’t mean to not call,” I told my mom, watching as he jogged after it. “But Dad got hurt, and I had leave school to go to the hospital.”
“What?” she gasped. “Oh my God! What happened? Is he all right? Are you all right?”
I sighed, holding the phone away from my ear. “He’s fine,” I told her. “Just needed some stitches.”
“Then why did you have to go to the hospital?”
“He didn’t know where his insurance card was,” I replied. “So ...”
Before I could finish this thought, though, I heard her exhale, a long, hissing noise like a tire losing air, and I pictured whatever truce we might have had deflating right along with it.
“You had to leave school because your father misplaced his card?” I knew better than to answer this, as it was not an actual question. “Honestly! You are not his mother, you’re his daughter. He should be keeping up with your documents, not the other way around.”
“It was fine, okay?” I replied. “Everything’s fine.”
She sniffled, then was quiet for a second before saying, “I was so excited yesterday about having you come down to the beach with us. As soon as I heard the house was ready, all I could think of was you.”
“Mom,” I said.
“But then even that has to be so complicated,” she continued. “I mean, you didn’t even want to hear about it, and that used to be something you loved so much. It makes me incredibly sad that instead of having a normal life—”
“Mom.”
“—your father is dragging you from one place to another, and you’re having to take care of him. Honestly, I can’t for the life of me understand why you don’t . . .”
There was another bang from behind me and I spun around just as the door was knocked open, the basketball again soaring through it. It hit the linoleum and bounced, right at me, and as I grabbed it, the phone between my ear and shoulder, I was suddenly infuriated. My mother was still talking—God, she was always talking—as I stomped to the open door and out onto the deck.
“Sorry!” Dave’s friend yelled when he saw me. “That was my—”
But I wasn’t listening as, instead, I took every bit of the anger and stress of the last few minutes and days put it behind the ball, throwing it overhead at the basket as hard as I could. It went flying, hitting the backboard and banging through the netless hoot full speed before shooting back out and nailing Dave Wade squarely on the forehead. And just like that, he was down.
“Oh, shit,” I said as he crumpled to the pavement. “Mom, I have to go.”
I tossed my phone on a deck chair, then ran down the steps to the driveway. Dave was lying in the driveway, stunned, while his friend stood a few feet away staring at me, wide-eyed. The ball had rolled into the street, stopping by a garbage can.
“Holy crap,” the friend said. “What kind of shot was that?”
“Are you okay? ” I asked Dave, dropping to my knees beside him. “I’m so sorry. I was just—”
Dave was blinking, looking up at the sky. “Wow,” he said slowly, then slid his gaze over to meet mine. “You are much better than us at this game.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. I opened my mouth to try, or at least to apologize, but nothing came. Instead, we just stared at each other, and I thought of a few nights earlier, sitting on those hard wooden stairs, the sky above us. Strange meetings, above and below ground, like crazy collisions, refracting then attracting again.
“Dude, that was incredible,” his friend said, shaking me loose from this trance. “You went down like a mighty oak, felled in the forest!”
I sat back on my heels as Dave pushed himself slowly up on his elbows. Then he shook his head hard, like they do in cartoons when they’re trying to unscramble their brains. It would have been funny, maybe, if I hadn’t been the one responsible for the damage in the first place. “I really didn’t mean to—” I finally managed.
“It’s okay.” He did another head shake, then got to his feet. “No permanent damage.”
“That’s a relief,” said his friend, who had gone to chase down the ball and now returned, bouncing it in front of him. “I know he’s not much to look at, but this boy’s brain is like a national treasure.”
Dave just looked at him, his expression flat. To me, he said, “I’m fine.”
“And I’m Ellis,” his friend said, sticking out his hand. I shook it slowly. “Now that we’re acquainted, you have got to teach me how to do that shot. Seriously.”
“No,” I said, sounding sharper than I meant to. They both looked surprised. “I mean . . . I don’t really know how to do it.”
“Dave’s medulla oblongata begs to differ,” Ellis replied, pressing the ball into my hands. “Come on. Please?”
I felt my face flush. I didn’t want to. In fact, I couldn’t believe I’d even thrown the ball in the first place, much less that it had gone in. It was a testament to my dad’s teaching—administered basically since I could walk, at parks and our home court—that I could not touch a basketball for years and still make his signature shot.
While my dad loved basketball, and lived it and breathed it for most of his young life, he was not the best player: a bit on the short side, with a passable jump shot and a decent layup. But he was fast and passionate, which usually got him playing time, even if it wasn’t much. To his teammates and friends, though, he was more known for the various custom shots that hedeveloped and honed during practice downtime and in neighborhood pickup games. There were dozens of them: the Slip ’n’ Slide (a sort of backward spin move), the As
cot (a necklevel fakeout, then sudden burst to the basket), the Cole Slaw (you kind of had to see it to understand). But of them all, the Boomerang was the most famous. It was more of an assault than a shot, and required an overhand throw, practiced aim, and more than a bit of luck. Clearly, I’d had two of the three.
Now as I stood there with these two guys, both watching me expectantly, I suddenly heard the rattle of my dad’s truck. When I looked up, he was downshifting, turning into the driveway. It wasn’t until he was approaching and I saw his face, surprised, that I realized I was still holding the basketball. He pulled up, looked at it, then at me, and cut the engine.
“Look,” I said to Ellis. I . . . I can’t. Sorry.”
He looked at me, quizzical, as I knew this apology sounded entirely too heartfelt under the circumstances. Then again, it wasn’t really for him. Or even for Dave, who deserved it, considering the hit he’d taken. Instead, even as the words came I knew they were really for my dad, whose eyes I could feel on me as I handed off the ball, and walked off the court and back inside. Game over.
“Okay, try this one. Four-letter word, has an a in it. Clue is country in Micronesia.”
I heard chopping, then water running. “Guam.”
A pause. “Hey. That fits!”
“Yeah?”
I watched from the doorway of the Luna Blu kitchen as Tracey, Opal’s worst waitress, hopped up onto a prep table, crossing her legs. Across from her, at an identical table, a slim blond guy wearing an apron was chopping tomatoes, a huge red, pulpy pile in front of him.
“All right,” she said now, peering down at the folded newspaper in her hands. “How about this? Shakespeare character born via C-section.”
The guy kept chopping, using the knife to push another pile into the ones on the table. “Well—”
“Wait!” Tracey whipped out the pen front behind her ear, clicking it open. “I know this one! It’s Caesar. I’ll just . . .” She frowned. “It doesn’t work, though.”
The guy rinsed the knife, then wiped it with a bar towel. “Try Macduff.”
She squinted down at the page for a second. “Holy crap. You’re right again! You’re entirely too smart to be a prep cook. Where’d you go to college, again?”
“Dropped out,” the guy replied. Then he looked up, seeing me. “Hey. Can I help you?”
“Better straighten up,” Tracey told him, although, I noticed, she herself did not get off the prep table or put down her paper. “That’s the boss’s daughter.”
The guy wiped his hands, then walked over. “Hey. It’s Mclean, right? I’m Jason. Nice to meet you.”
“We call him the professor, though,” Tracey called out, folding her puzzle up. “Because he knows everything.”
“Hardly,” Jaso said. To me he added, “You looking for your dad?”
I nodded. “I was supposed to meet him here, but he’s not in the office or out on the floor anywhere.”
“I think he’s upstairs,” he replied, pointing at the ceiling above us. “With Opal’s, um, community project.”
Tracey snorted. She was short but built like a bull, with broad shoulders and muscled arms, and wearing the same sheepskin boots I’d seen her in my first day, this time with a denim dress. “Her gang of juvenile delinquents, he means.”
“Now, now,” Jason said, walking over and picking up his knife again. “We can’t judge.”
“I can,” Tracey replied. “Did you see them, lined up outside earlier? All smoking and surly with about a thousand piercings among them? God. You could just smell the teen angst, it was so thick.”
Hearing this, I realized it did explain the crowd of people—mostly kids my age, a few older, a few younger—I’d seen clumped around the front doors of Luna Blu on my way in. It was a Monday afternoon before opening, but clearly they weren’t there for food: there was a sense of obligation to their gathering, something forced, not chosen. And Tracey was right, there had been a lot of smoke.
“Hit me with another one,” Jason said now, nodding at Tracey’s paper.
She peered down at it, running her finger along the page. “Okay, how about . . . eight-letter word for fuel, last letter is an e. I put down gasoline, but it’s messing up everything around it.”
“Kerosene,” Jason said, starting on the tomatoes again.
“Holy crap, that’s right, too!” Tracey shook her head, impressed. “You’re wasted here. You should be, like, teaching or something.”
He shrugged, saying nothing, and I took this pause as my exit, thanking them as I headed out of the kitchen and down the hallway. In the restaurant, a girl with yellow-blonde hair and a nose ring was wiping down the bar, while a couple of other waits chatted as they rolled silverware at a table by the window. I headed into the side room, to the stairs that Opal had led me up the day all her boxes had arrived. I’d just started up them when I heard my dad’s voice. Glancing above me, I spotted him and Opal halfway up, talking.
“. . . all for helping the community. But this is ridiculous. We can’t be running a rehab program above the restaurant,” he was saying.
“I know,” Opal replied. She sounded tired. “That’s exactly what I told Lindsay when I went to her office this morning.”
“Lindsay? ”
“Lindsay Baker,” Opal said. “She’s the councilwoman who’s in charge of this whole thing. But she insisted that they’re renovating their offices and the community center is totally booked up. There’s no place that can handle an ongoing project like this.”
“So what you’re saying,” my dad said, “is that there is not a single room in the entire town for this to happen other than ours.”
“No,” Opal replied uneasily. “But that is what she said.”
My dad sighed. Above them,in the attic room, I could hear thumping, footsteps, and voices. “And why did you volunteer for this again?”
“Parking! I did it for parking,” Opal told him. “But when I brought that up today, she totally ran a muddle on me about it. She started in about community responsibility and civic pride and I—”
“Wait, wait,” my dad said. “What did you just say?”
I’d heard it, too. It wasn’t something we could ignore, either of us.
Opal blinked at him. “Community responsibility?”
“Before that.”
She thought back. Above them, in the large room, I heard more thumping. “Oh, running a muddle,” she said finally. “Sorry. It’s just this basketball term. It means when you—”
“I know what it means,” my dad said. “I’m just . . . surprised to hear it coming from you.”
“Why?”
Now it was my dad who had to pause. “Well,” he said after a moment, “I just didn’t realize you were, um, into the game.”
“Oh, God. My dad was a hard-core DB fan,” she told him. “He’s an alum, and so are all my brothers. Basically, I had to go there or I’d shame the entire family.”
“Really.”
Opal nodded. “Although he’s not been happy with the new coach. I don’t keep up with it that much, but apparently there was some kind of scandal. Something to do with his personal life, or—”
“Anyway,” my dad said, cutting her off. I felt my face flush. “Let’s get back to the crisis at hand. What are our options here? ”
“Well,” Opal said slowly, “I think for the time being the best we can hope for is that the councilwoman takes pity on us and finds another room. Which might happen. But . . . not today.”
“Right,” my dad said. “Today, we have a roomful of criminals to deal with.”
“They’re not criminals,” Opal told him. “They just owe community service.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Well, not—”
There was a loud thud from above them, followed by some guffaws. Opal glanced up the stairs. “I think I’d better get up there. I’m supposed to be supervising.”
My dad looked, too, then sighed, shaking his head. “What did you
say that councilwoman’s name was?”
“Baker. Lindsay Baker.”
“Okay,” my dad said, turning to go down the stairs, “I’ll give her a call, see if I can move things along.”
“Oh,” Opal said quickly, “I . . . I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
Opal swallowed. “Well,” she began, as another thump sounded from the room, “it’s just that she’s kind of . . .”
My dad waited.Mth="1em" align="left">“. . . a force,” she finished. “As in, to be reckoned with. She has a tendency to kind of, um, overwhelm people.”
“I think I can handle her,” my dad said as I moved off the bottom step, out of sight, to wait for him in the dining room. “You just deal with the criminals.”
“They’re not criminals,” Opal called out. “They’re—”
My dad shut the door on this, apparently not interested in alternative definitions. When he spotted me, he gave a weary smile. “Hey there,” he said. “How was your day?”
“Uneventful,” I said as we walked around to the bar side. “You? ”
“Just the usual chaos. You hungry?”
I thought back to the soggy turkey sandwich I’d had for lunch, ages ago. “Yeah.”
“Good. Come back to the kitchen with me and I’ll fix you something.”
I was about to reply when, turning the corner, we suddenly came face-to-face with a tall guy in an army jacket, wearing a backward-facing baseball hat. There was a huge black-ink tattoo of an eagle covering his neck. He looked at my dad, then at me, and said, “Hey, where’s the probation thing? I need my sheet signed.”
My dad sighed, then nodded behind us. “Up the stairs. Shut the door behind you.”
The guy grunted, then walked past us, slouching his hands into his pockets. At the table by the window, the two waits rolling silverware tittered. My dad shot them a look, and they quickly quieted, just as his phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, then glanced at the screen, his brow furrowing.
“Chuckles,” he said to me, flipping it open. “Hello? Yeah, I did. The ice-machine repair guy was just here. Well . . . do you want the bad news, or the bad news?”