Off the Rim

by Sonya Spreen Bates

  He glanced up at the hoop, and I thought he might just go for the long-range shot. Coach wouldn’t have been happy about that. It was the cop-out move. We could practice long-range shots any time. Then suddenly he switched hands and turned his back to me, sidestepping closer to the basket. I matched him stride for stride, left, right, left again and forward, letting him herd me into position. When he spun and drove in for the layup, I made my own move.

  I stepped in, crossed my arms and bumped him. Hard.

  Jesse reeled back and hit the floor.

  “What the—?”

  “Whoa, sorry about that,” I said, giving him a hand up. I would rather have given a hand up to Hitler, but I had to keep up appearances. “Let’s go again.”

  He gave me a guarded look and started dribbling again, keeping an eye on me while he switched the ball from his right hand to his left and back again.

  “Come on, don’t take all day,” I said, gesturing for him to come closer.

  He faked to the left, then drove in past me on the right.

  I turned and jumped as he went for the layup. We collided in midair, and both of us hit the floor.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” he said as he got to his feet.

  “What?” I said innocently. “I’m defending the basket. What does it look like?”

  He scowled at me. I almost thought he was going to walk off the court, but he got to the top of the key and turned back, prepared for another attempt. This time he drove straight in. I rushed right at him, and he hit the floor for the third time.

  He jumped up, anger written all over him. With a glance over his shoulder to make sure Coach wasn’t watching, he stepped up and got right into my face.

  “I don’t know what your problem is, Lane, but you’re asking for it,” he said.

  “Yeah?” I growled back. “What’re you gonna do about it? Get your buddy to send me nasty emails?” The words were out before I could stop them. I could have kicked myself.

  Jesse’s eyes widened, then his brows drew down in feigned confusion.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, stepping back. “You’re nuts.” He turned and jogged toward the other end of the court. “Walker! Switch with me,” he called out. “Lane’s lost his marbles.”

  “Are you stupid?” Noah said when I told him what had happened. “Isn’t this exactly what we didn’t want?”

  “I know,” I said. “Shut up about it, all right? I feel bad enough already. Just help me figure out what to do.”

  “We’ve got to talk to Jenna,” he said. “Now.”

  “She’s home with the stomach flu,” I said.

  “Then we’ll just have to go out there.”

  I couldn’t argue. Both of us knew how serious this was.

  My car was still at the body shop, so Noah drove us out to Jenna’s after school. He was driving a king-cab Nissan Frontier that still smelled like a new car.

  “Your dad lets you drive this?” I asked, looking around appreciatively. “It looks brand new.”

  “It is. And it’s not his,” Noah said.

  “You bought this? Where’d you get that kind of money?”

  Noah shrugged. “It’s an early graduation present,” he said.

  I whistled. I’d known Noah’s family was pretty well-off. His dad was one of the local doctors, and his mom owned a dress shop in Vancouver. I hadn’t realized how well-off.

  Going around Devil’s Bend reminded me again of the car accident. Debris and tire marks were still visible around the accident site. Suddenly, I wondered if there was a connection between the two—the accident and the threatening messages. The cops had never found the black pickup. Could it belong to Nick Smith?

  When Jenna saw us at the door, she was pretty upset. I don’t know if it was just us or the effects of the stomach bug. Even as she opened the door, she looked pale and scared, like she was on the verge of tears.

  “You told Noah?” she asked me accusingly. “Dyl, you promised.”

  “Jenna, we got something,” I said. “Nick Smith is Facebook friends with Jesse Derby.”

  She calmed down a little when she heard that. “Jesse Derby, from your team?” she said. “I’ve never even spoken to him.”

  Noah brought Nick’s profile up on his laptop, and we gathered around to have a look.

  “Does that help at all? Do you recognize him now?” Noah asked.

  Jenna shook her head. “No. I’ve never seen him before. Not that I remember anyway.”

  We flicked through Nick’s profile, but it didn’t give us much beyond putting a face to the name. The guy’s privacy settings were high, so we couldn’t see any of his posts. The only Facebook friend we recognized was Jesse Derby, which confirmed our suspicions that Jesse had given Nick Jenna’s email address but didn’t give us any new information. It looked like we were coming up with a big fat zero.

  “Do you think Jesse gave this guy my email address?” asked Jenna.

  “He’s the only connection with you we’ve found,” said Noah.

  “Why would he do that?” said Jenna.

  “That’s another mystery,” said Noah, closing his computer. “Has this guy sent you any more messages?”

  Jenna swallowed and nodded. I knew it was bad news.

  “What? What’s happened now?” I said.

  “I did like you said and found a way to block his emails,” she said. “That was on Monday. Today the messages started coming in on my phone. Text messages. He’s got my cell number.”

  Noah and I looked at each other. We both knew what the other was thinking. Jesse Derby. It had to be.

  “Can we see them?” asked Noah.

  Jenna got her phone from the other room and flicked to the messages section. “It’s not just messages,” she said. “There are photos too. He’s been following me.”

  I looked at the string of photos, and fear gripped my insides. There were photos of Jenna outside the school, at the rec center, at Jo’s diner, getting into my car, walking down the street with Amber. The last one was of her house.

  “He’s been sending them almost every hour,” she said.

  “You have to go to the police,” said Noah. “This is outright stalking.”

  “No!” she said. “He’s made it clear. No police. If I just stay quiet, nothing will happen.”

  “But quiet about what?” I said. “How can you keep quiet if you don’t know what to keep quiet about?”

  “I don’t know,” Jenna snapped. “He won’t tell me, remember? Thinks I’m just playing dumb. Keeping quiet is the only thing I can do right now. Just leave it alone.”

  She sighed. I could see how stressed and worried she was about this. I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her everything would be okay. But when I went to give her a hug, she backed up, putting out her hand to ward me off.

  “You guys better get out of here before you end up with my stomach flu,” she said, trying to smile. “You’ve got to be fit for the game tomorrow.”

  I wasn’t happy about it, but we left.

  Noah paused at the door. “Don’t delete those photos, Jenna. Or any other messages he’s sent you. It’s the only evidence we have.”

  On the way back to town, I told Noah about the car accident and how we’d been run off the road by the black pickup.

  “Yeah, I saw Jenna’s Facebook post,” he said.

  “Do you think the driver of the truck could have been Nick Smith?” I said.

  He glanced over at me. “It’s a definite possibility. Is that when Jenna started getting those messages?”

  “No, it was before that.” And that meant the messages couldn’t have been a result of her posting that call for information about the black pickup. It still seemed like too much of a coincidence though. Jenna starts getting threatening messages. Then someone deliberately tries to run me off the road. What if it hadn’t been some random act of road rage? What if it was another attempt to intimidate Jenna? A very real, very dangerous
attempt to show her he meant business? The thought was enough to give me goose bumps.

  We drove along in silence for a few miles, and then Noah spoke up.

  “There might be a way we can find out more about this guy,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Well, Jesse Derby is friends with him. If we get into Jesse’s account, we’ll be able to see everything this Nick Smith has posted.”

  “There’s no way Jesse Derby is going to let us into his account,” I said. “That’s practically admitting he helped this guy stalk Jenna.”

  Noah kept his eyes on the road. “I wasn’t thinking of asking Jesse,” he said grimly.

  We stopped in at Jo’s Diner and holed up in a booth at the back. The after-school crowd had pretty much vacated the place, and no one paid any attention to us.

  Noah brought up the Facebook login page. “All we need is his email address and password,” he said.

  Yeah, like it was that easy, I thought.

  “Coach sent us a group email at the beginning of the season with the game schedule,” Noah said. “So the email address is easy.” He found the email and cut and pasted Jesse’s address into the Facebook login. “Come to think of it,” he said, “that may be how Jesse got Jenna’s email address too. Getting the girls’ schedule forwarded from someone on her team.” He shrugged.

  “Now for the password.” Noah turned to me. “Jesse doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’s really picky about his passwords, so what do you know about him?”

  I shrugged. “Not much.”

  “Come on, think,” he said. “Pets? Birthdays? Girlfriends? Nicknames?”

  “I don’t know.” I tried to think of everything I knew about Jesse Derby. It wasn’t much. “He’s got a picture of Guns N’ Roses in his locker,” I said. Carlos’s locker was two doors down from his. I’d seen that poster hundreds of times.

  “Guns N’ Roses.” He punched it in, but a message saying invalid password came up. Then he tried AxlRose.

  “What’s AxlRose?” I asked.

  “The lead singer,” said Noah. The same message came up again.

  “Do you listen to Guns N’ Roses?” I asked, curious. It wasn’t a band I would have thought Noah would be into.

  He shrugged. “I listen to lots of stuff. Now what else? And make it good. We may not get too many chances at this before we’re locked out.”

  I thought. “I think he has a dog,” I said. “But I have no idea what its name is.”

  “What kind of a dog?” said Noah.

  “Like, a Rottweiler or a bull mastiff or something,” I said. I’d seen him with it down at the park across from the school. It wasn’t the kind of dog I’d want to mess with.

  Noah tried various names—Butch, Rocky, Spike, Gunner, Atlas, Rebel, Princess. All invalid.

  “Princess?” I asked.

  “Some people have a weird sense of humor,” said Noah.

  “Wait,” I said, suddenly remembering. “Back in elementary school, Jesse had a birthday party. I remember because it was right before Christmas, and we all thought it wasn’t fair that he’d get presents on Christmas Eve and on Christmas morning too. His birthday is December 24.”

  I also remembered that party because of the way it had ended. We’d been kicking a ball around in the backyard, as kids do. Jesse kicked it toward a kid named Alex Murphy and it flew wild, hitting Jesse’s dad and making him spill his beer. I’d never seen anyone hit the roof as fast as Richard Derby did that day. He went agro on Jesse, and we all left pretty quickly. It was the first and last party I remember Jesse having.

  “Okay, that’s good,” said Noah. “122497.” It was too much to hope for, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed when invalid password came up yet again. “Or maybe Dec2497,” said Noah.

  A new message appeared. Security check. We were given a letter-and-number code to type in. Noah copied it carefully, and we were back to the login page.

  “Okay, we’ve got to get it now,” said Noah. “I doubt they’re going to let us try much longer.”

  But we’d come to a dead end. I couldn’t think of a single further bit of information about Jesse Derby. Nothing that he’d use for a password. Would we ever find Nick Smith? I stared at the computer, wishing it would somehow transmit Jesse’s password to me by computer telepathy.

  “Hold on,” I said. “What was that date you put in?”

  “122497,” said Noah.

  “Not 97,” I said. “Try 96. Jesse was ten the year of the party. A year older than me.”

  Noah plugged in the numbers, and we held our breath.

  The login worked.

  “You did it!” I said.

  “No, you did it,” said Noah, already scrolling through Jesse’s friends to find Nick Smith. I have to admit to a twinge of guilt about hacking into Jesse’s account. It lasted about half a second, until Noah clicked the screen one more time and we were face to face with Nick Smith’s full profile. The guy who was threatening Jenna. With Jesse’s assistance.

  Nick Smith’s bio claimed that he lived in Vancouver, Washington. No surprise there. It was only an hour away. He was married to Leanne Smith and had two kids. And he worked at a Ford dealership. I could believe that. He looked sleazy enough to be a car salesman. And that could explain the brand-new Ford F-150, if it did belong to him.

  We scrolled down through his posts, hoping to find something from around the time he started sending messages to Jenna. Nothing jumped out at us. It was all the usual stuff. And there were no black pickups in his photos either. So with all that we had gone through to hack into Jesse’s account, we were no closer to finding out what Nick wanted with Jenna. Or whether he’d been the driver of the black pickup. I wasn’t just disappointed. I was devastated.

  “Let me check Jesse’s messages,” said Noah. “See if he contacted Nick privately.” But there were no messages there at all, so either Jesse didn’t use Facebook for messaging or he’d deleted them all.

  “All that and nothing,” I said. “Not even a photo with the truck in it. What’s wrong with this guy? Who doesn’t put up a photo of his car?”

  Noah closed the laptop and sat back in the booth. “There is another way to find out if Nick Smith drives a black pickup,” he said.

  He had a funny smile on his face that rekindled a grain of hope in me. “What are you thinking?” I asked. I was beginning to see there was more to Noah Walker than brains.

  “Feel like a drive into Vancouver?” he said.

  Nick and Leanne Smith lived on the east side of the city. Their address was easy to find in the white pages. According to Google Maps, it would only take us an hour and ten minutes to get there. We grabbed a couple of burgers to go and headed off.

  It was dark by the time we drove down 164th Avenue, looking for the turnoff. Passing by a few large apartment complexes, it suddenly dawned on me that Nick Smith probably had a garage. And if he used that garage, we would never know what kind of car he drove, and it would all be for nothing.

  “This is it,” said Noah, turning down a side street. “Keep an eye out for number 14450.”

  The burger seemed to turn over in my stomach as I scanned the houses. It was hard to see the house numbers in the dark. A few people had porch lights on, though, and we glimpsed enough numbers to know roughly where we were.

  “That was 14440,” I said. “It must be just up there.”

  Noah pulled over opposite the house at 14450. It was a smallish house, probably a rental. The yard was kind of overgrown, and the fence was in need of repairs. There was a light on in the front room, and I could see shadows moving behind the curtains. The driveway was empty.

  The disappointment was sharp in my throat.

  “It was a long shot,” said Noah.

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you want to do now?”

  “Go back, I guess,” I said. “It’s not like we can knock on the door and say, ‘Did you run me off the road with a black pickup last week?’ ”


  “No, I guess not.”

  We sat there for a couple of minutes longer. Neither of us had any other ideas, and finally Noah started up the engine. “The truck needed a good run to break it in, anyway,” he said.

  He did a U-turn and headed back the way we had come. We’d only gone a block down the road when headlights appeared up ahead, and a vehicle drove past us.

  “That’s it!” I shouted. “That was it. Turn around.”

  Noah did another U-ey and pulled over a few houses down from 14450. We watched as a man got out of a black Ford F-150 and reached behind the seat to grab a bag. He slung it over his shoulder and went into the house, pausing on the front porch to lock the vehicle with a beep and a flash of lights. As he passed under the porch light, I recognized him from his Facebook profile. It was definitely Nick Smith.

  Noah and I got out of the Frontier. We crossed the road and casually walked past the house. I took a good look at the back bumper of the pickup as we passed, then dug my phone out of my pocket and took a couple of photos. The right-hand corner was dented and scratched, and I was sure that in daylight, I would have seen streaks of silver paint from my Honda.

  Chapter Ten

  Game day dawned clear and cold. To say I was distracted would have been an understatement. With everything we had learned in the past couple of days, it was hard to concentrate on basketball. Especially when we loaded ourselves onto the bus and headed down the same road to Vancouver that Noah and I had driven the night before.

  We’d decided to keep quiet about what we’d found out for now. Nick Smith obviously meant business, and we didn’t want to do anything to set him off. Until we found out why he was targeting Jenna and what he wanted her to keep quiet about, we’d just have to lay low.

  Columbia’s gymnasium was already crowded with spectators. As the higher-ranked team, they had the home-court advantage, and I could see it was going to work in their favor. We’d brought as many supporters as the bus would hold, including Stretch and our cheerleading team, but they were vastly outnumbered by the Columbia fans. The team mascot, a large brown bear, was already pacing the sidelines, winding the crowd up. Seeing the masses of kids and parents swarming over the bleachers, I wondered just for a second if Nick Smith was up there. But it was Jenna whom Nick Smith was watching. And Jenna was still at home sick. So if Nick was anywhere, it was camped outside her house. That thought gave me a queasy feeling in my stomach, and I sent Jenna a quick text.