It was almost the truth, but it sounded weak once she’d said it. Worse, it sounded patronizing.
“Kelsey, don’t you ever wonder what’s going to happen to you when you’re no longer a Lynx?”
“College.” Kelsey shrugged, her mouth full of curly fries.
“Yeah, but only to play ball. You don’t even know what you’ll major in.”
“Doesn’t matter. I already got a scholarship to Montana State.”
“And then after college? You’re going to move back here and have ten kids with your Lynx boyfriend? Who, I might add, is only your boyfriend because you’re both point guards, which is the least romantic thing ever.”
“Hey, hitting kind of close to home, aren’t you?”
“Yes, my point exactly,” said Lillian. “We need to kill this ridiculous dysfunctional genetic disease.”
Their fathers were brothers who had married their high school sweethearts, who were also alums of the Lady Lynx. (The girls’ team was just called Lynx now, same as the guys’. Feminism and all that.)
Kelsey laughed. “It’s an obsession, but I think calling it a disease is a bit of a stretch.”
“If you could only see yourself,” Lillian said. “I’m not the weird one here, Kelsey, not by a long shot.”
“I never said you were.”
“How’s that sea ice treating you? I hope you can swim as well as you play ball, Kels.”
“Lillian, come on….”
But she was gone. Just like that. She’d thrown her book bag over her shoulder and walked out of the Frosty Freez, leaving Kelsey feeling slapped by her own metaphor and also bailing on the bill.
Lillian had left for Alaska a few days afterward, and now she was writing postcards about mountains and lakes and clean air. All things that existed in Montana, too, if wildfire smoke wasn’t obscuring the view.
Or if you lived anywhere other than Lared, where the latest plan was to wear green surgical masks to play ball outside.
When Kelsey pulled up to the courts a few minutes late (thanks, JJ), she couldn’t help noticing that her teammates looked like escapees from the nearest hospital. They were lined up shooting free throws. Every time someone bounced the ball, puffs of ash flew into the air like dust bombs. Babs, the Lynx all-star forward, had also donned a pair of ski goggles. Kelsey couldn’t tell if anyone was laughing, because their mouths were obscured by the green masks, but she knew one person who would think this was hilarious.
Glancing at the passenger seat, she almost expected to see Lillian, notebook and pen in hand, eyes rolling to prove her point. “This town is so myopic, if the world was ending, the only worry would be how to get in ten more minutes of court time.”
On the seat there was just the Snickers wrapper and the postcards from a distant land—as if her cousin’s ghost had decided to haunt her through the postal service. Lil wrote about the wildflowers, fireweed and columbine and skunk cabbage. She said foxglove was her favorite but it was poisonous, and believe it or not, you had to watch the younger campers, who were known to eat things they shouldn’t.
I wish you were here, Kels, but I realize it’s hard to imagine you doing anything else, anywhere else. I guess I’ll just have to see the world for the both of us. Love, Lil.
Where does Kelsey see herself in a year, two, five? She sees nothing but smoky, swirling ash.
There’s a tap on the window. Her father’s eyes are quizzical over his green mask, his brow furrowed. Is she going to play?
She has those same eyes; can widen them the way he does to answer, can mirror him in so many ways.
Yes, of course she’s going to play. What else would she do? She tries not to hold his gaze too long, afraid there will be something in it that will make her question herself. She cares what he thinks and has felt uncertain about how he sees her since the season ended. Since that one loss.
Her father is one of the best referees in the state. His brother, Lillian’s dad, is one of the best coaches. Right out of college, they stepped into their roles as easily as they’d stepped into their high-top sneakers all their lives—the laces untied, never taking them off, sometimes even sleeping with them on.
When Kelsey and her brothers were little, their mom had loaded up the station wagon with bags of Cheetos and coolers full of Wonder Bread sandwiches and soda and they’d driven all over Montana to watch her dad ref. So many hazy memories, surrounded by sweaty brothers all stretched out in sleeping bags in the back of the car, waking up in time for the next game. Montana dust coating the back window, grazing their skin, their clothes, as if an invisible hand were tossing fistfuls of sand at them as they drove across the state. The sun blistering orange in the heat of the day.
Everything in her memory was tinged with orange, their Cheeto-y fingers and Orange Crush tongues. They were the disheveled kids with constant bedhead, yelling from the bleachers in Billings, Helena, Bozeman, and places so tiny they were left off the maps. Small-town gymnasiums with hard wooden bleachers and oversized mascots, like chickens with big feet and tissue-paper feathers, that made them laugh, while others sometimes caused their mother to tut and shake her head, or worse, leave the gym.
Once, Kelsey’s mother had made her and her brothers wait in the car because one of the teams called themselves the Redskins and had an Indian mascot with long braids and a feathered headdress who ran up and down the sidelines wielding a tomahawk.
“I will not let you just sit and watch this hideous display of racism,” she told them. “It is demeaning and wrong and don’t you ever forget it.”
“But it’s cold out here,” her brother had whined.
“Good. I hope you’re uncomfortable, because that’s nothing compared to how kids from Rocky Boy or Crow or Flathead must feel when they play here,” their mother said. “Put on your damn coat if you’re cold.”
Kelsey would not forget it, nor would she forget the screaming parents who sometimes jumped right out of the bleachers to get into her father’s face, his whistle blaring, sweat darkening his back and the armpits of his zebra-striped jersey. She loved that he was the one who could make people cheer happily or scream with anger—he and his whistle spurred more emotion than any preacher she had ever seen yelling from a pulpit. It was thrilling to behold.
But that was when she was a little kid and her only role in any of it had been to eat popcorn and stomp her feet on the bleachers when the cheerleaders asked the crowd to join in, trying to distract an opposing free throw or psych up the defense. It was loud and stinky and exciting. But mostly, Kelsey had been cheering for the ref, the guy in the stripes, the one with the whistle and the eyes that matched her own. She could not imagine a more perfect world than the one she’d grown up in.
Until high school, when she learned quickly that nobody cheers for the ref. Least of all his daughter, who would prefer that he not notice every move she made.
“You just have to be better than everyone else,” he said when she complained. “Because the fans are watching me harder when I’m reffing my own daughter’s game.”
“But that traveling call was bananas! Those girls were double-teaming me and hacking like crazy. Intentional fouling!”
“I don’t care if they were acting like boxers in a ring. If you don’t want me to call traveling, then you better cement your pivot foot. Even if they draw blood, if you move that foot, I’m calling it a walk. The burden of proof is on you when I’m the ref.”
Lillian had been sitting in Kelsey’s kitchen, listening. Lillian had also been there when the whole thing happened, sitting in the bleachers, watching her cousin get called for traveling by her own father. There was a word for all this, Kelsey thought. Nepotism? No, that meant you were somehow benefiting from being related—and this was the opposite.
Kelsey was embarrassed that Lillian had heard the details of the call play out in her dining room.
Lillian and her father never had to have these kinds of fights. Their relationship had never been so idealistic; there was no “falling from grace” for Lillian.
It was the first time an idea began to worm its way into Kelsey’s head: Had her cousin’s lack of basketball skills actually been a small gift, rather than a curse?
This idea was jarring, but still, it began to take root in Kelsey’s brain as Lillian got farther and farther away, becoming someone who could choose any path, someone for whom there were no expectations.
Kelsey, on the other hand, was feeling Lared close in around her.
She had never felt so much pressure to be perfect, until she began to make mistakes.
Kelsey had always blamed the messenger. But Lillian was not here to shine her strange illuminating light, revealing things that Kelsey refused to see.
Now there was no one between her and the message. She felt abandoned. Lost.
Her father tapped again on her window, and for the first time in her life, Kelsey decided that she didn’t feel like hitting the court. It wasn’t worth it to put on a stupid surgical mask and squint through the gritty air trying to find the basket or someone to pass to.
She shook her head, started up her car, and waved goodbye to the one person she had never said no to.
* * *
—
She drove around town for half an hour, which meant she’d basically gone in circles, passing the same houses about a hundred times until she wound up at her boyfriend’s place, which she never did in the middle of the day. Usually they were both busy playing ball.
“Hi,” said Brian, surprised to see Kelsey in his doorway. “Come on in. Want some milk?”
He was drinking straight out of a gallon jug. His jersey was completely soaked, front and back. One high-top was on, unlaced; the other foot was half in, half out of a sweat sock.
“Where did you play?” she asked.
“Our coach opened the gym,” he said. “You know, because of the bad air.”
“We’re playing outside,” she said.
“Yeah, well, we’re the guys.” He laughed, as if that was funny. Or made any sense.
She was still standing in the doorway.
“Kels, you’re letting in the dregs. In or out, I need to shut the door.”
She stepped inside as a coughing attack hit her.
It happened to everyone lately: coughing as if they smoked a pack a day. It was the new normal.
Brian rubbed her back between her shoulder blades as she leaned forward and hacked her lungs out.
“Thanks,” she said, standing up, wiping her eyes.
He didn’t have a particularly pretty face, and his nose was off a bit to the left from the time he’d been elbowed getting a rebound in junior high—four years ago—but he and Kelsey had been a couple ever since. She had fallen hard for him, watching him fall hard to the floor, his broken nose spurting blood everywhere. He hadn’t let go of the ball, even while bleeding all over his white jersey. Blood was on the gym floor and on the guy that elbowed him. Her heart had beaten wildly in her chest—as if something were blooming inside her—watching him make both of his free throws. Lillian had laughed at her then for falling in love over a rebound.
“It was so much more than a rebound,” Kelsey had said at the time.
But today Brian just looked sweaty. And smelled bad.
“I still don’t understand why we play outside and you get the gym.”
“Calm down,” he said. “We’re going to trade off. Your dad put up a real stink about it.”
“You mean my uncle,” she said. “Our coach.”
“No, I mean your dad. I heard him getting heated when we were warming up.”
“Well, he knows he’s not supposed to interfere. It’s against the rules for a ref to be involved in team practices.”
“I guess he cares more about his precious daughter’s lungs than he does about the rules.”
Again, Brian seemed to think he was being funny. Was he always like this? Suddenly Kelsey wasn’t sure.
“Are you being snide on purpose?” she asked.
“Are you having your period?”
“Fuck you.”
“What’s gotten into you?” He backed away, arms in the air, as if she were on the attack.
“I just want to talk and you’re jumping on me with these one-liners that aren’t funny, Brian.”
“Well, usually you think they are. Now you’re acting more like…”
“More like what?”
“More like…Lillian. The way she never laughs at anything.”
Kelsey said nothing. Her throat was scratchy, like she’d been standing too close to a campfire. She kept trying to clear it, aware that she sounded like a cat hacking up a fur ball.
“Maybe I’ll go,” she said, once she found her voice.
“Yeah, good idea,” he said, not bothering to pretend he cared, shutting the door behind her.
Back in her car, she thought about what he’d said. Lillian never laughed at anything?
It wasn’t true. Lillian was the only person who could make Kelsey laugh so hard she peed her pants. For as long as she could remember, before they knew that Kelsey would be the basketball star and Lillian would be the oddball, they’d just been cousins who saw themselves as the yin to the other’s yang.
Their fathers had started them early, when the basketballs were almost as big as they were, and they would laugh and tumble over them in saggy diapers, like rolling around with a light pumpkin, getting it stuck between their pudgy legs.
Kelsey can still hear Lillian’s deep belly laugh and remember how contagious it was, how once they got going they could not stop. She imagines, but doesn’t remember, that their fathers would roll their eyes and shake their heads. Probably in fear that one of their children would not shake off the silliness and transition into the real thing, dribbling, doing figure eights, butterfly drills.
Those drills slowly began to make sense to Kelsey but not to Lillian. It was like watching a generational rope unravel, so gradually that it would have gone unnoticed, except that each person in the Randolph family had easily wrapped themselves around the strand before them, creating an unbreakable bond. It was hard to believe that one person could unravel it.
Kelsey’s talent compared to Lillian’s clumsiness led to a rift between their fathers. Neither one knew what to say, so they didn’t talk about it.
But this was Basketball Town; it wasn’t a subject you could just pretend wasn’t there.
It was always Lillian who refused to believe that they had to keep playing this charade, that basketball was the only thing that mattered. She was the equivalent of the little kid who keeps yelling, “The emperor has no clothes,” except in Lared there was usually a marching band drowning her out.
Kelsey heard Lillian’s voice all the time now. Watching her teammates wearing green surgical masks, hearing Brian say the boys deserved the gym and she was just “having her period” if she disagreed, the way her father was overstepping his bounds as ref. Kelsey was full of questions that Lillian wasn’t even there to pose. So they must have been coming from inside her own mind.
She opened the glove box and pulled out the second postcard from her cousin. It was a long skinny one. A picture of a mountain ringed with fog took up the whole front. “The highest peak in North America.”
You should have been here, Kels. I woke up and kids were missing from their beds, which is pretty much a counselor’s worst nightmare. But it’s light out all night, so at least searching for them was easy. I couldn’t believe where they were. The stupid outside court with the dirt floor, huge potholes in it and an old pickle barrel for a basket. I have never seen basketball played like this. First of all, they were terrible—even worse than me! Just laughing and falling in the dirt and trying to p
ut the ball through that stupid smelly bucket. But it was also absolute joy. I didn’t think it was possible to play basketball that way, not for glory or attention but just for the thing itself. These kids surprise me every day. Love, Lil
Kelsey drove with Lillian’s words swirling around and around her head: “just for the thing itself.”
At home, her mother was waiting in the entryway. Her scrunched face made Kelsey wonder instantly what she had done. Her mother rarely got mad, but her moral compass was finely tuned, and her eyebrows were pointing due north, a sign that Kelsey had done something drastic. But she couldn’t think what.
“Jimmy Jeffs called.”
“Mom, everyone—”
“Do not ‘everyone does it’ me, young lady. You know better. Get in my car. We are going back to pay for a Snickers bar.”
“It was literally like fifty-seven cents.”
“Really, Kelsey? Who do you think you are? And for that matter, who do you think I am? This is about self-respect, not fifty-goddamn-seven cents.”
Her mother had a habit of swearing when she was taking some kind of parental high ground. It was confusingly contradictory.
“Fine, I’ll pay for the stupid candy bar.”
“Oh, you buckle up, young lady. This is going to cost you a lot more than fifty-seven cents.”
Kelsey stared at her mother’s profile as she drove. She had one dimple, and when she was mad it pulsed in her cheek, as if that was where she kept her heart. She’d been a fabulous basketball player in her day, but now she was thick in the middle and limped a little from arthritis in her left hip.
“Too many hip checks against those Wyoming girls, the ones that grew up on ranches,” she’d always say. “God knows they must have practiced against black angus cattle.”
Whenever Kelsey played against a Wyoming team her mother would offer the same advice: “Just set your feet. Don’t lean or move your hips.” As if Kelsey didn’t know how to take an offensive foul.
Her mother might be angry at the moment, but Lillian’s postcard was fresh in Kelsey’s mind, and she couldn’t stop herself from asking questions.
Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town Page 9