Lizzy Legend

by Matthew Ross Smith

  I watched the ghosts moving on the wall, cursed to repeat their same actions for all eternity.

  “The day before the game, Valley’s star player, Paul Smith, was quoted in the paper saying he was going to hold your dad to single digits.”

  “Smith played for Denver.”

  “And Utah. And Seattle. And Detroit. Had a nice pro career. Your dad destroyed him. Sixty-two points. After the game, Smith said what everyone said after they played us: ‘That was the greatest basketball player I’ve ever seen.’ ”

  “I already know all this, Coach.”

  Just before the final play, when Dad did his famous crossover move, pulling the ball sharply across his body—“drawing the curtain,” they called it—freeing himself to make the winning shot—Gulch clicked off the projector. Dust motes swirled up. Gulch waved them away, coughing. “Listen, I made some calls. Explained the situation. And good news: You can play.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Did you hear me? I said you can play. With us. They granted you a waiver. You can play, starting today.” He rubbed his hairy hands. “God, Lizzy, these boys have no idea what’s about to hit ’em.”

  “I don’t know, Coach.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Part of me was overjoyed.

  I could play!

  On the boys’ team!

  But another part was annoyed that I’d had to deal with this at all.

  “Maybe I’ll just play for the girls’ team,” I said. “Coach Varisanno’s a good coach. She played D-3.”

  “You’re not hearing me. You’re a Trudeaux. You’re going to play for me. I mean, for us.”

  “I don’t know. I need to think about it.”

  “What’s there to think about?” he said. “It’s simple. To get better, you need to play against the best competition possible, right?”

  “Maybe I’ll just go play for the Bells, then.”

  The Bells were the pro team in Philly.

  Gulch did one of those half laughs where you expect the other person to fill in the other half.

  I didn’t laugh.

  “You know,” he said, leaning back, “first time I saw you shoot, you were shorter than this desk here. You used to run out on the court during time-outs and shoot. The crowd always liked watching you better than watching the actual games. Couldn’t blame ’em. I used to watch too. We all did. To get the ball up to the rim, you had to get a running start and heave it from your hip. But it always went in. Or seemed to. I remember thinking one time, Look out, she might go pro one day! But then I laughed. Yeah. Like that would ever happen . . . .”

  I leaned forward.

  Instead of kicking over his projector, like I wanted to, I said, “Okay, Coach, I’m in.”

  ARDWYN MIDDLE SCHOOL

  BOYS’ BASKETBALL

  OFFICIAL TEAM CONTRACT

  As handed down to the founder of basketball, James Naismith, in the year 1891 AD, on a stone tablet coach’s whiteboard, as he stood atop a mountain ladder, nailing a peach basket to the wall.

  Thou shalt not whine.

  Thou shalt not cry.

  Thou shalt not cheat.

  Thou shalt not reach.

  Thou shalt not loaf (on defense).

  Thou shalt not covet (the ball).

  Thou shalt not question (thy coach).

  Thou shalt not quit (ever).

  Thou shalt not throw a behind-the-back pass when a chest pass would do just freaking fine.

  And, of course . . .

  Thou shalt not record, sell, or distribute any of Coach Gulch’s copyrighted plays if thou dost not have express written permission—violators subject to five months in detention and/or five hundred suicides with no water breaks.

  Read closely and sign if you agree.

  Name (printed): __________________________________

  Name (signed): ___________________________________

  Date: ______________

  Thank god for Toby. He always knew how to make me laugh, which kept me from being a total, brooding, self-serious ass.

  He came up to me before my first practice. “Hey. Be honest. Does this uniform make me look fat?”

  He had a basketball stuffed in his XXL practice jersey, making him look pregnant, and two more in the back of his shorts, giving him what we called a “bubble butt.”

  “You’ve got a lovely figure,” I said.

  He peeked over his shoulder. “Really? You think?”

  A whistle blew.

  “Gather ’round!” Gulch said. “Sykes, quit messing around!”

  Toby birthed the basketball and cradled it.

  Gulch frowned. He had a rolled-up baton of papers in his hand—our team contracts that we’d need to sign or he wouldn’t let us play. “Now listen up,” he said. “Good news. As you see, Lizzy’s joining us. You all know what she can do. The rest of the league’s about to find out.”

  Tank Marciano raised his hand.

  I braced. You know how they say your vision gets worse from sitting too close to the TV? That’s how I felt being around Tank. Like my IQ was dropping just being near him.

  “Coach,” he said in his caveman voice. “I forgot my sports bra in my locker; can I go get it?”

  “Sure,” Gulch said. “Go ahead. But if you do, don’t come back, and see if you can find your brain while you’re down there.”

  Tank stared with his mouth open.

  “Now then,” Gulch said. “There is one actual uniform issue. And that’s the number twenty-four. Lizzy—”

  “I’m twenty-four!” Tank yelled.

  “I know this is important,” Gulch said, “so we’ll decide this democratically.” He was always a little too pleased with himself when he used big words. He tried to spin the ball on his finger. It fell right off. “We’ll settle this with a game of PIG.”

  PIG, of course, is a shooting game where you have to make the same shots your opponent makes, or else you get a letter. If you spell P-I-G, you lose. (You can also play HORSE or ELEPHANT or HIPPOPOTAMUS if you have the time.)

  Tank and I rock-paper-scissored to see who would shoot first. I threw paper and he threw rock, meaning I should’ve won—paper covers rock—but he just smashed through my paper with his caveman fist. He wasn’t much for games of skill or strategy.

  Speaking of which . . . PIG wasn’t the best game for him. He carried the ball to the corner and shot a knuckle ball, a hideous thing, no rotation at all. Somehow it grazed the corner of the backboard and banked in. A corner bank! You watch basketball enough, maybe you’ll see that once a year. You can’t get any luckier.

  He celebrated like he’d clubbed something to death.

  I caught the ball before it hit the ground and skipped out to the same spot. How many times had I drained this exact shot? A thousand? Ten thousand? I took one dribble, pulled up to shoot, but then—

  I stopped.

  Toby tilted his head. His flat-top slanted.

  Coach Gulch squinted. He sort of wheezed through his whistle.

  I’d never been one to hesitate. Or doubt myself.

  Everyone was staring.

  It wasn’t doubt. It was the opposite. It was certainty. I knew that even if I closed my eyes and shot a wild, falling-over hook shot, the ball was going to go in. And that, strangely, made me hesitate. It was one thing to shoot alone in the rain. But in front of the team, I felt weirdly, I don’t know, exposed. “You can have it,” I mumbled.

  “Play the game,” Gulch said.

  “No,” I said. “He can have it.”

  “Play the damn game!”

  “The team’s the most important thing, Coach. I don’t care about a stupid number. I just want to win.”

  Later, walking home, Toby said: “What the heck was that all about?”

  “What?”

  “You backed down from Fred Flintstone. Then you went the whole practice and didn’t even shoot once.”

  “Yeah, but I had like thirty assists. Our team still won.”
>
  “Are you trying to prove a point or something? Because I’m all for it. I’m all for proving stuff. I’m in. I just don’t understand what the point is.”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  He was genuinely hurt by that. I knew because he wasn’t a good enough actor to fake it.

  “I have to show you,” I said. “Meet me at the court at six tomorrow.”

  “Six? Nooooooo way. It’s gonna be, like, thirty degrees!”

  “Fine. Six fifteen. Bundle up.”

  Toby appeared at the top of the hill just after dawn. For some reason I thought of one of those Just Married cars, dragging a bunch of clattering junk behind it. Except his would’ve said Just Woke Up. His jacket was unzipped, his sneakers were untied, and he had a frosted Pop-Tart hanging from his mouth.

  I shot the ball from the foul line. Pure swish.

  “Wow,” he deadpanned. “Never seen that before.”

  I stepped back to the three-point line. Pure swish.

  He yawned. His breath plumed in the early-morning cold.

  Half-court. Pure swish.

  That one made him raise an eyebrow. It wasn’t just that it went in. It was the way it went in. The way the ball seemed to accelerate through the hoop.

  I carried the ball to the far corner of the court, about ninety-five feet away, and lofted up a sky hook shot.

  The ball flew through the overcast sky.

  It was up there so long it could’ve evolved.

  It could’ve grown wings and flown away.

  But it just kept tracking toward the hoop.

  Closer . . .

  Closer . . .

  Pure swish.

  Toby stared like his brain had turned to Pop-Tart mush.

  I swished the same ninety-five-foot hook shot again.

  And again.

  And again.

  “Let me see that ball,” he said. He shook it at his ear. “It have magnets in it or something?” A popular theory among the conspiracy theorists these days.

  “You try,” I said.

  He shot a free throw. His normal form. A two-handed push shot.

  Air ball.

  I carried the ball to half-court and turned my back to the basket. One-handed, over the head. Pure swish.

  “You could always shoot,” he said. “But not like this.”

  I told him everything. The robocall. The wish. The first shot in the rain.

  “I just can’t believe it,” he said, rubbing his cold hands.

  “Well, it’s real, man. So you’d better start—”

  “No. I mean . . . I just can’t believe you didn’t wish for more wishes. I mean, come on. How do you not wish for more wishes? You totally blew it!”

  “I was kinda put on the spot—”

  “Well, next time that happens, don’t be so selfish. You could have totally hooked me up!”

  “Actually . . .” I stopped.

  “What?”

  “After the call, I got this text—”

  “Lemme see.”

  I showed him the weird follow-up text I’d gotten the next day.

  [RESTRICTED NUMBER]

  Thank you.

  Please keep this for your records.

  Wish #39765488335251 has been granted.

  Term Reply X – 01

  “What’s X-minus-one?” I asked.

  “Maybe it’s computer code—isn’t that all zeroes and ones?” He squinted. “Or maybe it means you still have one wish. Like in a video game, you know how it says your lives left, like x01? Let’s try to text—”

  I snatched the phone back. “Don’t.”

  “Jeez. Relax. I’m just—”

  “You can’t tell anyone,” I said. “No matter what. Promise?”

  He turned an imaginary key at his lips . . . then bugged his eyes.

  “What?” I said.

  “I . . . swallowed . . . the . . . key.”

  I shook my head. “Idiot.”

  Our first game was against Springfield. They were the defending league champs. They had a freshman forward, Reggie Burton, who supposedly was already getting college scholarship letters.

  We bumped fists before the tip and did little side stretches as we waited for the clock operator to figure out how to reset the game clock. The gym smelled like boiled hot dogs and dust. The stands were 95 percent empty. A sparrow had gotten inside somehow and was hopping around. The janitor, Grumpy John, was chasing it with a bucket.

  Finally, the clock was set and the potbellied ref came forward. He pointed. “Red this way. Brown this way.” We were red. They were brown.

  It seems silly to say, but I think I was more nervous before this game than all the much bigger ones that followed. Maybe it was because—for some reason—Dad wasn’t there. Or maybe because I hadn’t played a game yet since . . . you know.

  The ref tossed up the ball.

  Tank tipped it to his left.

  Billy Castaldo, our starting small forward, caught it there.

  On the far side, I broke for the hoop.

  Just as Gulch had drawn it up.

  Billy zipped me the ball.

  And, just like that, three seconds into my boys’ basketball career, I was cruising in for an open layup. Instinct took over. I took two dribbles. Right foot. Left foot. But just as I was about to lay the ball off the backboard, I froze. Instead of shooting, I just landed with the ball. The ref blew his whistle, wheeled his arms. Traveling.

  The boys on the Springfield bench were elbowing one another, laughing.

  I looked down. I was still clutching the ball.

  The ref signaled a delay of game warning. Or rather, he tried to, but didn’t know the signal for it, so he just pointed at his wrist and rolled his eyes.

  Coach Gulch stuck his fingers into the corners of his mouth and half whistled/half spit. He lifted his shoulders. You okay?

  I waved him off and jogged back on defense.

  “Got something sticky on your hands?” Reggie Burton joked.

  I considered saying something back, but instead I just waited until he got the ball and immediately stole it from him. Yeah, I thought. I don’t know what it is. The ball just keeps sticking to them.

  I fired the ball ahead to Tank for an easy layup.

  The next time down, I started hard right, so Burton took a big step . . . then I threaded a bounce pass right through his legs to Sean Dormond for another easy layup.

  Maybe this point guard thing isn’t so bad after all.

  We won, 52–40. They don’t keep stats in middle school other than points and fouls, so, according to the official book, I had no impact on the game whatsoever.

  Unofficially, of course, I controlled the game. I owned it.

  You’re probably wondering why, once again, I didn’t shoot the ball. It must seem, from the outside looking in, like I was holding a winning lottery ticket and was too afraid to cash it.

  The truth is, I was afraid, and it was affecting my play, but not in the normal way. I think I knew, even then, that once I did shoot, when I revealed this magic power, nothing in my life would ever be the same. And then the one sacred place I’d always been able to control things, the basketball court, would be just like every other crappy place in the world.

  After that first win against Springfield, I went right to the Stop-N-Pump. I saw Dad through the glass as I walked up. He was down on his knees, fixing a wheel on an overturned mop bucket, wearing his sweat-stained baseball cap (the cheap free-giveaway kind with a McDonald’s logo on it). I pulled open the door. Ding.

  “How much you win by?” he said without looking up.

  “Twelve,” I said.

  “That’s it?”

  “Our starters sat the whole fourth.”

  “How many your man have?” Dad always did that—asked how many my opponent had instead of how many I had.

  “Two.”

  He spun the repaired wheel and stood, stiffly, pushing up off his knees. “Well, that gives you something to work on for the next
game.”

  I asked Dad about his injury once—How did it happen? What did it feel like? Where exactly on the court were you?—but he just grumbled, “Drop it, okay?”

  After his injury, Dad had moved home to Ardwyn and gotten a job at the local auto shop. He wasn’t a natural there like on the basketball court, but, in a weird way, that was exciting. He worked at it. He borrowed books from the public library and studied. He was never their best mechanic, but he was their most reliable. He was one of those steady role players every team needs. One year, the shop even printed him a cheap little certificate that said TEAM MVP. They didn’t put it in a frame or anything. They just gave it to him. It had oil-smudged fingerprints all over it. I never would’ve known about it if I hadn’t gone snooping for our electricity bills. The printer must’ve been low on ink, so his name was ghosted out, but I could still read it: RICK TRUDEAUX, TEAM MVP. He worked there for seven years, and though things weren’t perfect, they were . . . okay. We survived the worst that life could throw at us in those years and kept moving forward. We had each other. We were okay.

  Then the auto shop closed. “Tax issues.”

  The owner was thrown in jail.

  Dad scrambled to find a job, and that was how he ended up working the overnight at the Stop-N-Pump. He couldn’t afford to wait around for the perfect job, he said. He’d taken out a loan for night classes years earlier, and the interest was piling up on that, plus all our other bills—food, utilities, the mortgage, etc.

  Don’t worry about me, he said. I’m fine. When’s your next game?

  I pushed him to open his own shop—Why not?—but he said it was too much of a hassle, too much paperwork.

  How was practice? he asked. When’s your next game? What’d you learn at school?

  Another few months passed. That was when he got those bags under his eyes. And that was when I realized that time moves differently for adults. When you stop imagining the next thing in front of you, it all sort of blurs together, and it’s easy to get stuck.

  Dad limped back behind the register. “Sorry,” he said. “Maria went into labor, and I had to cover.”