Lizzy Legend

by Matthew Ross Smith

  The game was at Darby, a fifteen-minute bus ride away. Buses have always made me feel nauseous—especially school buses with that diesel exhaust/hospital smell—so I was leaning my forehead against the cold rectangular window, trying not to puke.

  Toby was picking at the dark green seat covering beside me. “What do you think this seat’s made of ?” he said. “Dead iguanas?” He picked harder. “What’s the difference between an alligator and a crocodile anyway? Do you ever look at a rhino and just think, like, wait, that’s, like . . . a dinosaur?”

  My headphones were on, so I pretended like I didn’t hear him. I liked to build a cocoon around myself before games. Lizzy Trudeaux—who was a fairly nice person—went into the cocoon. Someone different came out.

  “It could be dried boogers,” Toby said, sniffing his fingers. “Here, taste and tell me.”

  I smacked his hand away. “Quit it, man.”

  “What, you’re nervous? I’ve never seen you nervous.”

  “I’m not nervous. I’m sick.”

  “Bus sick?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “What are you listening to?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Those headphones big enough? You look like you should be landing airplanes in those things.” He pretended he was waving glowing red batons, landing planes.

  I pressed my forehead harder against the cold window.

  Toby reached across me to open the window—you know the kind where you compress the two hinges?—but that was just a fake out. When I lifted my arms, he reached down and yanked the black cord attached to my headphones.

  He stared at the loose cord for a second. “Wait, you’ve got your headphones plugged into your pocket?”

  “We can’t all afford—”

  “Oh, please. Don’t play the poor card. You’re just weird.”

  He was right, of course—the headphones were to keep sound out. I told you about my cocoon. And if that was weird, fine. Whatever. Nothing mattered except getting ready for the game.

  I wasn’t allowed in the locker room with the boys, so I changed alone in the girls’ bathroom. The tiled floor was ice-cold, even through my socks. It only took me about eight seconds to get changed because I’d slept in my uniform the night before.

  When I came out of the bathroom, Coach Gulch and the boys were streaming out of the locker room. Gulch was carrying a spiral-bound notebook, like always. He was glaring over at his mortal enemy: Darby’s head coach, Pat Brothers. He crooked his meaty finger, summoning me. “Hope you got some of that magic left from yesterday,” he said. “This is a big one.”

  “That was just the beginning, Coach.”

  “Good. Don’t hold back today, hear me?”

  How many people were in the gym that day? Twenty-five? Thirty? The stands were like a huge brown continent dotted only with major cities. One fan here, one there, two there, mostly open space in between. Dad was up in the far corner, alone, like always. He was Juneau, Alaska.

  I kept staring up at the ceiling as we cycled through our pregame layups. Darby’s gym was famously cramped; the ceiling was so low you had to shoot line drives. One of the metal-encased lights was permanently burned out, so there was a dark patch between the three-point line and half-court that was known as the Darby Triangle. If you crossed through that area, legend had it, you would vanish.

  Darby also used their gym as their cafeteria, so the floor was super sticky in some spots, where soda had spilled, and ice-rink slippery in all others. I kept palming the dust from the bottoms of my sneakers. That might actually be what I remember most about middle school basketball—constantly palming dust from the bottom of my sneakers so I didn’t slide all over the place. Oh, and the old scratchy jerseys with the numbers peeling off. I remember those, too.

  “Now, listen up,” Gulch said in the pregame huddle. “Listen up. This isn’t personal, okay? Despite what you may have heard, I have not been holding a personal grudge against the Coward Pat Brothers since he broke my nose on March 2, 1979. This is about you guys, okay? Not me. So go out there and have fun. That’s the important thing, right? Have fun. So let’s have fun. So much fun. And what else? What did we talk about? Execute. Execution. Let’s execute, right? Also, last thing, remember: the gods forbid us from looking back. They say, if you look back at that game on February 4, 1980, when the Coward Pat Brothers nearly yanked your arm out of its socket when you went up for a rebound, you will be turned into a pillar of salt. So let’s not get turned into pillars of salt out there, okay, guys?”

  We all looked around at one another until Toby—god bless him—said: “Great plan, Coach.”

  Guys,” I said. “I’m still feeling it. Just get me the ball and this’ll be fun.”

  “Right,” Gulch said. “Like I said, just pass the ball to Lizzy and get the heck out of the way!”

  Now, there was a game plan.

  The horn sounded.

  “All right!” Gulch yelled. “Here we go! Everyone, hands in!”

  We piled up our hands (Toby called it the Ouija Board Moment). “One . . . two . . . three . . . DE-FENSE!”

  Darby didn’t have any star players like Reggie Burton. But they were all tough—kids from Darby were always tough. They all had the same military-style haircut and wispy black mustaches. The ref came forward and tossed the ball up—I can still see it spinning—and, blink, somehow the ball was in my hands. I took a few left-hand dribbles, head up, surveying the other players as they settled into the far end of the court. I pulled up for a deep three-pointer. It was a line drive, skimming just below the metal light casings. The ball rocketed through the rim with so much momentum it ricocheted off the back wall and hit one of the Darby players in the neck. He went down.

  3–0.

  I stole the inbounds pass, dribbled out to the far corner, and hit another line drive.

  6–0.

  On the next possession, I rebounded a Darby miss, pushed the ball, found a pocket in the retreating defense (imagine nine paper boats floating lazily down a river, and one weaving aggressively between them), and pure-swished another three. 9–0.

  Before I could inflict any more damage, Darby’s coach, Pat Brothers, walked out on the court, holding his hands over his head in the shape of a sideways T. Time-out.

  He stared at me, bewildered, like, Who the heck is this girl?

  By the end of the first quarter, it was 36–7. I’d scored all thirty-six points. I was twelve of twelve from deep. The gym was abuzz, somewhere between Stage Four (Elation) and Stage Five (Delirium). (The Five Stages apply to fans, too.) Students were running out into the hallway during time-outs, grabbing teachers, janitors, anyone they saw, “You have to see this! It’s amazing! She’s the best player I’ve ever seen!”

  Midway through the second quarter, I was up to forty-five points. Darby had already burned all their time-outs trying to devise a way to stop me, but I kept carving through them like I’d weaved through those little orange cones at the park. My mind was hyperalert. I was one step ahead. I anticipated where the open space would be, like Sidney Rayne.

  The crowd mock-booed when I passed to Tank for a wide-open layup, the first time anyone on our team but me had shot the ball. “Boooooo!”

  Jogging back on defense, laughing, I thought of Coach Paul Westphal’s famous quote: “Basketball’s simple. Three rules. One: if you’re open, shoot it. Two: if someone else is more open, pass him the ball and let him shoot it. And three: have fun.”

  Normally, I agreed with that, but not this game. This was my game. I decided right then I wasn’t gonna pass anymore, no matter what. On the playground, we called those types of players ball hogs, and everyone knew the basketball gods frowned on ball hogs. But this was different. I’d been given this gift by the gods, right? They obviously wanted me to use it.

  With eight seconds left in the first half, I had sixty-three points, already the league record. Coach Gulch put his finger up and yelled, “One shot! Last shot!”
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br />   Guess who was gonna take it?

  I took the inbounds pass, knifed between two Darby defenders, squeezed between the sideline and a third, spun back past a fourth, shimmied my shoulders and blew past the fifth (the crowd loved that one), and released the ball as time expired.

  For the first time all day, there was a sound other than pure outer-space silence as the ball passed through the rim. As I came down, my right foot landed on a defender’s foot. My ankle turned over.

  Crack!

  The gym went silent. Hands over mouths. I writhed on the ground, holding my right ankle. I rolled over and punched the court. No. No. No. This can’t be happening.

  Toby rushed off the bench. His eyes were huge. “Lizzy, Lizzy, you okay?”

  Dad bolted down from the stands, leaping three levels at a time. He squeezed through the halo of players around me. Only it wasn’t Dad—it was the Wizard.

  He didn’t wait for a doctor or an ambulance. He swept me up and carried me right out to the icy parking lot. The sweat immediately froze to my body. “So this one time,” he said, gliding like we were on one of those moving ramps at the airport, “this one time when you were about five, you had this assignment at school where you had to draw a picture of what you wanted to be when you grew up. You remember that?”

  Pain bolted up my leg.

  “The other kids all thought about it, the teacher told me, tapping their crayons on their lips, you know, like stupid kids. But not you. Not Lizzy. You just picked up the crayon, face all scrunched up, same way you do your homework now. A minute later, you raised your hand and said, ‘Done!’ You remember what you drew?”

  “A basketball player?”

  He laughed. “Nope. A zookeeper. You drew a zoo, all the animals in their cages. You said you wanted to be a zookeeper.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. And then you said, ‘But I’m gonna let them all go. Zoos are animal jail!’ ”

  For the few seconds he was telling that story, casting his spell, I forgot he was carrying me through an icy parking lot. But then pain shot up my leg again.

  “It’s not . . . that . . . bad,” I said, wincing. “It’s just a little . . . sprain. I can play.”

  “I know,” Dad said. “I know. We’ll just have the doctor take a quick look.”

  For about two seconds, after he’d lowered me into the passenger side of his Chevy, but before he’d gotten in the driver’s side, I was alone in the car. A half sob escaped, but I swallowed it. I wiped my tears with the back of my hand and bit down on the inside of my cheek. Blood pooled under my tongue.

  We sat in the emergency room for two hours, waiting while more urgent cases jumped us in line. Heart attacks. Strokes. Sawed-off fingers. Who knew the world was so dangerous? My entire basketball career is hanging in the balance, I thought. What could be more urgent? And yet we waited. And waited. And waited.

  As if things couldn’t get any worse, it got so late that Dad had to call out of work. I hated making him call out of work. Hated, hated, hated it. The debt collectors had been calling even more lately, and I was seriously starting to worry. Could we lose our house? Where would we go? How does it work? Do they just dump all your stuff on the sidewalk, change the locks, and say “Good luck”? Would we have to go to a homeless shelter? Would we have to share a bed?

  It seemed unfair that all Dad wanted to do was work, and all I wanted to do was play basketball, and yet . . . that was too extravagant? That was living beyond our means? In the richest country in the history of the world? We couldn’t afford to live in our little row house in Ardwyn, where we wore gloves in the winter instead of turning on the heat? I answered the call once and said to the debt collector, “You know he’s trying, right? He’s trying his best? Can you just lay off? Give him a little time to get back on his feet?” And you know what she said? She said in this tired, small voice, “I’m sorry, honey, I’m just doing my job.”

  Honey.

  That pissed me off.

  But it was true, I guess.

  She was just doing her job.

  Another hour passed. Dad brought me water in a white paper cone. “You know what I wanted to be when I grew up?”

  “Um, a basketball player?”

  “No. God, no.”

  “Astronaut? Fireman?” I cycled through all the things little boys were supposed to want to be. “Policeman? President?”

  “I actually wanted to be a sheep shearer. We went on a field trip to this sheep farm in first grade. They took us all the way out there, like an hour away.”

  “And?”

  “It was pretty lame. It was just a bunch of sheep.”

  I laughed. “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know. But then they brought us into this barn and there was this older guy in there, this bald guy, shearing the sheep. He went right down the line, with these big electric clippers, giving them all buzz cuts. The sheep didn’t mind at all. They looked like they were kind of enjoying it. The wool fell right off. They almost seemed relieved. And I thought, Wow, that’s this guy’s job. He just wakes up and shears sheep all day. That’s so cool. No one bothers him. I wish I could do that.”

  “Wow, Dad. Dream big.”

  “Says the zookeeper with no animals.”

  I sipped my water. It tasted like the paper cup.

  Another hour passed. My foot started to throb. And finally, I was taken back to wait for X-rays. The young doctor came in pouring a king-size bag of Skittles into his mouth. “Oh, hey,” he mumbled, thrusting the candy behind his back. “How we feeling?”

  “Been better,” I said.

  “Let’s just take a quick look.”

  “Do they teach you to say that in doctor school?”

  “They do, actually.”

  He pressed on my foot. “That hurt?”

  Yes. God. Yes. “No.”

  “We had a construction worker in with the same thing yesterday,” he said. “Guy was crying like a baby.”

  He took X-rays. We waited another half hour. Then he came back. “See these two specks?” he said, aiming a Snickers bar up at the X-rays. “Those are little bits of bone that you tore off with the ligaments.” He was going on about how cool it looked—“It’s hard to do that, actually!”—when I cut him off.

  My foot looked like a loaf of bread with purple toes. “How long am I out? Our next game is Friday . . . .”

  “Oh no, no, you won’t be back for that. You ripped the ligaments right off the bone. The good news is there’s no fracture. You’ll be in a cast for a few weeks, then a few more weeks of PT and you’ll be good as new.”

  Great, I thought, physical therapy. How much does that cost?

  Back home, frozen peas piled atop my ankle like sandbags, delirious with pain and exhaustion—as if things couldn’t get any worse—my Sidney Rayne poster began trash-talking me.

  “Hey, man, don’t you guys ever turn the heat on? I’m freezing up here.”

  “Yeah, well, sorry. I don’t pay the bills.”

  “Who does?”

  “No one. Stop bitching. Put on your warm-ups if you’re cold.”

  “I’m kinda stuck in midair here . . . .”

  The floorboards creaked in the hallway. Dad was hovering outside my door. I could see his shadow. I imagined him reaching his hand up to knock, but then lowering it. Limping away.

  My breath fogged when I sighed.

  Sidney was right.

  It was freezing.

  “Keep your head up, rook. This is just a little setback. Keep your eye on the prize. I’ll be waitin’ for ya.”

  “It’s just not fair, you know? I was just getting started.”

  “It doesn’t matter how you start, rook. It matters how you finish.”

  “Did you really just say that?”

  “What do you want from me? I’m a poster.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Sidney flew closer. Or seemed to. “Hey, rook. Can I ask you somethin’?”

  “Shoot.”
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  “It’s something I’ve always wondered. But I’m kinda afraid to ask.”

  Sidney Rayne? Afraid? “Go ahead, man. It’s just the two of us.”

  “Do I . . . make it?”

  “Like, are you successful? Do you reach your goals? Do you become as good as you can be, reach your full potential? Is that what you mean?”

  “No. I mean, like . . . do I make this dunk? I feel like I’m not gonna make it. The basket’s still, like, super far away. And I just keep thinkin’: This is gonna be really embarrassing if I don’t make it.”

  I smiled. “You really feel that way?”

  “Sometimes,” he admitted.

  “Just believe in yourself, man. If you don’t, who will, right?”

  “Now who sounds like the poster?”

  The rest of December inched by like a slow-moving freight train. I was on one side of the tracks, behind a flashing red stop sign. The rest of my life—my destiny—was on the other side. I caught little glimpses of it, little flashes of light, between the train cars. But mostly I just waited. Christmas passed. New Year’s.

  The middle school team was still decent without me—they still had Tank—but the other teams quickly figured out how to stop him. They hacked him any time he caught the ball, knowing he was a 30 percent free-throw shooter. Coach Gulch kicked chairs and tore out what was left of his hair, but there was nothing he could do. Tank couldn’t shoot free throws, and he didn’t have the patience or persistence to learn. The team finished 12–7 and lost to Darby in the second round of the playoffs.

  Season over.

  At the same time, the closest pro team, the Philadelphia Bells, was having one of the worst seasons in franchise history. By early March, they were already mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.

  I won’t lie: It was a dark time for me. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t concentrate at school. I could still shoot at the playground, but I never missed, so that got old. One day, I stood at the side of the court and heaved the ball as far as I could toward the abandoned factory. It soared into the distance but then boomeranged back and went in.