After the Shot Drops

by Randy Ribay

  Next time down, Fairview’s shooting guard bricks a three. Eric bricks it at our end, but I get the put-back to tie it up. Fairview’s point throws it out of bounds. I shake Yurevich and bank it off the glass to add two more to give us the lead for the first time tonight, 57–55. I know I can’t let it stay like that, but I wanted to feel good for a moment.

  So next time down, I give Yurevich some space and let him hit a deep three from the baseline, making it 57–58. I inbound to Eric and then glance at the clock. Eleven seconds.

  Eric gets caught in a trap immediately, and gives it back to me. I take it up court, stutter step right, fake left, and then cross over back to the right. Yurevich slips, and I breeze into the lane. Every green jersey on the floor gets in my way, so I kick it behind me to Drew.

  I spin around just in time to see him lay up an uncontested two.

  The buzzer wails before Fairview even brings it across half-court.

  And that’s it—​59–58. We’re state champs.

  My teammates crash into me. The crowd swarms the court. Cameras flash. I smile so wide, feeling like my heart is about to burst.

  We won!

  Oh, shit.

  We won.

  52

  Nasir

  Bunny’s family, Keyona, Anna, and all the others in our section are going wild. They’re hugging and high-fiving and hugging again. They’re clapping and dancing and snapping pics and taking videos with their phones.

  But I’m standing there stunned, a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  What did you just do to Wallace, Bunny?

  53

  Bunny

  On the bus ride home, as everyone else is talking excitedly about the game and passing the trophy around, I’m sending Nasir text after text. All variations on the same theme: I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to win. I fucked up. I’m sorry. Have you heard from Wallace?

  But he doesn’t answer a single one of them.

  He was with my family and Keyona when I met up with them. Told me, “Great game,” like everyone else, but I could tell he was just keeping up appearances. We both knew what that win meant, what it might cost.

  It’s a strange thing to feel so upset about something that was supposed to give me so much joy, something I’ve worked so hard for.

  Someone palms the top of my head and shakes it around. It’s Eric.

  “Buuunnnnnyyyy!” he shouts, and the entire bus starts shouting my name in the same way. The trophy gets shoved into my hands, people press their faces next to mine, and someone takes a picture. I try to smile.

  It hurts, and not because of my busted nose.

  54

  Nasir

  Bunny won’t stop messaging me with his apologies and excuses, but Wallace hasn’t responded to any of my texts or answered any of my calls. Soon as I get home, I ask my parents to drive me over to his place, but neither of them will do it, since it’s snowing pretty hard now and it’s already late.

  So there’s nothing for me to do but wait.

  I can’t sleep, so I try playing some video games, wasting time online, watching some TV—​but none of it distracts me enough. I’m checking my phone every second for a message from Wallace and standing up all the time for no reason. I’m not feeling an ounce of tired.

  Just after one in the morning, I hear a couple of soft knocks at the front door.

  I bolt down the steps as quietly as I can and open it up to find not Wallace, but Bunny. He’s got his winter hat on and hood pulled up, the bridge of his nose all swollen. The snow’s coming down real hard in the darkness behind him.

  “Can we talk?” he says.

  I start to shut the door, but he plants his boot in front of it.

  “Please.”

  “It’s late, Bunny. My parents are asleep,” I say. “And I’m guessing your family is, too.”

  “Let’s go somewhere, then,” he says. “The courts?”

  Bunny’s the last person I want to see right now, but getting out of the house seems like a good idea. I’m starting to go crazy.

  “Fine,” I say.

  I slip on my winter gear and join him outside a few minutes later, making sure I’ve got my phone in my pocket. It’s wild out here. A couple feet of snow blankets everything on our block, and more is falling. It’s beautiful. Almost bright, in a way. Plow hasn’t come through yet, so it’s all perfect and untouched. Not a single tire track or footprint. The sidewalk, the stoops, the cars, the streets—​covered until they’ve become simply suggestions. It makes the world feel clean and fresh, hiding the trash and broken bottles. I try not to think about how the snow will eventually melt and mix with the dirt to create a muddy mush that will make things even worse than they were before.

  The best part of it all is the perfect silence, like someone hit Mute.

  I dig my hands into my pockets, taking it all in and ignoring the hell out of Bunny standing next to me. It’s cold, but not freezing. My breath puffs up in little white clouds in front of my face. I look up, wanting to see stars. But of course, there aren’t any. Just an uninterrupted sheet of gunmetal clouds dumping all these fat flakes down to earth.

  We start walking, taking huge steps to plow through the snow. I feel kind of bad ruining the perfect sheet of white, but there’s also something satisfying about making the first tracks. Then again, fresh snow will probably have covered it all up by the time we return.

  Neither of us speaks. We walk. The only sounds in the night are our breathing and the soft shuffle of our feet plodding through the powder.

  To break the monotony, after some time I ask, “Is your nose broken? That was a lot of blood.”

  “Probably. I’m going to get it checked out in the morning.”

  I nod, thinking about how it serves him right for messing up that game.

  “Any word from Wallace yet?”

  I don’t answer.

  Eventually, we reach the courts. The street lamps are off, but the world is glowing. The hoops stick up from the smooth plane of white, looking youth-size with how high the snow is.

  Bunny follows as I walk across, taking slow, long strides. I make my way to a raised mound marking one of the picnic tables, the same one I was sitting on with Wallace when he found that kitten. I start pushing snow off the bench and the table so I have a place to sit, Bunny doing the same next to me. Some snow gets in between the bottom of my gloves and the cuff of my coat sleeve, but the bright points of wet cold actually feel kind of nice.

  Once we’ve cleared enough off, we sit down, our butts on the table part and our feet on the bench. We both wince.

  “That’s cold,” he says.

  I don’t say anything as I shift to try to find a position that’s not going to end up with me having a frostbitten ass. I give up after a few moments and deal with it. Gaze at the evening. It’s as quiet and perfect as when I was standing on my stoop.

  But I’m not cold. My anger at Bunny’s keeping me plenty warm. And the more I think about it, the angrier I get. Only thing keeping me in check is worrying about Wallace.

  “I’m sorry, Nasir,” he says.

  I keep my mouth shut.

  “I meant to lose for you. I really did. But I thought if I had to, I’d at least keep it close, you know. Go down swinging.” He sighs, examines the palms of his hands. “But in those final seconds, I guess instinct took over. Drew did the rest.”

  I stay quiet.

  “I know you’re mad at me for messing that up, but it’s not like it was fair of you to ask me to throw the game. I tried, but at the end of the day, I’m not responsible for Wallace.”

  “Then who is?” I ask.

  “Wallace.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  He shakes his head.

  A plow rumbles and scrapes down a side street somewhere close by, and then the world’s quiet again. I consider hopping down and making my way back home, but for some reason, I don’t.

  “Please, Nasir,” Bunny says after a few moments, “you have t
o believe me. I meant to lose tonight. Not for Wallace, for you. I want us to be cool again.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have been trying to keep it that close,” I say.

  He sighs again. “Yeah, I know that now.”

  There’s so much regret in his voice when he says that, I feel my fists unclench. “It was stupid. Real stupid.”

  “I know,” he says.

  I look down. Scrape the soles of my boots across the bench to clear it off again. “So how was that team dinner?”

  Bunny smiles. “Dr. Dietrich hooked it up, man. Steak for the entire team. Can you believe anyone has that much bread? If I was that rich, I wouldn’t be using it to buy a bunch of teenagers steak.”

  “You’ll be richer than that in a few years,” I say.

  Bunny doesn’t deny it.

  “So what will you spend it on?” I ask.

  “Easy,” he says. “First, I’ll buy back Word Up.”

  “Obviously. What else?”

  He answers right away, like he’s already thought this all out. “College funds for everyone. Even my mom. She always talks about going back to school after all of us move out.”

  “Third?” I ask, helping Bunny spend imaginary money even if I know it’s kind of dumb.

  Again, he doesn’t hesitate. “Maybe donate a whole bunch of it.”

  “Cool. Fourth?”

  “Fourth?” He laughs. “This is getting out of hand, man. I don’t know. Maybe a nice car to take out Keyona in.”

  I nod. “So everything’s good with her? She was at the game.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Did she say we were cool?”

  “Nah. She ignored the hell out of me the entire night.”

  “Damn,” he says. “At least she came.”

  “Well, I hope it works out,” I say, finding that I mean it.

  He shrugs. “Me too.”

  “But you realize that after tonight you could probably have any girl you want,” I say, because it’s true. Most girls have always looked at Bunny like they’d be all over him if he said the word. And now he’s a state champion. “To be honest, it’s always made me kind of jealous.”

  “Nah,” Bunny says, looking down. “You know me, Nas. I’m not like that. Neither are you.”

  I nod. “True. But I got to admit part of me wishes I was.”

  Bunny laughs. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  We watch the snow fall until it covers up what we just said. I stick out my tongue and catch some flakes.

  “I’m sorry about tonight,” he says again.

  But there’s not much of my anger left. “Don’t be. I shouldn’t have asked you to throw the game,” I say. “It wasn’t right.”

  “You were trying to help Wallace.”

  “You deserved to win, Bunny,” I say, and I know it sounds corny. But I don’t care. Sometimes the corniest things are the things we need to say the most, the things people need to hear the most.

  Bunny drapes one of his long arms around my shoulder and pulls me closer until our heads bump together.

  Even though someone watching might get the wrong idea if they saw two dudes hugging like this for as long as we do in the playground in the middle of the night, I don’t care. We stay like that, the snow falling on us, and it feels good. Peaceful. It makes me feel better, like I matter to someone. Like I have a brother. Whoever decided that guys can’t hug too much must have been a real bitter, lonely-ass person.

  Eventually, we pull apart. Then we sit and watch the world again, even though everything is so still and quiet there’s not much to watch. I drop my gaze and stare at the snow on the ground in front of us.

  Beneath the bench, I notice a basketball. I hop down, reach underneath, and pull it out. It’s that cheap orange rubber kind, half deflated.

  “Bet you can’t make it from here,” Bunny says.

  I look at the court. The nearest rim’s probably a good thirty or forty feet away. I draw back my arm and launch the deflated basketball overhanded like a baseball. It wobbles through the air before dropping into the snow with a small poof about ten feet short of the hoop.

  We laugh.

  Bunny pushes off the bench and trudges to the spot where the ball disappeared. He digs it out, squares up, and sinks the bucket without even grazing the rim. Only, the net’s frozen, so the ball gets stuck inside it. We both laugh again.

  “So you told me how you’ll spend all that money,” I say, “but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First you got to go to college. And every team in the country will be knocking on your door come June fifteenth.”

  He digs his hands into his pockets and shrugs. “I don’t know. That still seems like forever away.”

  “Just three more months, man. If you had to decide today, where would you go?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I could be that far away from my family, so I think I’ll probably end up somewhere close by.”

  Then he scoops up a handful of snow and throws it at me. I duck, but it doesn’t matter. The powder scatters soon as it leaves his hand, and it all blows right back in his face. I laugh as he brushes it off.

  “Stick to balling, man,” I say.

  “Whatever. So what about you: Princeton? Yale? Harvard?”

  I laugh. “Yeah, right. My grades are good, but not that good. I’ll probably end up at Rutgers or Temple. Maybe Penn State.”

  “We always talked about going to the same college. You still down with that?”

  The fact that he still thinks about that makes my heart feel full, like it’s about to lift me into the sky. “It’d be nice, but I don’t want to hold you back, man.”

  “Nah, it wouldn’t be like that,” Bunny says, and then checks me with his shoulder.

  “Look who we’ve got here,” a voice calls from the other side of the court, breaking the evening’s peace. I know who it is straightaway, and I’m filled with relief as I turn around.

  “Wallace!” I say.

  But as soon as I see his tall figure making its way toward us, kicking up the snow like a playground bully kicking over some kid’s block city, I know something’s not right. He’s swaying, clutching a bottle in a paper bag in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other.

  “You okay?” I ask. “What happened with those guys? Everything cool?”

  Bunny draws a bit closer to me like he’s closing ranks.

  Wallace stops short a few feet away from us. Glaring and grinning, he takes a drag on his cigarette and a pull from whatever’s in the bag.

  “The real question is,” he says, slurring, “what the fuck happened with this guy?” He points at Bunny.

  55

  Bunny

  Even though I’m glad to see Wallace is okay, I’ve got a bad feeling about the way he’s acting. But I try to play it cool. “What’s good, Wallace?” I say, closing the distance between us and holding out my fist for a pound.

  But he just laughs and stares at my hand hanging in the air. I shove it back into my pocket.

  Wallace continues glaring at us and takes another swig. It’s so quiet I can hear him gulping it down. After several seconds, he lowers the bottle, sighs with satisfaction, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Where you been, man?” Nasir says. “You didn’t answer any of my texts.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  I look at Nasir, who looks at me and then back at Wallace. “You all right? Need a place to sleep tonight?”

  “Hell of a game, Bunny Boy,” Wallace says, ignoring Nasir and glaring at me.

  “Thanks,” I say, even though I know he doesn’t mean it.

  He doesn’t take his eyes off me. “You fucked me over, though. You know that?”

  Nasir steps between us. “Chill, Wallace.”

  “Ha.”

  “I know you’re upset,” Nasir says, “but Bunny didn’t place those bets to put you in the hole. And he didn’t sell that tip to try to dig you out. You did.”

  Wallace loo
ks from me to Nasir, back to me, and then lets his eyes settle on Nasir. He takes an unsteady step toward him. “Why are you taking his side? He doesn’t care about you.” Wallace pauses, then says, “He knows, doesn’t he? You told him.”

  Nasir doesn’t say anything.

  “He did,” I say. “And I meant to lose—​for real . . . It’s just . . . I’m sorry, man.”

  Wallace laughs as he stumbles toward me. “Oh, you’re sorry? In that case, everything’s cool! I’ll tell the dudes looking for me right fucking now that I’m sorry, and then everything will be cool with them! I should have thought of that earlier. Gee, thanks, Bunny Thompson!”

  “They’re looking for you?” Nasir asks.

  Wallace spits, staggers through the snow toward us a couple more steps.

  “Come home with us, Wallace,” Nasir says. “We’ll figure something out in the morning. I promise, man.”

  “What was your line?” Wallace asks me.

  I don’t answer.

  “Come on,” Nasir tells him, his voice quiet. “It’ll be okay. Let’s get you somewhere safe.”

  Wallace laughs again, shaking his head. Takes another drink. “Fuck you, Nasir.”

  I step forward. “It’s my fault, Wallace. I’m sorry that—”

  “Stop apologizing,” Nasir interrupts, the compassion gone from his voice. “He brought this on himself. He was dumb all on his own.”

  I wait for Wallace to react, but he stands there, grinning.

  “Yeah,” he finally says. He takes one last drag and flicks his cigarette away. “By the way, your buddy Nas tell you how I got your phone?”

  “Yeah, he told me.” I keep my eyes on Wallace. “It’s cool.”

  “Is it, though?” He spits.

  “Wallace,” I say, “we’re going back right now. Come with us and stay with Nasir like he said.”