On Guard

by Patrick Jones

  When would Callie wake up? When would Callie live again? When would Callie die?

  The only people with more questions than her family, it seemed, were the police. Maybe they sensed Robert or one of his crew had pulled the trigger. Callie was insignificant to them, but Robert was big game whose head the cops would love to nail on their wall. They swarmed like bees, buzzing her and her parents’ phones until they all blocked the number.

  “Mercedes, heads up!” Cheryl yelled and passed the ball back to her. There was nothing but silence, as if the gym were a sound vacuum. Just ball against floor. Three times.

  Mercedes launched the shot. Her feet off the floor and the ball in the air, Mercedes waited for the space to fill with hope and possibility, but there were only question marks.

  Who? Why? When? When would Callie wake up? Questions clouded her court vision.

  It took the loud sound of her missed three banging hard against the backboard to clear her vision. Instead of playing her position, Mercedes raced toward the net. Cheryl inhaled the rebound and passed to Halle. Halle shot a brick from the baseline. Under the basket, Mercedes leapt into the fray, elbows flying, intent on violence. The ref’s whistles sounded like sirens.

  14

  “Play smart!” Coach shouted at Mercedes to start the second half. Mercedes wondered why Coach didn’t leave her on the bench where she belonged. She’d had four shots, four misses, two turnovers, one foul, and zero confidence. She couldn’t block out the noise of the crowd or the noise in her head.

  Halle grabbed the ball from the jump and passed to Cheryl, who dribbled down the court and called the play. Mercedes stared at the court, not her teammates. An unfamiliar voice inside herself was growing louder: Please don’t throw it to me!

  Cheryl passed to Halle, then set a pick. Mercedes trudged into position. The Lamar guard raced toward her, but it was too late. Mercedes held as the clock ticked down. She looked to pass, but no one was open. Dribble. Stop. Look. Pray. Shoot. Miss. Not just the net, but also the rim: an air ball filled with iron.

  “No worries,” Cheryl yelled. Mercedes stared at the scoreboard. Down ten points, but the answer to her team winning was to be down one person. Her. Mercedes hustled into position. She set herself. The hometown favorite Lamar High guard faked left, moved right. Mercedes stared at the empty real estate in front of her and listened as the ball tapped off the backboard for an easy two.

  The buzzer sounded as subs jogged onto the court. Mercedes saw no one coming to replace her. She tried to get Coach’s attention but failed. Up in the stands were scouts, but that was about the future. Mercedes lived suspended in the present with Callie.

  With Mercedes not a threat, Lamar double-teamed Cheryl, forcing a turnover. Two more points. Ball back up the court. The guard backed off, daring Mercedes to shoot and miss.

  Jump. Shoot. Miss. Cheers. No buzzer, but no matter. Mercedes sprinted for the bench.

  15

  “You okay?” It was Cheryl. While North had won the game despite Mercedes, the bus ride back had been silent. Mercedes was surprised by Cheryl’s call the next morning. “Mercedes, talk to me.” Mercedes said nothing until Cheryl pressed hard, just like she did on defense.

  “No, I’m not all right.” The contents of Mercedes’s broken heart, nervous mind, and wounded spirit spilled out.

  Cheryl kept quiet until Mercedes heard words she’d never heard from a teammate. Words she’d said to others, yet that no one but Jade had said to her before. “Mercedes, it’s okay. Don’t cry.”

  Mercedes took a deep breath like she was trying to pull the tears back into her eyes. “It’s too much,” Mercedes said.

  “If there’s anything we can do,” Cheryl offered. Mercedes mumbled and hung up the phone just as she heard the back door open. There stood her parents, sweating even in December.

  “What are you doing?” They should have been at the hospital.

  Her parents looked at each other, but not at Mercedes. Her mom held a bucket in one hand and a brush in the other; her dad held two brushes. Her mom emptied the bucket into the sink, then filled it with water. Her dad washed his hands under steaming water and bubbling soap. Mercedes walked toward the sink and saw the white surface turn scarlet as her father cleaned off his hands.

  Mercedes followed them back outside. Her dad slammed the door. It was good that Lincoln was at Grandma Bee’s house, she thought, so he could avoid all the anger. Her parents walked with slumped shoulders toward the garage where the word “SNITCH” had been spray-painted in red letters two feet high on the garage door. A word stronger than muscle, soap, and water.

  Mercedes had her why. Callie’s shooting wasn’t random; it was revenge.

  16

  “Mercedes, what is your problem?” Coach said, drawing stares from the rest of Mercedes’s teammates. Coach never called out a player during halftime. But North was eight points behind a smaller, less skilled Carver High team at the half. It was just one game, but in a single-elimination tourney, one loss was all it took to go home. A place Mercedes didn’t want to be. Part of her wanted to be on the court, but Coach had Mercedes parked on the bench.

  “I didn’t tell you to sit down,” Coach said. Mercedes stood like a cadet at basic training waiting to be screamed at, humiliated. All deserved.

  “You want to play in the second half?” Coach asked in a challenging but not angry tone.

  “I don’t know.” Mercedes had never answered anything but “yes” to that question.

  “Kat, give me the ball bag!” Coach shouted. Kat tossed the white mesh bag at Coach.

  Coach tossed the ball bag toward Mercedes, who let it fall at her feet. “Pick it up!”

  Mercedes complied as Coach grasped her end of the bag. “You want to play?” Coach pulled her end of the bag hard. The tough fibers dug into Mercedes’s hands but she hung on. “So your sister got shot. So you don’t think you can play. So everything is a struggle!” The louder Coach yelled, the harder she pulled. The harder she pulled, Mercedes yanked back even harder. The friction of the bag against her skin caused a burning sensation. Her hand was on fire, yet she would not, could not, let go.

  “Maybe you’re a loser like your sister! Maybe you belong on that corner!” Coach yelled.

  Mercedes gritted her teeth; she felt her muscles tighten like steel cable as she pulled. “You can’t play because you’re struggling. The struggle weighs you down. Let it be, Mercedes.”

  Coach tugged hard on the bag; Mercedes yanked back harder. “Let it be, Mercedes!”

  Mercedes yelped, released the bag, and crumpled to her knees.

  “What do you want, Mercedes?”

  “Coach.” Mercedes rose from her knees and stood tall, her torn-up palms open for all to see. “I want the ball.”

  17

  “That was one of the most impressive second halves I’ve seen in all my years,” a tall woman with short, graying hair told Mercedes as she stood by the team bus.

  “What?” Mercedes shouted, startled by the stranger. She leaned against the bus for safety.

  “Do you have a minute?” the woman asked. Who was she? A scout? A cop? Those jobs have a lot in common, Mercedes thought. Old people with power judging young kids, deciding if they are “good” or “bad,” with the answer determining their future. Mercedes wondered if a gray area existed anywhere in the world.

  “I’m Tina Franklin, Auburn.” Mercedes swallowed her smile. Auburn was only one hundred miles away, but the orange and blue Tigers seemed light-years away from her life in Birmingham.

  “Have you talked to Coach?”

  The woman smiled but didn’t answer her question. “I saw what kind of athlete you are, so tell me, what kind of student are you?”

  Mercedes’s report card was a hive of Bs, except in math, where an A stood tall. Mercedes rattled off her good grades, but the Auburn envoy cut her off with a smile.

  “I didn’t ask about your grades,” she said. “I asked, what kind of student are you?” One that
doesn’t like quizzes or trick questions, Mercedes thought. Behind her, she heard teammates on the bus celebrating the win thanks to Mercedes’s twenty points in the second half.

  “At Auburn, student athletes are students first and athletes second.” The woman reached out her hand. “If you can graduate college, you can play. That’s how it works at Auburn.”

  Mercedes took the card and buried it in the pocket of her Dream hoodie, which seemed right. “Thanks.”

  “You played like two different people out there,” the Auburn recruiter observed.

  Mercedes agreed but didn’t tell her why. She’d just begun to understand it herself. If Callie was a broken stoplight, then Mercedes was stuck at a crossroads, not knowing what to do.

  18

  “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference,” Mercedes said under her breath. The whizzing of machines and blaring of alarms throughout the hospital covered up the noise of her prayers. Mercedes stared at her sleeping sister.

  “I cannot change this.” Mercedes held her sister’s limp hand. “I must accept it.”

  Mercedes looked at her own left palm where she could still see the marks left by the rough mesh bag. “I must accept this,” she repeated in time with the breathing machine.

  Mercedes released her sister’s hand and knelt down by the bed. She said the serenity prayer over and over, each time louder until her voice reached that of Coach calling a play or Pastor Curtis trumpeting out a prayer. She knew from the doctors that no prayers would be answered: Callie wouldn’t wake up. But as she thought about her sister’s life the past few years, Mercedes knew that the Callie she loved had died years earlier.

  Mercedes stood, took a deep breath, and pulled down the sheet covering her sister’s motionless body. Staring at the “Loyalty” tattoo and other gang tats, Mercedes knew she needed the courage to change Lincoln, or help him change, if he was traveling down the dark path that she suspected. Mercedes would need to do more than talk. She would need to act, to be a leader.

  Mercedes ran her left hand along the length of her own unmarked right arm. She didn’t totally blame her sister for wanting to belong to something bigger than herself, something that gave her life meaning. Her team did that; Jade did that.

  “I cannot change this,” Mercedes whispered. “I must accept it.”

  Taking one last deep breath, Mercedes lifted Callie’s hands so they rested against Mercedes’s chest and she imagined their hearts beating in time together. “I must let it be.”

  19

  “Play your game!” Coach shouted at Mercedes as the fourth quarter ticked down. Game she had—twenty points: five threes, two layups, and one foul shot. She loved playing on the road; it was something about making the opposing crowd hate you and then breaking them. Pleasant Grove, the host of the tournament, had, as always, found themselves in the final game against North.

  “You got this?” Cheryl asked. Mercedes smiled in reply. She looked into the crowded stands to see her family, which included Jade. They’d left the hospital to see Mercedes in action. Mercedes knew she couldn’t let them down. If she was really going to “let it be,” she’d need to focus on the present, not the past. She didn’t see the Auburn scout in the stands, but she forced the future and past out of her mind.

  “Play your game!” Coach yelled to the team. Mercedes felt the words in her bones.

  Game. Total game. That’s what Coach had taught her. She could always pass, shoot, and run faster than anyone. That’s all that mattered on the playgrounds. But in college, Mercedes knew a player couldn’t be one-dimensional. Sure, you could come off the bench, make some threes, but that meant you were a specialist. Not a real player, an athlete, a leader.

  “Yes!” Coach shouted as Mercedes reached out, tipped the pass, stole the ball, and dribbled like a demon as they’d practiced a hundred times. This wasn’t playing; it was Mercedes’s muscles and mind remembering what to do when. Perfect pass. Assist. Two more North points.

  Despite Mercedes playing tight D and scoring when she got a clear shot, Pleasant Grove kept the game close. In the lead by one with five seconds left, Coach called a safe play. A.J. inbounded but Cheryl couldn’t pass. About to be fouled, Cheryl passed to Mercedes. With no pass, Mercedes ducked the swarming D and hurled the ball toward the net like an orange comet. As she shot, Mercedes tumbled to the floor and was deafened by boos from the hometown crowd and cheers from her team, who grabbed their phones to catch a falling star in motion.

  20

  Mercedes and Jade sat holding hands on a big green sofa in the corner of Halle’s basement. Music boomed around them, punctuated with laugher. The sounds of victory.

  On the table in the middle of the crowded room sat the Pleasant Grove Girls High School Tournament trophy. One by one, Kat snapped photos of each player hugging and kissing the trophy.

  “I want you up there with me,” Mercedes whispered into Jade’s ear.

  “I didn’t do anything.” Jade pulled Mercedes closer. “Seriously?”

  “I thought I’d lost everything, but you helped me find my way,” Mercedes said. She knew before the end of the season she needed to share the same words with Coach.

  “You always had it.” Jade squeezed Mercedes’s hand. “Sometimes life gets blurry. That’s how I was before I met you, Mercy. Everything was blurry, like looking through a haze of smoke.”

  Mercedes glanced at her phone, wondering if she wanted it to ring. Would it clear the haze from her life, not just for thirty-two minutes on the court, but for the rest of her days? “Mercedes, get to the hospital quick,” she imagined her mom’s words, “because Callie is—” But then she didn’t know which word would come next: Awake? Dying? Dead?

  “So what’s next?” Mercedes asked Jade. “You should apply to Auburn. I am so in.”

  Jade rolled her big brown eyes. “I can’t get into Auburn. You know that.”

  While Jade had brought her grades up, Mercedes knew Jade’s first two years were nothing but tough Ds. Mercedes pulled the scout’s card out of her pocket. “What’s that?”

  Mercedes told Jade about the scout speaking with her. “You have to go,” Jade said.

  Mercedes rested her head on Jade’s shoulder. “What about us?”

  Jade didn’t answer.

  For all the clatter of the day’s victory, Mercedes knew her future held so much loss.

  21

  “He’s been banging stuff since he got home,” Mercedes told her mom. Even though they had tried to keep the hopelessness of Callie’s condition from Lincoln, he’d found out and was angry. “Maybe it will make him think twice about getting into trouble, traveling that road, and—”

  “He’s not going to do that,” her mom snapped. They sat at the kitchen table. Mercedes’s father had exhausted all his vacation time and returned to work. Her mom would need to return to her job after the new year, just like Mercedes would go back to school every day, not just game days. Mercedes forced down the thought of Callie alone, surrounded not by family, but by machines.

  “You don’t know what it is like to—” Mercedes started, but her mom cut her off again.

  “That’s why we moved here, to get you away from those influences,” her mom said.

  “Mom, there are corners everywhere!” Mercedes thought about the corner where Callie was shot. Mercedes knew she could never “let it be” like Coach said until she visited the scene.

  “Not at Auburn,” her mom said. The scout had invited Mercedes and her parents to dinner. “I’m not letting them buy you or this family. If she wants to meet us, she can do it here.”

  Mercedes glanced into the living room at the family photos with Callie in the picture. What if the recruiter asked about Callie? What if she knew? “I want Jade to be here. And Coach too.”

  Her mom sighed. “Well, I guess I have a lot of cooking to do!” Mercedes laughed.

  “You need any help?” Merc
edes asked.

  “I do, so get your brother down here. We won’t let this thing break us.”

  Mercedes said nothing. Thing. It. Her parents always used impersonal words like they were afraid to speak the truth, although she knew they were right. It would not destroy them. Like falling behind in a game, challenges brought people together, made them strong like a rock. Because a rock didn’t bleed, it didn’t cry; it smashed the scissors that would cut a life in half.

  22

  Mercedes tried not to startle when people started to hug her during the first day back at school after the holiday break. When they touched her, Mercedes backed away like they carried the plague. Some congratulated her on the championship while others offered sympathy about her sister. A few did both, which Mercedes had a hard time handling. How could she accept congratulations and feel happy when her sister lay in a coma feeling nothing?

  By the end of the day, Mercedes stood at her locker, as exhausted as if she’d run a hundred wind sprints. She didn’t know if she could face another day hurtling between the highs and lows.

  “You okay?” Mercedes shivered at the touch on her shoulder. Jade. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” Mercedes turned and pulled Jade close to her.

  “I can’t stop it.” Mercedes still couldn’t stop being startled awake by nightmares either.

  “It takes time,” Jade said. “It’s called trauma. It just takes time and—”

  “Letting it be.” Mercedes stared at her palms. The marks were gone, but the image remained.

  “I’m going with you to Auburn. I talked to my counselor. It’s a long shot, but—”

  “I’m good at long shots!” Mercedes said. Jade’s laughter lifted her spirit. “You know, right now, Jade, I feel like I’m on the top of the mountain. But there’s a problem with that.”