by Alan Cumyn
He hadn’t seen his father since.
“No way you should have been cut. Towers is a pretty good guard but he can’t shoot. I’ve seen you shoot, man.” Biggs looked up like a doctor in the middle of some surgery and said to the twins, “This guy never misses. I’ve never seen him miss.”
“It’s about time we had a junior varsity for the girls,” Left Eyebrow said.
Stan’s hands flexed as if holding the pebbled grain of an imaginary basketball. Now what was he supposed to do? Varsity only had two spots open. Everyone else was coming back. Now there would be twelve from last year’s JV competing for those two spots — all right, eleven. Collins broke his leg skateboarding. But what about all the seniors who didn’t make varsity last year?
Suddenly Janine Igwash loomed above him. Completely clothed. Her tattoo was just a little red and black blob near the creamy white corner of her collar.
“What are you doing about the retina?” she asked him. Even though Jason Biggs was the one with the scalpel in his hand mucking about with the retina and who knew what else.
“We sketched it before we sliced it,” Right Eyebrow said.
“I didn’t think we were supposed to slice it,” Janine Igwash said to him directly again. Her eyes were dark green with little brown blobs that flashed with light.
She looked down at the hatchet job Jason Biggs was doing, and back to Stan, and down and back again.
“There’s this dance that my parents’ youth group has forced me to help organize,” she said to Stan. “And I’m supposed to go and it’s like there’s no possible way out of it in any way and, there’s this stipulation.” She shoved her hands in her pockets.
Was she really saying this? Stan went through a mental checklist. Everyone else was listening; she was wearing all her clothes. Probably it was real.
“Stipulation?” he said.
“I need to bring, like, a guy.” She stood very still and looked at him, her green and browns scanning his face. Jason Biggs was most of the way through the eye now.
Someone kicked Stan’s ankle. It was Left Eyebrow.
“A guy?” Stan said.
Janine Igwash couldn’t seem to say anything more. Left Eyebrow kicked him again.
“Ten minutes, people, before you need to clean up,” Mr. Stillwater announced. He was sitting at the front in the same blue shirt he wore every day, or maybe he had a whole closet full of blue shirts.
When Stan glanced at Janine Igwash again she was back at her station cleaning up. Her face was redder than her hair.
“You sure blew that one,” the twins said together.
—
The rest of the day slid by in jagged fragments, during which Stan heard again and again the unbelievable news about JV. Everyone seemed to know, maybe through Biggs, what the disaster meant to Stan personally. He thought he’d been secret about his obsessive practice.
But this was a complete crash and burn.
Once he caught sight of Janine Igwash at her locker on the second floor reaching for something on the top shelf amidst a bird’s nest of squashed papers and other items. She certainly didn’t need his help reaching the top shelf. But if she turned in the next second and a half he was sure he would stop and accept her invitation to the dance, if in fact it had been an invitation. When she did turn he was already almost past her.
Then later at lunchtime in the cafeteria lineup he pretended to be extremely interested in the new student mural of various androgynous figures playing sports such as hockey, soccer, volleyball and even basketball, although the basketball player had one arm longer than the other and his or her elbow was definitely out of alignment given the shoulder angle of the jump shot if in fact it was a jump shot that the artist was trying to depict, and what did it matter anyway now that JV was canceled?
Then there she was again at the end of second period in the afternoon, tying her shoe right in front of him as he was trying to make it to English and nearly tripped over her but fortunately his reactions were swift and he managed to miss her completely although she did look up at the last moment to see who was bearing down on her with such speed.
“Hey,” he said as he flashed by.
It occurred to him that if he stopped he might say even more than that, but what?
In the hallway Coach Lapman didn’t meet Stan’s eye, probably didn’t even remember who he was.
At home after dinner he was reading the same assigned passage of The Catcher in the Rye over and over when his mother approached. She sat quite close to him on the sofa so that he had to pull out his earbuds and turn off his music.
“Aren’t you training tonight?” she asked.
“They canceled JV basketball,” he said. Under questioning he explained the hopelessness of the situation.
“Well, you could try out for the varsity team anyway, couldn’t you?” she said.
Stan knew that if he just stayed quiet she would eventually drift away and he could get back to not reading his novel. Anyway, Gary would be calling soon.
She squeezed his knee in a motherly way.
“How are things on the other side?” she asked.
“What other side?”
“The social side of things. Any . . .” His mother hesitated so he knew she had probably been planning this segment of the conversation all along. “. . . cute girls, you know, you’re interested in?”
“Cute girls?”
“You know what I’m saying, Stanley.” She stretched flat her brow furrows with her fingertips.
“I guess,” Stan said.
“What do you guess?”
She was almost finished her wine. Gary was going to call any minute. Or Lily was going to need help with her homework. If he could just stall a bit longer . . .
“We haven’t had any good conversations about all this,” his mother said. She waved her hand vaguely. “I’d like to think that you feel free enough to ask me anything. You’re entering such a rich and . . . confusing time of life. And your father isn’t here to help. It’s just me. You know I grew up with sisters, so I really don’t know the male perspective . . . I know men, of course . . . I know I’m terrible with them. I’m really not much of a role model for you. But if there is anything you want to talk about . . . you know, the mechanics of . . . how it all works.” The words were sputtering now. Not even the wine was helping. “You do know the mechanics?”
He couldn’t avoid the direct question.
“We had a . . . mechanics section as part of health,” he said.
“But you haven’t . . .” She squeezed his knee again. Her hair was falling all in front of her face.
Where was Gary when you needed the guy?
“Haven’t what?” Stan said finally.
“You know . . . you haven’t actually . . . I mean, you do go out at night sometimes. And I know I’m away more than I should be. I mean —”
She was asking if he’d —!
“No!” he blurted.
She looked startled. Surprised and relieved and perhaps disbelieving.
“It’s all right if you do. I mean, eventually, when you love someone. I mean, not now, but in the next few years you’re going to be entering an age when the feelings are overpowering and . . . there’s the whole thing about the adolescent brain.”
“What?”
“I was reading about this. The center for consequences is underdeveloped . . . I mean, in the adolescent brain . . .”
At last, the phone! Stan felt his shoulders ungrip. But it wasn’t his mother’s phone, it was the home line.
Lily picked it up then screamed, “Stanley!”
Nobody ever called him.
“It’s for you!”
It was Janine Igwash. Stan didn’t recognize her voice at first and was convinced someone was calling from across the continent to try to sell him something — tickets to a dance. But she wasn’t selling, she was asking.
“I know I sounded like a stammering clownface this morning in biology but what I was tr
ying to get out was it’s Saturday night. This Saturday. It starts at eight o’clock and I don’t think I would stay past ten or so and we don’t even have to dance if you don’t want to. I mean, there will be music and such. But if you don’t like to dance then we could just, I don’t know, hang out.” She paused. “Feel free to jump in and say something any time about now.”
Stan considered his words. His mother poured herself another glass of wine not ten feet away and pretended she wasn’t listening.
“We don’t have to worry about transportation because my parents will be driving. I think maybe I mentioned this is their thing. Are you still there? You do talk, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Stan said.
“Well?”
“I just, uh, I’m not sure why you’re asking me?”
Stan’s mother chopped something hard on the counter so that he dropped the phone. When he picked it up he said, “Sorry about that,” but it was into a dial tone.
3
At 2:17 a.m., after precisely no sleep, Stan snuck downstairs, bypassed squeaky stair number five and, sitting in the den on the couch near the window by the light of the streetlamp outside, composed the following letter to Janine Igwash:
I know you think I’m an idiot. But I have never been asked out before by any girl so I guess it’s not surprising I didn’t know how to act. I’ve been training for something . . . different and now that’s been canceled and sometimes it’s hard to change gears.
Also, I’m not a usual sort of guy. I feel like I’m older than that in some ways. Maybe when I am older I’ll go completely off the road and behave just like a teenager but right now I don’t want any part of the stupidity that is happening.
Maybe it’s a drag your parents make you help organize things like youth dances but at least that means they have their own lives together. My parents are a complete mess. My father specifically doesn’t live here anymore.
So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m trying really hard not to be 16. Does that make any sense?
One thing maybe it would be stupid to tell you but here I am writing it anyway is that I do think of you from time to time, and not
just because you tried to ask me out. I do think of you.
But I don’t want to be physical until I know how to be. Sexual I mean. I’m sorry for saying it.
I know you just asked me to a dance and even then you said I didn’t have to dance. So maybe instead we’d go for a walk and I would tell you a lot of things. Maybe you have things on your mind too. It doesn’t mean at all we would end up being physical but the problem would be afterward and mostly in my head but also in my body which is doing weird things. I may look like something on the surface but underneath a lot of the time I’m just barely clinging.
So going to the dance with you would be a lot bigger event than maybe you’re thinking about.
Now it’s almost 4 o’clock in the morning and I’m going to be a zombie if I don’t go to bed. I’m sorry for my handwriting. I’m sorry if I actually give you this letter. I’m having one of those moments when I seem to be standing outside looking at myself wondering what I’m going to do and not having the slightest idea.
Yours sincerely,
Stan (Stanley) Dart
Stan folded the letter — six sheets of his miserable handwriting — three times, shoved it in the kitchen garbage, got halfway up the stairs, then turned around and pulled the letter out of the garbage. He took it upstairs to his room and stuck it under some papers at the bottom of his own wastebasket which only got emptied once a month at most. Then he pulled himself between the sheets.
Janine Igwash was instantly in his head, standing quite close to him though turned slightly away, looking down. She had dropped a button and was just about to bend over to look for it. Her black silky shirt was almost falling open, and the little tattoo at the base of her neck nearly peeked at him.
She was in his head like she was living there. The black shirt falling so softly off her shoulders, undone. Shirt tails. Off the rails. Light blue underwear the color of the sky. His heart hammering and all he was doing was lying there, still as a board. Stiff as a post.
Holding up the sky.
4
Stan spied the tiny notice on the bulletin board outside the gym. Tryouts for the boys’ varsity basketball team begin Monday at 6:30 a.m.
How could information of such vital importance be so sparse in detail? Thin blue ink, easy to miss. Maybe Coach Burgess was hoping no one new would show up. He only had two spots to fill anyway.
Six-thirty in the morning!
But instead of driving people off, the awkward start time only seemed to pique more interest. Marty Wilkens, who could barely tie his own shoes, said he was going to come out. He’d grown six inches over the summer and so maybe he might be able to play basketball. Leonard Palin, a hockey player, announced he’d been working on a left-handed hook shot. “It’s unstoppable,” he said in the hallway outside geography.
But really that hallway was owned by the enormous Karl Brolin, six feet six, 220 pounds of senior orangutan who flicked illegal bounce passes to Ty Blake and Jamie Hartleman, the core of the varsity team. No teachers told them to take it outside. They ran, jumped, pivoted, ricocheted off the lockers while Stan and others let them pass.
That’s the way it was with those guys. Once last year at lunchtime Stan tried to guard Karl Brolin when Brolin decided to play at the junior basket outside just because he could. Brolin got the ball and backed in — backed in with his big rump and his huge shoulders until he was underneath the basket. Then, as now, all Stan could do was give way.
Stan carried his Janine Igwash letter — he’d retrieved it from the wastebasket — in an outer pocket of his backpack where it was zipped and sealed secure. He didn’t want her to see it and so he kept it with him at all times.
Janine walked past him talking with Katherine Loney. Janine was a head taller than Katherine, though she didn’t slouch like some tall girls did. He held the fire door but Janine did not glance at him. She simply kept listening as Katherine said, “ . . . pieces of it everywhere, even in her hair!” If Janine had glanced over, Stan was prepared to say, “I’m sorry, I dropped the phone.” His jaw was relaxed, the words were lining up, then she was by. Coldly, Stan thought. Determined not to look. “But why in her hair?” Janine asked. Stan didn’t hear the reply. He was headed in the other direction. Nearly running.
To hell with her.
In the break after first period he sat underneath the stairwell at the south end of the building and wrote in tiny script at the bottom of page six of his letter to Janine: what we cannot know/in the chaos of control. He looked at those two lines — minutes were draining away, he was going to have to head to biology soon — and finally he scratched out the lines and added, Why is everything so difficult?
He didn’t have a good sense in his head of how he was ever going to make the varsity team. There were too many good players. The players were too big, too strong, too experienced. All year he’d been imagining making his shots against the JV guys. But most of them were not going to make the varsity team, either.
In biology Jason Biggs said, “Tryouts for varsity start Monday at 6:30 in the morning!” They were supposed to be finishing their diagrams of the components of the eye. Janine Igwash did not look around once in the first ten minutes of the class.
“Six-thirty in the morning!” Jason Biggs said.
She was working on her diagram. If Stan’s letter wasn’t safely back in his locker he would have just walked up to her and handed it over. Simple as that. He felt like a man of action.
“Monday morning!” Jason Biggs said. “You gotta go, man. I’ve seen your jump shot. You never miss.”
Then he looked to where Stan was looking.
“Not Janine Igwash,” he said.
“What?”
“Everyone knows she’s tilted.”
Mr. Stillwater stopped talking and looked directly at the two of them.
Stan’s ears were burning. They always gave him away. Biggs looked innocent as grass.
“What does everyone know?” Mr. Stillwater repeated. All eyes were on Stan.
“Nothing,” Stan muttered.
“Everyone knows nothing?” Mr. Stillwater said.
Stan stayed silent. He sneaked a glance at Janine Igwash. Her face was pale, pale white, but her neck was red. Her hair was so wild he wanted to get lost in it.
What did Biggs mean by tilted?
“Stand up.” Mr. Stillwater’s eyes never left Stan. Maybe this wasn’t going to pass after all. Stan rose uneasily. “What does everyone know?” Stillwater pressed.
“That I’m an idiot,” Stan said. Janine laughed. She was the only one.
“Are you?” A little less heft in Stillwater’s voice. The moment seemed suddenly open to comic possibilities.
“I’m talking with my idiot friend when I should be listening,” Stan said. Some giggles now. “That makes me an idiot, too. I’m sorry, Mr. Stillwater.”
Stillwater nodded slightly, his eyes narrowed.
“And sometimes I drop the phone when someone wonderful is on the other end,” Stan continued. He looked directly at Janine, whose eyes were dark now — how did that happen? Black jewels. “And I fail to apologize because of just how awkward everything is at this age.” Gales of laughter. Jason Biggs’ desk nearly tipped over, Stan was leaning so hard against it. But Janine kept looking.
“That’s enough. Sit down, Stanley!”
Stan sat down. Janine kept looking. He would not look away first. His heart was hammering. He was breathing like he was carrying a load of bricks up a tree for some reason.
Just because it had to be done.