Fast Break

by Mike Lupica

  But the shot dropped softly through the hoop. Nothing but net.

  “Great,” he said. “Now I get my last assist of the day.”

  “Better late than never,” she said.

  When he made a motion like he was going to pass her the ball again, she shook her head.

  “Nope, I’m quitting while I’m ahead. One and done. But you can shoot a little more if you want to. I’m happy to keep feeding you.”

  “I’ll bet you never expected this to be part of your job when you took me in,” he said.

  She shook her head. “It’s not a job, Jayson. Tom and I couldn’t be happier to have you in our lives.”

  “Even when I break your stuff?”

  Mrs. Lawton sighed. “Well, now that you mention it, maybe we should send you back.”

  She caught Jayson’s eye and winked.

  They sat down in the cool grass, facing each other, as the sun went down and the fall day began to turn into night. Mrs. Lawton sat cross-legged. Jayson sat with the basketball in the grass between his legs.

  “Today was a disaster,” he said to her. “I could’ve at least played my game, played smart. I was the reason we lost.”

  “You could look at it that way. But you were also the reason your team came back and had a chance to win with the last shot,” she said. “And this was on a day when you had to feel like you were playing on both teams. Trying to prove something to both teams. And prove to yourself that you could take all that on and still come out a winner. That’s an awful lot to handle, even for someone who can play basketball the way you can.”

  “I still should’ve passed,” Jayson said to her.

  She smiled. “Heck, even people in outer space know that.”

  Jayson couldn’t help himself or stop himself. He laughed.

  23

  THERE WERE TWO GAMES THE next week, one against Moreland West, and a rematch against Karsten, both away games.

  Belmont won them both. Put the loss against Moreland East in the past. At least for now.

  If anything, Jayson over-passed in both games, as if wanting to show his teammates—maybe needing to show them—that he wasn’t the selfish player he’d been at the end of the Moreland East game.

  He took just six shots against Moreland West and made four of them. Then he took seven against Karsten and hit four. He scored less than ten points in both games. Instead, he played to his strengths, handing off the ball to Cameron Speeth, who carried the scoring load, scoring twenty points in both games, hitting his shots from inside, outside, and on the break. Jayson would never say it to him, because he couldn’t think of a way to say it without the words coming out wrong, but he’d found himself a brand new Shabazz on the court.

  He didn’t ignore the other guys, either. He found open looks for Bryan and Brandon and Rashard, too. But his go-to guy was his big man. Cameron was a point guard’s dream. He was a finisher. And Jayson was letting Cameron know that he knew.

  After the Karsten game, Coach Rooney came over to talk to Jayson. “I get what you’re doing. And I know why you’re doing it. I respect that. But you can’t pass up open looks for the rest of the season.”

  “My job is to find the open man.”

  They had come back from Karsten in one of Belmont’s small buses and were standing in front of the gym. Jayson could see the Lawtons waiting for him in their car.

  “And you’re doing a real good job of finding the open man,” Coach said. “But when you are the open man, take the shot.”

  Somehow, Jayson had been throwing himself into basketball more than ever, especially now that he could see his team’s potential. He really believed that they could make it all the way to Cameron Indoor. He was spending as much time as he could on the Lawtons’ court. Mrs. Lawton even came back out to help him sometimes, but she always waited for him to ask.

  It wasn’t as if somebody had turned a switch and suddenly he was happy, suddenly he’d decided that he belonged at Belmont and with the Lawtons. Jayson still wasn’t even sure what it meant to be happy a lot of the time.

  But at least these days he wasn’t going around looking to pick a fight with the world every chance he got.

  “You seem . . . more relaxed,” Ms. Moretti said to him during her weekly visit.

  “Don’t get used to it.”

  “Why not? Isn’t that better than the way things were before?”

  “It’s only a matter of time until I mess up again. Or until the kids at school, their parents, my teammates and Coach find out why I really ended up living here.”

  Jayson thought about the way Mrs. Montgomery had treated him, and could only imagine what she would think if she found out the truth.

  “What about your friends at school? Do you think they would look at you differently if you told them about your past?”

  “I don’t know,” Jayson said. “Maybe. Not about to find out, though.”

  “I think if you ever explained it to someone like your friend Zoe, she’d understand,” Ms. Moretti said.

  “No way I would ever tell Zoe about that.”

  “If she ever did have to hear it, wouldn’t you rather it come from you?”

  “Zoe likes me for who I am now,” he said. “Who she thinks I’ve always been. I don’t see any reason to change that.”

  Later that day, Bryan called and asked him to meet up in town for pizza along with Cameron and Brandon. Jayson thought, Why not? It would be the first time he’d hung out with the guys on the team away from games or practice.

  They were at a front booth at Joe’s Pizza. He felt a little awkward, though the rest of the guys acted like being together outside of practice was normal. Which, he knew, it was. Somehow, after all the time they’d spent together on the court, he still didn’t know how to act with his teammates off the court.

  They had ordered two pepperoni pizzas, Brandon joking that one of them was for him, and were waiting for their number to be called. Jayson couldn’t help it, but this was another time when he thought back to the Pines, and how many times he had to make one large pizza last for days when he was living by himself.

  Cameron looked like he had something he wanted to ask, but didn’t quite know how to do it. So he just came out with it straight. “Is it getting less weird for you, living with the Lawtons?”

  “It’s still weird,” Jayson said. “But everybody’s trying real hard. Even me.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Lawton seem to be doing their best, showing up to all your games,” Bryan said.

  “Yeah, can’t say they aren’t doing whatever they can,” Jayson said. “Now it’s on me to do the same.”

  For some reason he didn’t feel as if the guys were pressing him; they could just as easily have been recapping the Karsten game. Maybe because they were slowly becoming his boys.

  “Not to be nosy here,” Brandon said, grinning, “but how did you even end up with the Lawtons? We’ve heard some stuff, but never from you.”

  He gave Brandon a fake smile. He’d been getting good at that lately. “Long story, but the short version is that someone found out that I was living by myself after my mom died. And then this woman from Child Services got involved, and she was the one who brought me to Mr. and Mrs. Lawton.”

  He raised his shoulders, dropped them, and said, “And now here we are.”

  It was at that moment that the front door to Joe’s opened and a familiar-looking man walked in. Jayson couldn’t remember who it was at first. But then the man turned his head, and Jayson got a good look at him.

  It was Pete. The guy from Foot Locker.

  24

  JAYSON HAD WANTED TO MAKE things right at the Foot Locker. He knew Mr. Lawton had already paid for the sneakers Jayson had stolen, but he wanted to buy them with his own money. The Lawtons had given him an allowance each week, but insisted that Jayson had to earn it by doing more tha
n simply keeping his room clean. So he cleaned out the garage, made sure the basketball court got swept, and piled the wood that Mr. Lawton would chop for the fireplace. He made it his job, every night after dinner, to clear the table, stack the dishes in the dishwasher, and clean any pots and pans that needed to be cleaned by hand.

  He just wasn’t ready yet, didn’t have enough money saved. Even if he did have the money, he wasn’t sure he was ready to face the people he’d stolen from.

  But now the thing that made him most ashamed had just come walking through the door.

  He pulled out his phone and casually looked down at it while he tried to figure out how he wanted to play out the situation. His coaches, teammates, and even players on the other team talked about how Jayson Barnes could always think one move ahead of everybody else on the court. He was trying like crazy to do that now.

  “You expecting to hear from Zoe?” Bryan said, grinning. “You’re staring at the phone like you’re waiting for something to happen.”

  “What? No, no, nothing like that.” But he kept staring at the phone like it was the most important thing he’d do all day, more important than beating Karsten earlier. “It’s just that Mrs. Lawton said she was going to text me about something I had to do later.”

  He knew it was lame, but it was all he had at the moment.

  He shot a quick look at the counter, praying that Pete wouldn’t turn around and remember him, remember what he’d done. Jayson had no idea whether Pete was there to eat at the restaurant or pick up takeout.

  But Jayson wasn’t willing to risk the chance that Pete might come over and out him in front of his friends. He dreaded the thought of having to explain the whole situation to the guys afterward.

  He briefly thought about telling them the truth. Why not? They were his teammates; he could try swearing them to secrecy, and maybe it would work. But then they’d know. And from then on they’d look at him differently. They’d smile and pretend everything was the same, but it wouldn’t be. He’d be a thief in their eyes instead of just their teammate and starting point guard. And eventually one of them would tell somebody else, and that’s all it would take, and before long everybody in the seventh grade would know. Including Zoe.

  His head was spinning with all kinds of thoughts, some of them crazy. But the only one that mattered was this:

  He had to get out of here—right now.

  He took another look around. It wasn’t all that crowded at Joe’s, just three booths along the wall were taken, one table filled with a bunch of girls.

  He heard the kid taking Pete’s order say, “To stay or to go?”

  “Stay. Don’t want to have to reheat the best pie in the county when I get home.”

  That was it. Jayson reached into his pocket for his phone, like he’d just been buzzed even if they hadn’t heard it, and said to the guys, “Ah, man, I was afraid of this. I gotta go. Mrs. Lawton is gonna pull up in like one minute.”

  “You didn’t even eat yet,” Bryan said. “She can’t wait ten minutes?”

  “I promised her,” Jayson said.

  He took a few dollars out of his pocket and threw the money on the table. Cameron said they’d pay for it; Jayson hadn’t even eaten anything. “Nah, it’s cool,” Jayson said. “I’m part of the team now.” He was watching Pete, still up at the counter, chatting with the cashier. Jayson was hoping to time his exit just right.

  “See you guys at practice,” he said.

  The second Pete turned around and started looking for a place to sit while he waited for his pizza, Jayson stood up and walked away from the booth, almost bumping into Pete as he made his way to the door. “Sorry,” he said as he kept moving, head down, the door nearly hitting him in the face as another customer came walking into Joe’s. “Sorry.”

  Then he was out the door and gone, out on the sidewalk, looking down at the same sneakers he’d stolen weeks back.

  Jayson waited for that same large hand to come down firmly on his shoulder.

  But it never did.

  • • •

  When he got back, the Lawtons were in the living room. Mrs. Lawton was reading and Mr. Lawton was watching a basketball game. Mrs. Lawton put her glasses on top of her head and bookmarked her page when Jayson came in.

  “You said you were going to call,” she said. “Did one of the other boys’ parents give you a ride?”

  He was tired of making things up today, so he didn’t even try.

  “I walked home,” he said.

  Mr. Lawton muted the TV with his remote. “Jayson, that’s more than a four-mile walk. Why didn’t you just call?”

  It was quiet in the room without the sound of the game. He checked out the screen and remembered that Kentucky was playing Kansas today.

  “Jayson,” Mrs. Lawton said. “Did something happen?”

  “It was no big deal,” he said, even though he knew it was a very big deal, at least to him.

  “It was enough to make you walk home alone.”

  “Not as if I’m not used to being on my own.”

  “You want to tell us what happened?” Mr. Lawton said.

  Jayson looked at Mr. and Mrs. Lawton. They were waiting for him to speak. Finally he sighed again. “The man who caught me after I stole the sneakers came into Joe’s when I was there with my teammates.”

  Mrs. Lawton put her book down now and sat forward in her chair. “I see.”

  “No, you don’t,” he said. “You don’t see. You don’t know what it’s like to feel like I’m still hiding, even though I’m living here now.” He was breathing hard, just like that, taking air in and letting it out.

  “What you did was wrong, Jayson,” Mrs. Lawton said. “But it wasn’t the crime of the century, either. Do you really think people would think so differently about you if they knew you stole a pair of sneakers so you could be like the other players on your team?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It was pathetic. I was pathetic.”

  “You’re many things, Jayson, but never pathetic,” Mrs. Lawton said.

  “My friends don’t really know me,” he said. “They just know the made-up version, the one who lives with you.”

  “Well, I know the real you,” she said, “whether you want to believe that or not. I think you’re a good person with a good heart doing amazingly well with circumstances that would have crushed most kids your age.”

  He wanted to believe her. Wanted people to see him as more than just a thief. But for now he just wanted to get out of this room, the way he’d gotten out of Joe’s.

  “You’ve got to stop being so hard on yourself,” Mr. Lawton said.

  “I’m just so tired of feeling like a phony, like at any minute I need to run.”

  “At least this time you ran home,” Mrs. Lawton said.

  25

  THE BOBCATS KEPT WINNING, AND kept looking more like a team that could win the league every time they played. When Jayson was playing ball, he knew exactly who he was: the point guard whose role was making everybody around him better.

  He wasn’t seeing as much of Zoe on the weekends. Not since that awkward conversation with her mom at her house. She’d canceled on him a couple times out of the blue, which was a little weird, but he didn’t think too much of it. She had mentioned that she would be doing a lot of riding and going to horse shows in the area.

  He kept in touch with Tyrese and talked to him a couple of times a week. But Jayson didn’t want to go back to the Jeff, and he didn’t invite Tyrese over to the west side to hang with him. They were still friends, but more than ever it felt like a long-distance friendship to Jayson, the two of them living on different sides of Moreland. Jayson felt like he’d be as much of a phony going back to the old hood now as he was going to Belmont Khaki Day.

  Ms. Moretti kept coming for her weekly visits and kept telling him how much “progress” she th
ought he was making. Sometimes Jayson would ask her how she could tell.

  “You seem more relaxed,” she said.

  “Then I’m fooling you,” he said. “I don’t relax. I just keep grinding away.”

  “In everything?” she said. “Even with school and the friends you’re making?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “So this is just one big show; you’re really not enjoying your life over here?”

  “It’s better than it was,” Jayson said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  She smiled. “My goal is for you to be happy.”

  “Everybody seems to want that,” he said. “But it’s like I keep telling you—that’s on me.”

  “Like it’s another opponent you need to beat? Jayson Barnes against the world?”

  “Something like that.”

  They left it there. It was a week before Christmas. Jayson wasn’t quite sure how he felt about his first Christmas at the Lawtons’. It had never been a very big deal at the Pines, just him and his mom, usually one or two presents. The last one they’d spent together, she’d been in bed for most of the day.

  Mrs. Lawton’s mom had died young of cancer a long time ago, though not as young as Jayson’s mom had been. She hadn’t seen her father since he’d left the family when she was a little girl. Mr. Lawton’s parents lived in Arizona and didn’t like to fly.

  Even so, Mr. and Mrs. Lawton walked around the house looking cheerful, but every once in a while, Jayson could see a sad look on their faces, and he wondered if they were thinking of their son. Isaiah had told them it was doubtful he would be coming home for the holidays. It was weird, Jayson thought, how some people would give anything to grow up in a home like Isaiah’s, while others just wanted to run away. He wondered which of the two options he wanted for himself now.

  He woke up at his normal time on Christmas morning. When he came downstairs, the Lawtons were waiting for him, Mrs. Lawton telling him she had been about five minutes from waking him up, since she couldn’t wait any longer to open presents.