“Man,” I said, feeling the need to fill the silence while I stood around and watched Shiner. “This place is a pit.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking around the dank room. “Reminds me of my sister’s place. Small and stinky.” He smiled at me, showing crooked teeth.
“Totally.” His sister was three years older than we were, and used to make kissing noises whenever she saw me and Shiner together. She was tall and brash and always intimidated me.
Shiner flicked on the switch, and the pump roared like a ski boat as he showed me how to air the balls.
“You want it full, but not too full!” Shiner shouted over the humming and rattling. “Firm, but not too firm!”
“How will I know?” I yelled back.
“You’ll just have to judge! There!” He pulled the needle out of the basketball and turned off the pump. Suddenly I could hear the cheerleaders outside the door doing their half-time routine—a bunch of clapping and stomping. “See?” He spun the orange orb in his palm, then bounced it twice on the concrete floor. “Perfect.”
“Thanks, Shiner,” I said earnestly.
“No problem.” He shuffled in the doorway for a moment, then said, “Hey, look. I’m sorry about today.”
“Which part?”
He laughed. “Well, I meant about knocking you in the hall when you were with Coach Eckels. I didn’t see him there, but I’m sorry, anyway. It was a jerk thing to do.”
I can honestly say that I thought that Shiner Camry would never bother to apologize to me for anything, especially since I never apologized to him for abruptly ending our Fall Ball dance. I was impressed, to say the least. “God, that was the least of my problems today,” I said. “But, thanks. It’s okay. I mean, you don’t have to apologize.”
He shrugged. “I wish I’d told you about Mrs. Everly’s outfit earlier. I saw her walking across the parking lot this morning. That’s actually why I came up to you in the hall—to tell you. That’s just like me to try to do something nice then mess it all up.”
He put his hand on the handle of the door but didn’t open it. We stood quietly for a moment, the cheers of the half-time routine coming through the walls muffled.
“Hey,” I called as he started to open the door. “You’re good at basketball. I remember you used to like to play. How come you’re not playing now?”
He shrugged his bony shoulders. “I don’t think Coach likes me very much.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that because it was probably true. Shiner always rubbed people the wrong way. I think no one really gave him a chance anymore. “Hey, was that your dad who played during the game in eighty-nine? Kenny Camry?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?” I wondered why more people didn’t realize it was Shiner’s dad. “What ever happened to him? I mean, I know he had you and your folks split when we were little, but did he keep playing ball?”
Shiner opened the door and let the screaming crowd and cheerleaders into our tiny space. “No,” he said, an edge to his voice. “He decided to become a burned-out loser instead.”
I sighed as he left. I stuck the needle in the little rubber opening and flicked on the switch like Shiner had shown me and wondered if someone like Jason could ever go for someone like me. If you could have someone like Kayla or especially Rosemary, then why would you go for a period-roses, Kotex-locker, old-lady-clothes-wearing, Class Favorite wannabe who . . .
I didn’t hear the explosion exactly. Not right away. In fact, I didn’t hear anything. The whole world went silent, like someone had pressed a giant mute button. Then the ringing started. . . .
One moment the basketball was resting in my hand, the needle inserted like an IV, the pump humming like white noise in the background of my thoughts, and then . . .
Full but not too full, Shiner had told me.
I was shaking. Not just my hands—which no longer held the ball—but my entire body. Uncontrollable, violent shaking, like I was standing at the epicenter of an earthquake. Next I heard a noise—a buzzing/ringing in my ears that sounded like the emergency broadcast signal the TV stations sometimes tested, except this ringing drowned out all other sounds. It was quiet at first, building, and then it was all I could hear.
Firm but not too firm, Shiner had instructed.
I looked at my shaking hands, then down at the concrete floor, where the ball was blown into four oblong pieces. I knew I wasn’t hurt, exactly—my limbs all seemed to be intact, and there wasn’t any blood that I could see. Still, I didn’t understand immediately what I’d done. It was that weird feeling of waking up in the middle of a dream—I paused for a moment, waiting to see what was real.
The ringing in my ears continued, but after a moment—a minute? five minutes?—I started to hear what was going on outside the door in the gym. Part of the ringing in my ears wasn’t from the explosion of the ball, it was screaming. Girls were screaming, and I could hear a low rumbling, like a stampede. But I still couldn’t budge.
Suddenly I was aware that something was on my arm—a veiny hand attached to a long skinny arm. Shiner. As I looked at him I realized how wide open my right eye was, and that the left was twitching uncontrollably. His mouth was moving frantically, but I couldn’t hear a word he said. I just stared at him like I was comatose or something.
“Hey! Sara!” He shook me gently. “Are you okay? Sara?”
“Y-y-y . . . yes . . . yeah. I’m . . . fine.”
“Geez, was that you?”
I stared at him, finally aware of my mouth hanging open.
“Sara, take a breath, come on.” Shiner demonstrated for me by breathing deeply once, twice . . . I managed to follow his lead and took a long, deep breath, which I never knew could feel so good. I didn’t realize that I hadn’t even been breathing. By my third breath, I felt much calmer and was able to relax my shoulders and turn my Rudolph stocking feet to face him. I couldn’t stop shaking, the ringing continued, and the pump hummed ominously in front of me.
“Was that you?” he asked again as he yanked the cord out of the wall, the sound of the pump stopping instantly while a steady ringing continued in my ears. “Did you . . .” Then he looked down and caught sight of the basketball. “Ah, hell, Thurman.” The concern vanished from his face, and he actually started to laugh. Shaking his head and laughing that high-pitched squeal of his, he bent over and put his hands on his knees, his back convulsing.
“You blew up a basketball?” he finally asked. “That’s it? That’s what happened?”
“Yeah,” I said, calmer now and, quite frankly, confused because he was laughing at my traumatic mistake. “I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Oh man, Thurman. You really did it this time. Man, this just ain’t your week. Ain’t your month. Shoot, I didn’t know a basketball exploding could be so loud. But, man, it is. You’ve cleared out the whole . . .” he started laughing again. “You’ve got the whole . . . oh, man, this is too good. . . .”
“What? Shiner. What’s so funny?”
“You’ve got the whole gym cleared out. Everyone thought it was a bomb, it was so loud. The cheerleaders, they started screaming, and Kayla Cane screamed, ‘Bomb!’” He demonstrated this in an oddly high voice that sounded nothing like Kayla’s. “Man, you should have seen it. It was a total stampede! Everyone is out on the football field right now. Nice work, Thurman.”
“Oh, my God,” I muttered, looking down at the exploded ball. “Oh, my God. This is just great. I’m going to get in so much trouble. Coach Eckels is going to be so mad. . . .”
“Ah, calm down,” he said, taking a step toward me and resting his hand on my back. “It’s not that big a deal. You’re probably not the first person to explode a ball.”
The door flew open. Coach Eckels pounced in frantically, his tanned skin a blushed pink. “What’s going on? What happened?”
Shiner stepped back from me as if we were doing something wrong, and I dumbly pointed down to the torn leather at my feet. “I’m sorry.
I blew it up.”
“My Lord,” Coach said, running his hand through his thick white hair, looking both relieved and annoyed. “You okay, Sara?”
“Yes, sir,” I said with a shaky voice.
“I think she’s just a little shook up,” Shiner offered. Coach Eckels looked quickly over at him—I guess he hadn’t noticed him standing there.
“Well, all right then,” Coach was saying, looking down at the ball. “Camry, go outside and tell Coach Wendell everything is fine. Tell him what happened and to bring everyone back in.”
Shiner scrambled out the door, and Coach looked at me.
“They called in the police. Everyone thought it was a bomb.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
“You okay?”
“I guess. I think there’s something in my eye, and my ears are ringing.”
“We’ll get Coach Wendell to take you to the hospital, get you checked out.” He let out a big sigh and a little laugh. “Whew! You had us scared there, Thurman. I thought it was some crazy ex-student, back for revenge; maybe ol’ Enzo finally came back to show us. Well, so long as you’re okay. A basketball can certainly be replaced. After all,” he chuckled, “it’s not as if you blew up The Ball.”
My eyes widened, and I felt sickness creeping up in my throat. Still, I gave a little laugh, then asked, “How can you tell if it’s The Ball?”
He bent down and picked up the pieces. “Well, we didn’t want to put a bunch of writing on The Ball, you know, mess it all up.” As he spoke he examined the orange and black scraps of leather. “So old Coach Randolph”—his eyebrows scrunched together—“put a little ‘#1’ right . . . by . . . the . . .”
14
Does He Like You . . . Like That?
Testing the waters, you tell your friend and heart’s desire, Stefan, that the new guy in history is totally cute. He:
a) scoffs and says, “You can do better!”
b) nods and says, “Yeah, he’s like the female version of that smokin’ Brazilian babe in our homeroom.”
c) doesn’t even look up, just mumbles, “Whatever.”
When Coach Eckels saw that little #1 by the black rubber insertion thing, he went totally ballistic. Suddenly he didn’t care that I was okay, or even that I really wasn’t okay because my eye was twitching more and more with every curse word Coach Eckels tossed around the storage room, despite his policy of not cursing around “the womenfolk.” He eventually told me to get out of his sight, which I did, and gladly.
Coach Wendell drove me to East Side Memorial to get my eyes and ears checked out. He sat with me in the waiting room while we waited for a doctor to see me and for my mom to come get me. He didn’t say anything, just sighed and scratched the back of his head a lot, then rested his hands back on the rounded belly that spilled over his coach shorts. The silence made me so anxious for a word of encouragement that I finally couldn’t take it anymore.
“Coach Wendell, I’m so sorry,” I implored. “I didn’t mean to do it.”
He sighed again as he stared off at the muted TV high up in the corner of the room. “Well . . . I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I’m sure it’s . . . well, there’s nothing much we can do about it now.” He never even looked at me.
If anyone should be upset, it should have been me. After all, that Ball inspired my existence. If Bowie hadn’t won that game in 1989, my dad might never have summoned the courage to ask my mom out—he might not have even noticed her in the first place. But when I went daydreaming about some boy (even a totally lusty boy), I let The Ball—my existence—explode into four ripped pieces. One for each member of my broken family. How nauseatingly poetic.
An eternity later, Mom showed up looking disheveled. Her hair hung as if exhausted against her cheeks, her ears poking through.
“Good God, Sara,” she said, tilting my chin up so she could look at my twitching eye. She took in my outfit, cocked an eyebrow, and asked, “What happened now?” Her mascara had run a bit with the long day, and her blouse was slightly untucked beneath her skirt.
Out of the corner of my good eye, I could see Coach Wendell shaking his head.
“I accidentally blew up the basketball at half-time.”
“It wasn’t The Ball, was it?”
Didn’t I say the story was legendary? I could only look down at the floor.
“Sara!” she gasped. “Not The Ball?”
When she said that, I started to cry. There I was in my too-short skirt and clunky boots, the green-ish lights of the waiting room casting weird shadows on everyone’s faces. I felt like the kid who always gets picked on at school, except the only person picking on me was . . . me. I had wanted to blame my bad situations on someone else ever since the day I got the roses, but there in the hospital, I realized it was all on me.
I bawled, and Mom immediately pulled me to her shoulder as Coach Wendell slipped discreetly toward the vending machines.
“Oh, honey,” Mom said. “Hush, now.” She squeezed me tight.
Up to that point, the only person who had genuinely tried to tell me it was okay was Shiner—which made me want to cry even harder. I wanted Arlene to be the one who said it was going to be all right. Kirstie had been a good friend to me so far, but she wasn’t my best friend—nothing could replace Arlene. She would have calmed me down after the blow-up and then would have made me laugh about the whole thing. Arlene would have told me it was just a stupid ball. I missed her. I felt betrayed, but I still missed her.
And poor Mom. Standing there in her heinous Dress Barn clothes she’d had since Elisabeth was a toddler. The black and white blouse was coarse and nubbly, and I couldn’t imagine that she had once considered it nice enough to buy. The last time I remember her getting all dressed up was the time she and Dad went to the Bighorn Sheep Foundation dinner a couple of years ago. They had come home laughing and talking loudly, waking me up. Mom’s diamond necklace had tickled my face when she bent to kiss me good night, and she had held her high heels in her manicured hand.
“It’s gonna be fine,” Mom assured me back in the waiting room. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”
Those simple words made me feel better. I’d blown up The Ball and that was it. Just like Coach Wendell had said: There wasn’t much we could do about it now. What was done, was done. I’d probably get expelled tomorrow, so let’s just get on with it.
My life had become one of amazing highs and dreadful lows, and I hardly had time to recover from the pain or properly bask in the joy before something else was hitting me in the face.
Two hours after I arrived at East Side Memorial, I was discharged. Nothing was wrong with me, physically. The doctor who blessed me with his medical genius shined a light in my eye and didn’t find anything wrong with it. I had probably rinsed out whatever was in there when I sobbed on Mom’s shoulder. Still, he gave me some drops to put in for the next forty-eight hours in case it was still sensitive. As for the ringing in my ears, he shined a light in them, too, and told me there wasn’t any permanent damage but if the ringing didn’t go away within twenty-four hours to go see my regular doctor. The whole thing took less than five minutes. But he did take time to chuckle when I told him I had blown up a basketball. He abruptly stopped chuckling when Mom added, “The Ball.”
I stood bored next to Mom as she filled out the insurance papers. She scribbled in my social security number, which I had yet to memorize, and reached over and patted my back—not making a show of it but just doing it.
Then something amazing, wonderful, exciting, perfect happened. The automatic doors of the emergency entrance opened, and beauty was wheeled in.
“Oh, my gosh, what happened to you?” I asked, stepping away from Mom.
Jason smiled as his mother, who was tall like him, and so elegant in her straight black pants and heels, wheeled him through the door in a wheelchair, his leg propped up and wrapped in a bandage at the ankle.
“Infamous Ball Girl,” he said, a bright smile on h
is face. “You okay?”
“Shoot, I’m fine,” I said, trying to act breezy.
“You caused a real scene tonight. I’m surprised you didn’t give yourself a heart attack.”
“I wish.”
Mrs. Andersen went to the desk next to my mother to check Jason in. Our moms said hello to each other, and the differences in their appearance was stark: a princess and a pauper.
“Well, what happened to you?” I asked, motioning to his propped-up leg.
“Came down wrong on a jump shot.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Just sort of a steady throbbing. Not too bad.”
“You don’t seem too upset about it.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Why should I be?”
Was he crazy? Basketball helped make him what he was today, socially speaking. Without basketball, it was possible he’d morph back into the meek kid he had been all through elementary school. Or maybe, I thought, once you reached the top, it was hard to fall back down? I realized that I had no one thing that would take me to the top of the Bowie social scene, but I had my list that I was slowly trudging through. Maybe with the right clothes and attitude, I would at least get some positive attention.
“Well, I mean, you’re only one of the best players on the team. What are we gonna do if you’re out for the season?”
“Eh,” he said. “There’s only a couple of games left, and I’m no Enzo. I don’t think it’s going to be that big a deal, to tell you the truth.”
“How come?”
“You’re friends with Shiner, right?”
For a moment, I hesitated. Maybe he was going to say something bad about Shiner and then I’d look like his co-loser if I was associated with him. But then I thought, What do I care? Shiner’s not as bad as I thought he was—not as bad as Kayla had me thinking he was. So I said, “Yeah, we’re sort of friends.”
“Well, it turns out he’s an awesome basketball player.”
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