by Kobe Bryant
“I used to ask myself those questions,” Rolabi said, walking out of the darkness. There seemed to be no floors or ceiling or walls, yet both of them were standing. “When I was younger, I knew about grana. But I saw places like the Bottom and I wondered why they existed.”
Lab bent over, feeling his breakfast coming up. “Not . . . cool . . .”
Rolabi gestured to the blackness around them, and buildings started popping up like mushroom caps. The ground beneath Lab’s feet turned gray, then cracked, and garbage rolled in from the darkness like a pestilent flood. Rusted cars appeared, choking the streets. A sky formed—gray and dark and polluted. People too. They began to shuffle amid the growing city. They lay on the ground on street corners. They huddled in dank alleyways. Lab knew it well.
“My neighborhood—” he said.
“Look at your hands,” Rolabi instructed.
Lab did. Silver light was coursing through them. He yelped and stepped back, watching as the light streamed through his body. It moved like blood, splitting and fragmenting and meeting in great arterial streams. There was darkness too, right at his core, black as night.
“Grana doesn’t exist in buildings, Lab. Or cars. It lives in people.” Rolabi turned to the cityscape. The cars and the buildings dulled, becoming shadows, but the people themselves grew brighter. Each became a silvery spot of light in the gloom. “It is inside them,” he said quietly.
“What are you saying?” Lab asked, holding up a silvery hand.
“People die because they must. But they live the way they do because humans have distorted their own grana. The rich betray the poor. The strong, the weak. But they all have the power for more. They could change this. This is what they chose. They built it.” He turned to Lab, pointing at the dark core. “I told you: Grana originates with your emotions. When they sour, so does the grana.”
Rolabi took a step toward him. His eyes were blazing like flickering green fire.
“If you don’t like what you see out there, change it. If we change our perspective, our emotional landscape, then the real world may just change with it. That is how we fix all this.”
Lab cowered under the force of his gaze. “I’m a kid. I can’t do anything.”
“We will see about that.”
Lab found himself back in line, his team around him, huffing and gasping for air.
“You gonna shoot, Lab?” A-Wall asked, prodding him with a finger.
Lab looked around and checked his hands for silver light. They were back to normal: walnut skin, freckles on the back, fingers soft and unworked. He cleared his throat and straightened, nodding.
“Yeah,” he managed. “Sure.”
Lab accepted the pass from Rolabi and walked slowly toward the net, trying to catch his breath. He kept seeing the silver pulses and those fiery eyes. Rolabi’s words reverberated in his head.
Change it.
Lab pushed the thought away. Before anything else, he needed to make this shot. He dribbled and looked up at the rim, almost nervously. There was a plain hoop staring back at him. Taking another deep breath, Lab lifted the ball to shoot. Then a man appeared in front of him.
He had a thick beard spotted with scraps of food, including part of a chicken bone. His hair was long and tangled; his clothes, tattered. A round belly stuck out over his pants, which were held up with a frayed rope. The man smiled, and his teeth were like kernels of corn, yellow and spotted with brown. His eyes were the same, though. Lab knew them well. They were his own.
“You ain’t ever gonna make it,” the filthy man said, still wearing that crooked smile that Lab knew he gave Peño sometimes. “You gonna let them all down. You belong in the Bottom.”
Lab yelped and shot the ball out of reflex. It rebounded off the back iron and bounced away, and the man was gone. No, not the man. Lab in the future: homeless and alone.
You could get your wish. No one to let down.
Lab stood at the free-throw line, shaking. He walked back to the team in silence, trying to clear the man’s weathered face from his mind. The group started running again, and Lab pushed his feet to move, trying to leave the vision behind him.
Vin, Big John, and Twig missed shots one after another. Each time, the team had to run again, making their way through the bizarre obstacles. Lab was barely able to keep upright—his legs had grown leaden, and his head was swimming. Finally, Reggie managed to hit a free throw, and the team mumbled a feeble cheer.
“Water break,” Rolabi said. “Bring your bottles over here.”
Lab grabbed his bottle and joined the seated circle, his mind still on the vision. If he was creating them as Rolabi claimed, why couldn’t he make nice ones? Where were the visions of glory and trophies and his father lounging in a hammock on a beach somewhere? How could Lab make those?
The grana flows from your fears. Your needs. You must face the darkness before you can hope to understand it.
I don’t want to! Lab thought.
So you choose what seems easy.
Lab rubbed his forehead. It was a strange sensation to speak through thought: he had to focus and verbalize and quiet all the noise that usually rampaged around his brain. He was amazed he could do it so easily. Was it true? Was there . . . grana coursing through him? Through all of them? And if it was, why find out about it now? How had Rolabi unlocked that potential?
You will learn.
Rolabi pulled a potted daisy out of his bag and stared at it thoughtfully.
With a flower? Lab thought, frowning.
I can think of nothing better.
Lab sighed and settled in. He let his mind wander. That was easy for him, at least. Peño couldn’t sit still for more than a few minutes—he was already fidgeting—but Lab didn’t mind silence. Most nights he lay in his bed and stared at the stucco ceiling, making shadow shapes with his hands in the glow of his night-light, while Peño snored across the room.
Twice, his father had removed the night-light, and twice Lab had panicked in the blackness.
“What’s to be scared of in the dark?” his dad had said. “It’s the best time of day.”
“You can’t see anything,” Lab had replied.
“So?”
“So you don’t know what’s coming.”
His dad had snorted. “So you’re scared of life. That’s a bigger problem.”
Still, when Lab went to his room that night, the night-light was back in its usual spot, and his dad never tried to take it away again.
Even with the comfort of the night-light, staying still and thinking wasn’t always easy. Sometimes at night, Lab’s mind went places he didn’t want to go, and he relived memories that were better left in the past. They started to appear now, and Lab tried to focus on basketball.
Lab goes to the outside, gets the ball, the buzzer goes down . . . shoot it . . . shoot it . . . The ball sticks to his hands. He can’t take the shot. The fans are going wild. Shoot it . . . shoot it . . . shoot it!
He blinked the image away. The silence dragged on, and soon Lab grew uncomfortable. Peño looked ready to explode. His fingers were twitching.
“What part of the body moves first?” Rolabi asked, breaking the silence.
What does this have to with the flower? Lab thought testily.
It has to do with time.
We’re wasting time, Lab thought.
Oh, no. We are building more of it.
Lab scowled and folded his arms. He was talking in his head. He was staring at a flower. He was doing everything Rolabi asked of him, and all he got were cryptic half answers and judgments and lectures. It wasn’t fair.
Then change the rules.
Stop that! he thought, and even in his mind, his voice sounded shrill.
“And how are we supposed to get more time?” Rain asked.
“By watching the flower grow. Water bottles away. We have o
ne more lesson today.”
Rolabi began to walk in a circle around the gym, reaching into his bag and tossing out random items. It was enough stuff to fill the bed of a truck. In moments, an entire obstacle course had taken shape around the gym. Lab had never seen so much equipment—all brand-new.
He wondered for a moment where Rolabi came from, where he went after practice.
The Kingdom of Granity, he recalled, thinking back to the contract.
The name stirred something again. That half-remembered song from his mother. He tried to think. There had been a place called Granity. And the cup—it had the power to fix something. He looked away, mouthing the words. So they came from away, and for peace, they all played . . .
The voice rose up in him, soft and lilting, and he pushed it away as his eyes burned.
Rolabi gave instructions for completing the circuit and told the team to begin.
Rain reached down to pick up a ball, grabbed his right wrist, and started to scream. Like dominoes, one player after another looked down and shrieked along with him. Lab looked down as well, almost reluctantly. His right hand, his good hand, was gone.
“What is this?” Big John shouted, his eyes bulging.
“An exercise in balance,” Rolabi said with infuriating calm. “Proceed.”
Everything seemed to collide at once. The gym and the grana and the visions—it had been pushing Lab toward an edge he hadn’t seen. And now his hand was gone. Rolabi had taken a piece of him, and he didn’t have much to spare. Lab marched out of line, temper boiling over.
“No!” he said. “This is too much. The other stuff . . . fine . . . but this is messed up!” He started for the bench and then whirled back, gripping his wrist. “And give me back my hand, you wack job!”
“If anyone leaves the practice without cause, they are off the team permanently.”
Rolabi’s tone of voice was the same as ever: even and calm. But the words hung in the air, and Lab paused, hearing the threat even through the pounding in his ears. Not even a threat—a certainty. He turned back.
Peño would come with him, surely.
“I can see your hand,” Peño said. “It’s right there.”
Lab looked down. “No, it isn’t. I’m the only one who lost it!”
And that was true. Everyone else still had their hands. They were all gripping their wrists, cradling them to their chests, but the hands were there. Lab paused, taking in the scene. Of course they couldn’t see their own hands. They had been screaming. And they could see his. The missing hands were just another illusion.
Lab felt dizzy, trying to process. They were doing this to themselves—that’s what Rolabi had said. Which meant . . . they needed to lose their hands? Why on earth would that be?
“This isn’t possible,” he said, feeling his knees wobble.
Why? Why would he need to lose a hand?
You are finally starting to see.
“Possibility is notoriously subjective,” Rolabi replied. “Shall we begin?”
“Just come play,” Peño said, looking straight at Lab.
Lab stood there, his eyes flicking from one player to another, and then to Rolabi.
If you quit, everything stays the same.
I’m fine with that— Lab thought.
Are you?
Lab turned away. He thought of his father and their run-down house. Of the hollow feeling in his stomach. Grasping for happiness that wasn’t there. Stuck in memories that wouldn’t fade. Wondering sometimes, most of the time, if it was worth pushing through at all. The coldness intensified. His skin prickled.
It would be easier to give up, he thought.
Yes, the voice agreed. And that’s how you know it would be wrong.
Lab blinked back sudden tears. He looked at his one remaining hand. He wanted to play ball. He needed to play. It was the last thing that made sense. He walked back into the line.
And so the road begins.
Lab was the last to start the circuit, and by the time he dribbled toward the first hoop, shouts, falls, and frustration were everywhere. He didn’t fare much better than his teammates. His left hand was uncoordinated, though stronger than Peño’s. He botched layups, lost the ball through cones, missed passes, and airballed shots. He figured it was just a bad start, but the next round was the same. So were the third and fourth. Lab managed to plunk A-Wall in the side of the head with a wayward pass. The drill was a complete disaster. When it finally ended, Lab doubled over, wiping his sopping face. He was drenched, and he could taste the acrid salt.
“Can we have our hands back now?” Rain asked hopefully.
“Tomorrow we will be working on our defense. They will be helpful then,” said Rolabi.
Lab turned to him. “Wait . . . we don’t get them back tonight? Professor?”
Rolabi was heading for the nearest cinder-block wall, though there wasn’t a door within fifty feet. Lab was about to say something when the lights flashed and then switched off. Wind roared in from nowhere, and Lab stared at the impassable wall as the fluorescent lights flicked on again. Rolabi had vanished, and silence descended on the gym.
“Okay,” Peño said, “I think maybe we should talk to Freddy. Rain?”
Rain nodded. “It’s time to fire Rolabi.”
Lab looked between them, surprised. Fire Rolabi? It was what he had wanted . . . wasn’t it? If they got rid of Rolabi, this grana business might go too. Things would return to normal, which was exactly what Lab had asked for. He looked around the gym. Old and run-down and fading.
For a second, he saw silver light coursing through his teammates again, feeding into the place, connecting with one another like bursts of static electricity. He blinked and the image was gone.
Lab went to the bench and ran his left hand through his hair. It had gotten long again, and now it was soaked, and he knew it was probably standing on end, making him look almost as crazy as he felt. He stared down at his flat wrist. There was silver light there too, forming a perfect hand. Lab sighed and awkwardly kicked his sweaty shoes off.
“Still think this ain’t magic?” Vin asked, plunking down beside him.
Lab glanced at him and recalled the grainy video he had seen in another vision. The bullies and the nervousness for his brothers and the stealing from his father’s store. Vin had issues too—in fact, Lab wasn’t sure he would make that trade after all. With Vin or Twig.
“It’s magic, all right,” Lab said. He paused. “Listen, uh, if you ever have stuff going on, you know we’re here, right? Like, you can talk to me and Peño. Or anyone.”
Vin frowned. “Yeah . . . sure. I know. Why?”
“Just in general. And no, a missing hand doesn’t count.”
Vin laughed, and a voice spoke in Lab’s head, nearly at a whisper.
And in the gloom, a distant light appears.
LAB SAT DEJECTEDLY on the home bench, staring at the empty space where his right hand used to be. He still couldn’t get used to the sight. By now he’d confirmed that everyone else could see it but him, even his dad. Lab had waited up for him—he got home after midnight again—and shared some leftover casserole, pointedly using his left hand to dig out an awkward scoop and sticking his right wrist out on the table. His dad never mentioned it. He just shoveled the food down like a starving man and asked about their training.
“Great,” Lab muttered. “I think the other guys want to fire Rolabi, though.”
“Why?” his dad asked, fork paused midway to his mouth.
Lab wanted to tell him everything. But how? His dad was about as likely to believe in magic as Lab had been. He would probably just tell Lab to get more sleep, or eat better, or do more homework. Homework was his usual answer for everything—even during summer break.
“Personality conflicts,” Lab murmured.
“Personality?” his dad said. “Wh
at does that have to do with basketball?”
Lab rolled his eyes. “It helps if people get along.”
“It helps if people do their jobs,” his dad replied. “Getting along can come later.”
They finished and went to bed, and Lab lay there most of the night. When he finally did sleep, it felt like he had just closed his eyes when sunlight was streaming in and Peño was yanking him out of bed by his ear. Lab stumbled up and brushed his teeth with one hand. Got dressed with one hand. Ate some stale oatmeal with one hand. It was difficult, awkward, and annoying—especially with Peño there. He almost seemed to enjoy it. He kept saying it was a challenge and a chance to strengthen their weaker sides and a bunch of other peppy nonsense. It reminded Lab of the fact that he might very well be doing this to himself, which made the frustration even worse.
The two of them were sitting on the end of the bench now. Another attempt at a knot slipped out of Lab’s shoelaces. He leaned back and sighed.
“I don’t like you right now,” Lab murmured, glaring at his brother.
Peño was trying to tie his shoes as well, and making a complete mess of it. “We’ll get them back today.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he said we would.”
“Peño, we are talking about a crazy person.”
“I’m not so sure he’s crazy. Just magical. Besides, Freddy is coming today.”
“Are you not hearing yourself? You want to fire the dude that has our hands?”
“When he leaves, the hands will come back.”
“How are you so okay with this?” Lab demanded.
Peño sighed and turned to him. “What do you want me to do, Lab? It’s magic.”
“Magic isn’t supposed to exist. Remember?”
“Well, it does. And I think that’s kind of cool—missing hands aside. Don’t you?”
Cool? Obviously, Peño hadn’t experienced the same visions. He hadn’t seen her. He hadn’t been on a sinking boat. Lab was being subjected to the real grana—the one Rolabi seemed to be describing. The fear and the questions and the darkness. That’s what this “magic” was for.
“You sound like a child,” Lab said.
