Home Games

by Benjamin Markovits

MS. KAMINSKI HAS PROMISED to announce who’s going to be on the Number Sense team. We’ve spent the past few weeks practicing. Every day, for the last ten minutes of class, Ms. Kaminski calls out math questions and we hand in our answer sheets at the end of the period—she writes down our scores in one of those heavy grade books with ruled lines. Pete’s still sitting next to me, but I don’t bother covering up my answers. I don’t even look at him.

  She makes us wait until the end of the period before telling us to put away our books. “Our first competition is next month,” she says, standing as usual with her feet together in front of her desk. “But we’ve got some work to do before that. Kids from all over the city are going to be competing. I know a lot of you signed up for this and want to go. It breaks my heart we can only pick three of you, but that’s just how it is. . . . So, I’m just going to say the names, without more ado. Laura Kirkup, Pete Miller, and Ben Michaels. I know all of you are going to want to wish them good luck . . .” and then the bell rings, and that’s how quickly the whole thing happens, just like that. Everybody gets up to leave.

  For the past few days, I’ve stopped eating lunch in the cafeteria. I keep hoping Mabley will say something to me about it—we still ride together in the morning. But sometimes we don’t even talk at the bus stop. She has a lot of friends; she doesn’t seem to care who she sits next to. Sometimes she says to me, “See you at lunch,” as we drift off in separate directions in the hallway. But then on the bus ride home she doesn’t mention it. She always has a lot of things to talk about at the end of the day, mostly with other kids.

  Mom mentions it, though. Some of the teachers take their breaks outside, or they drive somewhere for lunch, and once she sees me eating my salami sandwich by myself on the picnic table under the big pecan tree. It’s getting cooler, so I keep my jacket on and eat quickly.

  She leaves the other teachers and walks over to me. “Hey, Ben. Everything okay?”

  “Hey, Mom. Sure. Why?”

  “I mean, you’re sitting out here by yourself. It’s kind of cold.”

  It’s weird how easy it is not to tell her stuff. “I guess I wanted some fresh air.”

  “Well,” she says, “if you’re going to eat lunch outside, you need to wrap up a little warmer when you leave the house.”

  Later that night, over dinner, Mom asks me: “Do you have any friends?”

  Granma has cooked chicken-fried steak with gravy and mashed potatoes. I always seem to be hungry these days. Anyway, it makes Granma happy to watch me eat.

  “Leave him alone,” she says. “He’s doing fine.”

  “I know he is.” Mom is using her teacher voice. “He’s doing great. But I just want to know what’s going on. I don’t see you hanging out much with the other kids in your grade.”

  We always eat supper in the kitchen, which has a bright yellow table that’s big enough for four people. If Granma has something in the oven, she can check on it without getting up from her seat. Tonight she’s baking an apple pie for dessert—I can smell it.

  “What would you count as a friend?” I ask. For some reason, I feel pretty angry with Mom. I mean, she’s the one who made us come to Texas. She’s the one Dad walked out on. Maybe it’s just because we have to sleep in the same room, because she teaches at my school. I need a little space.

  She looks at me, surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “You asked me if I had any friends, and I want to know what counts.”

  “A friend is somebody,” she starts to say, and then stops. “I’m not asking you to keep score.”

  “A friend is somebody,” Granma interrupts, “when you don’t have to wonder whether they’re a friend or not.”

  I have to think about this for a minute. “There are kids I talk to.”

  “When I saw you at lunch today,” Mom says, “you were eating by yourself.”

  “I talk to somebody on the bus.”

  “Well, why don’t you have lunch with him?” Mom asks.

  I don’t want to say it’s a her. “I didn’t feel like it today.”

  “How often don’t you feel like it?” Mom’s accent has changed since we moved from New York. Or maybe it hasn’t changed but it just sounds normal now. In New York it was always like she was pretending. She said “y’all” and stuff like that, just to make a point, I guess, but it was always like—it was like when she wears too much makeup, or something, and I feel like, it’s embarrassing. But over here she fits in fine; I’m the weirdo.

  “Most days,” I tell her. Then, to change the subject: “Granma, can I have some ice cream with my apple pie?”

  “Of course,” she says, “that’s what it’s there for.” But Mom makes a face.

  “What?” Granma makes a face back at her.

  Sometimes they act like that, like sisters; or Granma acts like she’s really Mom’s bratty teenage kid, and Mom is too strict. Like Granma and me are on the same team against her. She takes some ice cream out of the freezer and gets her scoop from the drawer. “I want some ice cream, too.”

  “I don’t want him eating too much junk,” Mom says.

  “This is good Texas ice cream.”

  “I just don’t want it to be a sign of something. Sometimes people eat too much when they’re not dealing with other stuff.”

  “You read too many magazines. It’s a sign that he’s growing is what it is,” Granma says.

  In the morning, as we walk to the bus stop, Mom says, “How come you don’t bug me about getting a phone anymore?”

  “What’s the point? You’re not going to give me one anyway.”

  “That never stopped you before.”

  “Well, that was before.” I kick a few leaves along the ground. It’s another cool day, cloudy, too. “Do you want me to bug you?”

  Mom puts her hand on my arm. “I want you to do something other than say fine and thank you and leave me alone, which is basically all that you say to me. You just climb into this hole whenever I’m around.”

  “No, I don’t.” But it’s true, which annoys me, too. “First you complain if I ask for a phone, and now you complain if I don’t. You’re driving me crazy.”

  “You sound like your father,” Mom says.

  We walk a little farther in silence. All the houses here have grassy front yards, and sometimes there’s a sidewalk, but sometimes there isn’t, and we have to walk in the road. Which doesn’t matter, because there are hardly any cars; we can kind of spread out. At the end of the block, Mom says, “I want you to want a phone. That seems like a normal thing . . . for us to fight about. Like, get off the phone, do your homework, stop talking to your friends.” I can see the corner where the bus stop is, just at the top of the rise.

  “Phones suck out your brains anyway,” I tell her.

  She usually carries one of my book bags if she walks me to the bus. At least until we get near, so the kids don’t think, Look at that kid. His mom still carries his bags. She stops now and gives it to me; I sling the satchel over my shoulder. “I’ll make a deal with you, Ben,” she says. “If you talk to somebody new today, I’ll give you a dollar.”

  “What am I supposed to buy with a dollar?”

  “Well,” she says, “if you talk to somebody new every day for a week, you’ll have five dollars.”

  “How will you know if I talk to somebody new?” I ask her.

  “Because you’ll tell me.”

  “What if I lie?”

  She gives me a don’t-be-silly look, a teachery kind of look. “You don’t lie, Ben. I know that.”

  “No,” I say. “That’s true. I don’t lie, and I don’t talk to people.”

  And I walk off to the bus stop by myself.

  But at lunch that day, I don’t want to sit at one of the picnic tables in case Mom comes out and sees me. So I wander around the grounds, looking for a place to eat where nobody can bother me.

  The school building is brand-new, but there used to be an old school in the same place. When they tore it down, they h
ad to rebuild everything, including the football field and the picnic area and the chain-link fence that keeps us from going into the street. But if you look closely, you can see leftover parts of the old school, like a water fountain or an old brick wall.

  Pennsylvania Avenue is the name of the street, which is funny, because that’s the address of the White House. I mean, where the president lives. Maybe that’s why they built the school out of white brick. There’s a parking lot by the side of it, and then a field, and you can see neighborhood houses over the road. It must be weird living right opposite the school. Some of the houses are small and look like they could use some paint. The roof sags or there are broken steps up to the porch. But others are in pretty good shape.

  We’re not allowed to leave the school grounds, but I can wander down to the football field—which is on a slope away from the school, so it always gets muddy in the rain. There’s no fence on that side, just a big road at the bottom, with some benches and a bus stop and a few trees. It’s far enough away that I can feel like I’m not even at school; nobody knows I’m here.

  That’s where I go today. There’s a wooden hut in a corner of the campus, which I have never been to. I walk across the football field to get there, but it’s still cold out; the field is empty. I reach the hut and notice that there’s a padlock over the door, but the hinges are loose. If you pull on the door a little, you can look inside. I see an armchair, an electric heater, and a television set sitting on a wooden crate. But nobody’s there.

  I walk around the hut, which is surrounded by trees. Some of them must have been too big to cut down—they seem to lean their branches on the roof. I find a bike rack under one of them, pretty rusty, with a lonely wheel still locked to one of the crossbars. On the other side of the tree I see a basketball court.

  It’s just a square of concrete, with a pole stuck in the ground at one end and a dirty backboard and a bent old rim and raggedy net. The court is covered in leaves. One of the tree branches grows so close to the backboard that you can only shoot at it from the side. Maybe that’s why I have never heard of anyone playing there. You can hardly see the basket unless you walk right up to it. The whole thing looks like part of the tree.

  But there’s a bench by the side of the court, and that’s where I have lunch.

  After that, I start going there every day. As soon as the lunch bell rings, I race to the cafeteria—well, as fast as I can, with my backpack and satchel—and stand in line with all the other kids to buy my carton of chocolate milk. Then I walk out the glass double-doors and lug my stuff over to the basketball court to eat. It’s a relief to put everything down on the bench, and take out my sandwiches, and just have twenty minutes to myself, without having to say anything or look at anyone or pretend like I’m paying attention.

  Eleven

  MS. KAMINSKI RUNS a homework club after school, and she expects everybody on the Number Sense team to come to it. There are a lot of kids there—it’s really just an after-school thing for kids whose parents don’t get home until later—but she tends to put us in a corner by ourselves, so we can practice. We’ve been doing this for a couple of weeks now, and the tournament is in just a few days. Pete almost never comes, because the basketball season has started, and they’ve got practice, too. But Laura Kirkup is there every day.

  Laura is very quiet; she’s one of these girls who kind of hides behind her hair. Her dad is supposed to be rich—I think he runs some IT company—but you’d never know from Laura. Her clothes are from Gap or Old Navy; she also wears a lot of University of Texas gear, like a Texas Science hoodie. Every time she talks outside of class, it’s like a surprise. You can tell she has a lot of private opinions.

  Sometimes Ms. Kaminski plays music while we work—she has a CD player on her desk. Mostly she just plays classical music, because it’s not “distracting,” she says, but once she put on the radio, just to see what was playing, and “Yesterday” came on. I never know any songs, but I know this one, so I said to Laura, “The Beatles,” and she said, “Yeah, I know.” I said, “My dad is living right around the corner from where they recorded all their songs. In London.” And she said, “I like the early stuff more. If you’re going to be cheesy, you should just go for it. Like, I want to hold your hand. You know . . .” and she sang the lyrics or sort of hummed them under her breath.

  I don’t really have any good opinions about music, so I didn’t say anything and that was the end of the conversation. I think she might be smarter than me—she’s very good at long division.

  When Pete shows up, he pretends to be incredibly enthusiastic. He compliments Laura a lot, and I can’t tell what she thinks of him—if she likes him or not. Sometimes I think she does, and sometimes I think she can’t stand him. She’s hard to read.

  Afterward, I catch the late bus home, which means I don’t ride with Mabley anymore. Dinner is usually on the table, then I do my homework and go to bed. It’s a pretty tiring day.

  At the beginning of November, we get this mini heat wave, where the leaves have mostly fallen but the skies are bright blue. It’s sunny and warm, like a nice spring day in New York. It’s lunchtime, and I’m sitting on the bench by the basketball court, when a voice behind me says, “What are you doing out here?”

  My heart jumps and I turn around. It’s the groundskeeper. I’ve seen him before from a distance, mowing the grass on his John Deere mower or lining the football field with white paint. But I’ve never talked to him. He has a clean bald head, which he probably shaves. His beard is going white, and he wears overalls that make it hard to tell if he’s fat or skinny.

  “Just having lunch,” I say. “Is that okay?”

  “I’m not going to stop you.” He looks like he’s going to walk away again, but then he doesn’t. “Where are your friends?”

  “I just like to eat by myself.” I don’t know if this sounds rude, so I add, “It gets really loud in the cafeteria.”

  But he’s not really listening. “Kids used to come out here all the time,” he says. He’s still looking at me like he doesn’t know what to do. “I used to keep a ball in the hut for them to mess around with. But they haven’t come in a while.” After that, he leaves me alone—he goes back to the hut.

  He shows up again the next day with a Spalding basketball in his hands—he pretends to pass it to me, suddenly. I reach out to catch it, and he laughs because he’s still holding on to the ball in one of his big hands.

  “You didn’t tell me your name,” he says.

  “I’m sorry. I’m Ben.”

  “No reason to be sorry, I didn’t tell you mine. It’s Sam.” He takes a shot and misses, then chases the ball down slowly—he’s wearing heavy boots. “I used to come out here, too,” he says. He tries again; this time it goes in. “Anyway, if you want to play, you can play,” he says and passes me the ball, bouncing it hard off the concrete surface of the court and into my hands.

  I expect him to walk away, but he just stands there. “What are you waiting for. Let’s see your jump shot,” he says.

  This makes me nervous. I’m standing about six or seven feet from the basket, and sort of throw the ball at the rim—it hits the front end and bounces off the backboard and slips through the net.

  “Not like that,” Sam says.

  He gets the ball and walks over to me. “Hold it like this,” he says, pushing my wrist back and placing the basketball on my palm. His hands are strong, and he’s got a tattoo on his forearm of an eagle dragging an anchor by the chain. “Point your elbow at the rim.” He shows me by going through the motion himself, bending his elbow and straightening it, while the wrist rolls over, and holding his hand out afterward in that position. “Now you try.”

  This time, when I shoot, the ball hits the rim and bangs away.

  “Better,” he says.

  For the next few minutes, that’s all we do—he watches me shoot and tells me what I’m doing wrong. “No, no, no,” he says, even if the shot goes in. “Not like that. Bend your leg
s. Jump straight up. Follow through.” He pushes my elbow into place, pointing it at the rim. It feels weird, like walking tip-toe in a line—trying to stay balanced. He makes me practice one-handed, too. “Your left hand’s got no business pushing the ball. It’s just a guide dog.”

  “But I’m not strong enough.” Every time I try to shoot it his way, the ball falls short.

  “Start close,” he says. “Do it right.”

  Sometimes, even when I miss, he tells me, Now we’re getting somewhere.

  “All right, kid,” he says at last. “Practice, that’s all it is. Just leave the ball under the bench when you’re finished.”

  And he walks back under the trees to the caretaker’s hut.

  For a minute, I watch him go, until he disappears around the corner, then I start shooting again. The ball is a little flat, I can hardly bounce it high enough to dribble. And every time I miss, it rolls into the leaves. But that doesn’t matter—I chase after the ball and shoot again. For some reason it calms me down just to do the same thing over and over. The last time I played basketball was in Jake’s kitchen in New York, with a foam ball, when we broke his mom’s mug . . . and afterward my dad marched me downstairs to tell Mrs. Schultz about it.

  Eventually the bell rings, far away. I’ve forgotten about school and it takes me a second or two to realize where I am. Then I roll the ball under the bench and pick up my bags—the backpack first, and then the satchel over my shoulder—and walk across the football field to class.

  At lunchtime the next day I go back. All the leaves have been swept, and when I finish my sandwiches and look under the bench, I notice that Sam has pumped the ball up, too. Shooting on that court isn’t easy, though. On one side, you can’t shoot at all, because of that tree branch. But even on the other side, a telephone wire has started to sag, and you have to shoot over it.

  That doesn’t bother me. I was always better than Jake at shooting a basketball, and sometimes I talk to him in my head. I turn everything into a conversation. There’s this tournament next week. I’m on a kind of math team, and this kid called Pete Miller copied my answers to get in. . . . But then I realize, Jake and Pete would probably get along pretty well. They both like to—not pick fights exactly, but just talk, and get things started, and see what happens. If I hadn’t lived in the same apartment building as Jake, we would never have been friends, because I’m not the kind of person he usually likes. He’d know what to say to Mabley, too, if she sat next to him on the bus. Jake can look after himself. All these kids would probably like him better than they like me.