“Oh,” I said.
“It doesn’t sound like fun, though. It sounds like practice last night, except without the basketball. Just the work. You want to go? We can give you a ride.”
Yes, I wanted to go. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that Adria, my best friend, was going. And she was going with Kate, our new friend, who would now be better friends with Adria, and I definitely wanted to go. But I also knew exactly why I couldn’t. Taking care of Sam after school might save enough money to pay for the Action, but there was no way I could ask Mom to pay for anything else.
That’s not what I said to Adria, though. To Adria, I said, “I don’t think so.”
“Yeah, I don’t want to go, either.” Adria slid down in the seat and rested her head against the back. “But I guess I’m going. I’ll tell you what it’s like if I’m alive tomorrow.”
We sat in silence for a couple of stops, watching kids board the bus, clomp down the aisle, and drop into seats.
“You think Coach was just trying us out in different positions last night?” I said. “You think he’s going to move us back to our regular positions?”
“I don’t know.” Adria glanced sideways at me. “Like he said, he can’t move everybody back to their regular positions.”
“He’s got to move me back, though. Your dad’s always said I was the best point guard in all of county league.”
“Yeah, but, you know, he’s my dad.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, of course he said we were the best. He’s my dad.”
“Adria, what are you saying? We both made the all-star team three years in a row. Everybody thought we were the best.”
“Yeah, but…” Adria fiddled with the zippers on her backpack. “Remember how we always said a lot of girls in county league were good athletes, but they weren’t really basketball players? They just played basketball in the winter to stay in shape for soccer or lacrosse.”
“Yeah.”
“So what I mean is, well…” She sat up and turned in the seat to look at me. “Have you really watched Maura play? She’s an incredible ball-handler. We’ve never seen anyone who could do a spin dribble like her. Or pass the ball behind her back.”
I leaned against the window. “Yeah.”
“And Kim-Ly is so fast. She can push the ball up the court faster than anyone.”
“She doesn’t shoot very well, though,” I said. “Or drive to the hoop.”
“So, see? That’s probably why Coach wants you to be a shooting guard. You do those things way better.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I mumbled, but that wasn’t what I was thinking. What I was thinking was, who cared if I was a better shooter than Kim-Ly or Maura? All shooting guards did was stand around and wait for the ball to come to them. Point guards led the team. They made everybody else better by running the right plays and getting the ball to the right person. That’s why Adria’s dad said point guards were the most important players on the floor.
And I’d always been the point guard.
“Hey, I’m playing a new position, too,” Adria said. “I’ve never played forward before. I’ve always been a center.”
“But you want to play forward.”
“Still, I have to learn a lot of new things,” Adria said. “It’s kind of scary.” She looked at me sideways. “It’ll be fun, though, don’t you think?”
I bunched up the sides of my sweatpants with my fingertips. “I don’t know.”
The bus slowed, pulled into our school parking lot, and stopped. Adria and I grabbed the back of the seat in front of us and pulled ourselves up. We hobbled down the aisle, shuffling along with the other kids.
Adria was in front of me, and when she got to the steps, she crow-hopped down the first two, leaning on the handrail and jumping down on one foot, then bringing the other foot down on the same step. I tried to do the same thing, but the kid behind me said, “Move it,” and gave me a shove that knocked me into Adria.
She stumbled down the last step and took two awkward steps before catching her balance. But just as she straightened up, I staggered out of the bus and crashed into her again. She fell forward, hitting the asphalt on her hands and knees. All the kids getting off our bus laughed, and all the kids getting off the other buses laughed, and I grabbed Adria’s arm to help her up.
“I’m sorry,” I said about eighteen hundred times, and Adria said, “It’s all right. It’s not like you did it on purpose.”
Which proved what I already knew—Adria was a really nice person, and I was a jerk.
Because, you know, maybe I didn’t reach my hand out fast enough when she lurched forward, maybe I didn’t try quite hard enough to catch her before she went down, and maybe that was because… because some people get to go to strength-and-conditioning classes and improve their vertical leap and hang out with a new friend and play forward instead of center like they always wanted to. And other people, well, other people have to be shooting guards.
Things didn’t get a lot better after that.
For one thing, I had to haul myself up a long flight of stairs to get to my first class, and when I came back down to the first floor for my second class, the stairs had somehow grown to be twice as long. I hung on to the handrail, crow-hopping down each step, my thigh muscles screaming, and the kids behind me hollering at me to hurry up and get out of the way. And then, oh boy, I got to climb all the way back up to the second floor for third period.
By the time I limped into science, I truly felt like roadkill. I climbed onto my lab stool, propped my elbows on the table, dropped my head into my hands, and groaned.
“What happened to you?” Booker said.
I peeked sideways at him. “Basketball practice. I’m a little sore.”
“What position do you play?”
I stared at him now. Had he somehow figured out the worst possible question to ask? “Guard,” I said. Not point guard. Just plain old, nothing-special guard.
Booker shook his hair back from his face. “Looks like you play floor.” He pointed at the inside of my right forearm, where JJ’s heel print stood out in vivid purple and red, complete with the little zigzags of her shoe tread. “How’d that happen?”
So I told him all about JJ getting intense and showing great effort, which turned out to be funny in the retelling, especially about JJ’s mom with her laser-beam eyes, and especially when Adria leaned over from her lab table and threw in how mad JJ looked when I sank the three-pointer at the end of practice. But that also wasn’t funny, because it reminded me that Adria was a nice person and I wasn’t.
“Wow!” Booker rocked back on his lab stool. “You can shoot threes?”
For a second, I thought about telling the same not-quite lie I’d told Mr. Nyquist. “Uh, well, actually,” I said, “that was the first one I ever made.”
Booker grinned. “You picked the right time to sink one.”
“Nikki and Booker!” Mr. Bukowski said. “Do you plan to chat all morning or are you ready to join us?”
“Sorry,” we said together.
Mr. Bukowski started his lecture—Gregor Mendel and his pea plants and the beginnings of genetics—and we all opened our notebooks to take notes. Then Mr. Bukowski handed out a worksheet with these charts called Punnett squares and explained how we were supposed to use them to figure out what pea plant offspring would look like, based on the dominant and recessive genes of their pea plant parents.
Instantly, the room filled with noise, everybody talking and sharpening pencils and shuffling papers around. Mr. Bukowski wandered through the classroom, helping kids and answering questions.
When he got to Booker and me, he said, “You’ve told me your genetics project topic, haven’t you, Booker?”
“Yes, sir,” Booker said.
Mr. Bukowski nodded. “Okay, good.” He turned to me. “How about you, Nikki? Have you thought of a topic?”
“Um…” My face got hot. I didn’t want to tell Mr. Bukowski that I had
n’t thought about it at all, but finally I said, “Well, not really.”
“Any ideas?”
Booker spun around on his stool to face Mr. Bukowski. “Don’t you think Nikki should do her project on her eyes?”
Mr. Bukowski looked at Booker, his eyebrows raised. “Gee, Booker,” he said. “I believe I was asking Nikki for her ideas.”
“Sorry.” Booker turned and looked at his paper, then spun back around. “But Nikki’s eyes are really interesting, don’t you think? There has to be some kind of genetic thing going on to make someone’s eyes come out two different colors, doesn’t there?”
Mr. Bukowski adjusted his glasses. “Well, Booker, at the risk of insulting Nikki by talking about her instead of to her, yes, there is some kind of genetic thing that leads to heterochromia iridis, which, as you can probably guess, is the scientific term for the coloring of Nikki’s eyes. But it could be that Nikki doesn’t find her eyes all that interesting. It could be that after thirteen years, she’s gotten used to them and wishes people would stop talking about them.”
“Oh.” Booker looked from Mr. Bukowski to me, then back, then back again. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to… I mean, I wasn’t trying to… I mean… Sorry, Nikki.” He spun around, whipping his hair across his face, and hunched over his worksheet.
“It’s okay, Booker,” I said. “It doesn’t bother me.” Which, you know, was a total lie, because I hated it when people talked about my eyes. But it was hard to be annoyed at Booker.
Mr. Bukowski patted Booker’s shoulder. “We’re all glad you’re so enthusiastic about science.”
Booker nodded his head about a quarter of an inch and scrunched up his shoulders.
“Now,” Mr. Bukowski said, “have you come up with any ideas for your project, Nikki? Any questions about genetics you’d like to find answers to?”
I shook my head. “No, but—” I remembered something my mom said. “Mr. Bukowski, is there a sports gene?”
“A sports gene?”
“Yes.”
“You mean a single gene that makes people good or bad at sports?”
“Um, well, I don’t know what I mean. My mom said I must have inherited ‘the sports gene,’ but not from her.”
“Ah.” Mr. Bukowski chuckled. “I suspect your mother was using that expression more as a figure of speech than as a scientific reality. But, of course, we do inherit our body types from our parents—the length of our legs, the width of our shoulders, and so on. And the size and shape of our bodies certainly affects our innate ability at sports. You don’t see people who look like me playing professional football, for example, do you?”
How could I answer that? I mean, obviously I couldn’t say, No, you look like an Albert Einstein bobblehead, and Albert Einstein bobbleheads don’t play pro football. One, that would be mean. And two, it would be stupid, duh—Mr. Bukowski graded my work. I thought for a minute. “You could be a field goal kicker.”
Mr. Bukowski looked at me, his mouth half open like he was about to say something, then he smacked the lab table with the flat of his hand, bent over, and shouted these great big “HA-HA-HA” laughs.
All the kids in class turned to look at Mr. Bukowski laughing so hard, which was a pretty funny thing to see all by itself, but it was even funnier if you were also trying to picture him in shoulder pads and tight little football pants, running up to kick a field goal.
He finally stopped laughing and stood up. “Field goal kicker,” he said. “Can’t believe I never thought of that. You think I’m too old to start?”
“Um,” I said.
“Never mind, never mind.” Mr. Bukowski took off his glasses, wiped them on a handkerchief he pulled out of his pocket, put them back on, glanced at my worksheet, pointed at one of my answers, and said, “You might want to recheck that.” Then he looked at me. “In any case, I think you’ve asked an interesting question, one that’s certainly worth exploring. Why don’t you do a little research, see if you can narrow your topic, then we’ll talk again. One way or another, you’ve got to have your topic by the end of the week, okay? Remember, this is half your grade for the quarter. You need to get busy.”
He tapped the lab table with his knuckles, readjusted his glasses, and cleared his throat. “Field goal kicker,” he said. “Can’t wait to tell my wife about that.” He leaned forward, looking around Booker’s hunched-up shoulders at his worksheet. “Good work, Booker,” he said, then moved on to the kids at the next lab table.
You know that sound people make when they’re trying not to laugh, trying to hold their mouths shut tight, but finally can’t hold it in anymore? That sound you can’t spell, but if you could spell it, it would be something like Ppppbbbbfffftttt?
Well, the second Mr. Bukowski walked away, that sound exploded from the mouths of Booker and the other two kids at our lab table, Sunil and Laura. Which, of course, made me laugh, which, also of course, made my abs shriek with pain.
“Ow, ow, ow,” I said, holding my stomach. “It hurts to laugh.” And I told them about Coach Duval’s evil basketball-dribbling sit-ups and planks.
Which made them laugh harder.
Then Booker cupped his hands around his mouth to make his voice sound like a sports announcer, except not loud like a real sports announcer, and said, “The kick is up! It’s up and it’s good! Mr. Bukowski wins the game!”
Which made us all laugh even harder, which meant—big surprise—none of us finished our worksheets. Which meant—another big surprise—extra homework that night.
Booker
I should have started on my homework as soon as I got home from school that day, because even without the science worksheet I hadn’t finished in class, I had a ton of work to do. Plus I had to come up with a topic for my genetics project. But it was my last week of after-school freedom before I started taking care of Sam, so instead of digging into my homework, I dumped my backpack on my bed, threw a fist pump at Mia, and headed out to the driveway.
I worked on ball-handling for a while, dribbling two balls at once, crossing them back and forth, then sitting on the driveway and dribbling fast with just my fingertips, because maybe if I got better at all that, Coach would see I should be a point guard. Also it helped my muscles loosen up.
But you can only spend so much time dribbling before it gets boring, so I did my regular shooting warm-up, the ball poised on my left hand, my right hand behind my back, powering up with my legs, extending my arm, holding my follow-through, and…swish. One.
I corralled the ball and did it again, but this time the ball touched the rim before falling through. Didn’t count. I did it again. Swish. Two. And again. Swish. Three.
A lot of girls hated form-shooting. Even Adria. She thought it was stupid. But I liked the way it made me focus on one thing and work to get that one thing exactly right. And I loved feeling the shot—the energy rushing up from the balls of my feet, through my ankles and legs, right up my spine to my shoulder and forearm, and out through the tip of my index finger. Like a zing of electricity whipping through me. Like finding “the zone” when I was playing a game, every thought and distraction falling away.
I caught my ball again and kept going. Three swishes in front of the hoop, then three on the right side, three on the left, then back in front of the hoop, a step farther back, with the ball poised on my left hand, and powering up, and letting it fly, and…clang. Didn’t count. Clang. Didn’t count. Swish. One.
“You always shoot one-handed?”
I spun around. Booker stood at the end of the driveway, holding the handlebars of his bike.
“Where’d you come from?”
He looked over his shoulder. “Uh, the street?”
“I mean, what are you doing here? I mean… Geez, you scared me.”
“Sorry.” Booker swung his leg off his bike and walked up the driveway. “So do you always shoot like that? One-handed?”
“No, it’s just the way I warm up.” I picked up my ball from where it had rolled onto the grass.
“Oh. Why?”
“Why, what?”
“Why do you do that?”
“So I’ll have good shooting form.”
“Oh.” Booker squinted up at our old hoop.
I rotated my ball around my waist. “Do you play basketball?”
“Yeah,” Booker said, which made sense, because he was at least a head taller than me. And skinny, really skinny. “I like soccer and baseball better, though. I like being outside.” He rolled his bike back and forth. “My folks haven’t had a chance to sign me up for any teams here yet. Since we just moved.”
So then we stood there being awkward, not saying anything, until I finally said, “How’d you know where I live?”
“I didn’t. But I live a couple of blocks away and I was out riding around. I saw you out here.” He looked at the street, up at the hoop, then back at me. “How come you’re not doing a family tree?”
“What?”
“A family tree. You know, for the genetics project.”
“Oh, well…” I shrugged. “I’d rather do something else.”
Booker laughed. “You’re kidding, right? You’d rather do some big research report instead of calling up your relatives and asking them what kind of earlobes they have?”
I spun the ball on my finger. “Yeah, well… maybe. What about you? Why aren’t you doing a family tree?”
“Me?” Booker kicked at the front tire of his bike. “I’m not in touch with my relatives.”
“Why not?”
Booker crossed his arms, letting the bike tilt over against his hip. He shook his hair back from his face. “You really want to know? Or just making conversation?”
“I want to know,” I said. “Since you brought it up.”
“I guess I did, didn’t I.” He glanced at his watch. “Okay, well, my parents are in prison and—”
“What? Oh no! What happened?”
Booker jammed a hand into his pocket. He stared down at the driveway and pushed a pebble around with his foot. “My parents were drug dealers. Addicts, too.”
“Oh, gosh. Um, how old were you when they went to jail?”
“Kindergarten.”
Nikki on the Line Page 7
