I gave all the girls a questionnaire to take home and fill out with their parents’ heights, which they all did, except Mary Katherine, who promised to text me her parents’ heights. I gave the same questionnaire to the girls on my basketball team, but Linnae and Autumn were the only ones who gave them back to me at the next practice. Everyone else had forgotten to take them out of their gym bags.
This project was turning out to be a lot more trouble than I’d expected.
Taking care of Sam was a lot more trouble than I’d expected, too, though since I’d spent eight years living with him, I don’t know why I was surprised.
Monday, my first official day of taking care of him, wasn’t too bad. I hung out in the driveway shooting until Sam’s bus rumbled past, then I dribbled the ball down the street toward the bus stop. Before I made it past two houses, the bus stopped, the safety patrol stepped out, and Sam exploded out the door. He flew up the street, his backpack slamming into his hips, his voice coming out in sharp bursts—“Nikki! Nikki! Guess what! Jeffrey got sent to the office for talking back to Miss Spraig. And Taylor got in trouble for not doing her homework. And Mr. Olivera said we don’t get to play dodgeball at recess anymore because Jack threw the ball really hard at Kritika and she fell and broke her arm. And—”
By that time he’d run right up against me, and I was covering my ears with my hands because he was yelling loud enough to be heard in five states.
“What’s wrong, Nikki?” Sam said. “Do your ears hurt?”
“You’re kind of loud.”
“Oh, sorry.” He dropped his voice to a whisper and we walked home. Or actually, I walked. Sam jumped and spun and skipped backward. “Kritika got a chartreuse cast. Isn’t that a great word? Chartreuse. But I didn’t get to sign it yet, because her Sharpie ran out of ink and I couldn’t find mine, so Taylor was going to let me use hers, but then she got in trouble.…”
He kept going like that all the way up the driveway and into the garage, until it occurred to me that if we tried to do homework right away, he wouldn’t be able to sit still long enough to get anything done, so I told him to drop his backpack and get on his bike, and we rode our bikes up and down the street five or six times.
So after Sam ran his battery down, we went inside, and I made popcorn and poured us some juice, and we sat down at the table with our backpacks. Sam showed me his assignments, and I told him to get started on the hardest one first and to ask for help if he had trouble. And since he had mostly math homework, which he’s good at, he only had to ask for help a couple of times, so he got his work all done, and I got mine half done before Mom got home, and we all felt good.
Tuesday was pretty much the same thing, Sam yammering a mile a minute all the way up the street, filling me in on the third-grade news. Then Booker rode by on his bike, so Sam and I got on our bikes, too, and we rode up and down the street with Booker, and that made Sam extra happy, because he got to tell Booker about Kritika’s chartreuse cast, which Sam finally got to sign, and all the other superexciting stuff that happened to him that day. I tried to tell Sam that Booker didn’t care about that stuff, but Booker said it was okay and told Sam about his own third-grade teacher who kept frogs and snakes in their classroom. And then when Mom got home, Sam just had to tell her about Booker and his third-grade teacher’s snakes, and Mom looked at me hard and said, “You know you’re not allowed to have friends here before I get home, Nikki.” And I had to say, “He wasn’t here-here. He was just riding by, so we rode up and down the street with him a couple of times.”
But, you know, if I’m totally honest, I have to say that we rode up and down with Booker a few more times than we really needed to, which meant I didn’t get all my homework done before basketball practice and still had math to do when I got home at nine thirty, feeling like roadkill again.
Wednesday, Sam had to start working on a report on George Washington, which meant he needed a lot more help with his homework. First of all, I had to explain to him that the Three Important Facts he’d written down (that George’s mother’s name was Mary, that he had a brother, and that his father died when George was a kid) were not actually very important and definitely not why we remember George Washington, and that Sam needed to read more than the first page of his book on George Washington to find out the important stuff.
Sam said the book his teacher gave him had too many big words, so then I had to read it with him and help him figure out the actual Three Important Facts, which meant we’d barely finished Sam’s homework by the time Mom got home, and I hadn’t started mine, which meant a long slog of homework ahead of me that night.
Thursday, Sam caught his foot on the step when he blasted out the door of the bus, skidded across the gravel at the side of the road, and got up with one cheek and both elbows pretty well shredded.
Oh boy.
Two of the moms at the bus stop rushed over to see if he was okay, but since Sam wasn’t crying—because who wants to cry when all the kids at the bus stop are looking at you?—the moms told me to make sure I cleaned all the cuts well (really?) and walked off with their own kids.
It took a long time to get him all washed off and covered in Bactine and bandages, and by that time it was too cold to go outside in just a T-shirt, and Sam didn’t want to pull a sweatshirt over his elbows, so we decided to play a video game for a little while before we started our homework. And since Sam beat me in the first game, we had to play another one, and unfortunately for us, we were still playing when Mom got home.
We both got in big trouble for that, except that Sam got in less trouble because he was all bandaged up and Mom felt sorry for him, and besides, I was supposed to be the Responsible One.
But worst of all, I hardly got any of my homework done before basketball practice, so when I got home after practice that night, I still had a page of algebra to do, another worksheet on Mendel and his pea plants, and a chapter on World War II to read in my history book. I fell asleep somewhere around the Battle of the Bulge, and Mom woke me up and told me to go to bed and try to finish my reading on the bus in the morning, and she hoped I’d Learned My Lesson.
And then, of course, in case my homework and my science project and taking care of Sam weren’t hard enough, there was basketball.
That second week of practice, in addition to an extra set of sprints and line drills and a thousand more planks and sit-ups while dribbling, we had to keep running the Rainbow Drill with the horrible, heavy yellow balls until we made ten layups in a row without missing. On Tuesday, after we’d shot about a hundred layups and missed half of them, we got all the way to nine in a row before I missed, and everyone groaned, and I guess Mr. Nyquist didn’t think I felt bad enough about that, because he slapped the bleachers and said, “Oh, for crying out loud, it’s just a layup,” not very loud, but loud enough for me to hear. It must have been loud enough for Coach to hear, too, because he turned and gave Mr. Nyquist a scary-looking frown. That made me feel a tiny bit better.
So then we shot about a hundred more layups before we finally made ten in a row.
You would’ve thought we’d just won the NCAA championship, the way we all jumped around and cheered and high-fived each other. Coach clapped his giant hands slow and loud and said he was glad he had a team that could tough out the hard stuff.
And then he proceeded to try to kill his team with more sprints and drills and scrimmaging, and then, of course, more sprints at the end of practice for every missed free throw.
Thursday’s practice wasn’t quite as hard because Coach said he didn’t want to wear us out before our first tournament that weekend. But we still had to make those deadly ten-in-a-row layups with the horrible, heavy yellow balls and we still had to do the evil sit-ups and planks. And with my arms aching and my abs tight and sore, I still had to focus hard during our scrimmage to remember where I was supposed to be when my team was on offense, because I still wasn’t a point guard.
And then, like I said, I had all that homework to do when I
got home after practice Thursday night because Sam and I had made the Very Poor Decision to play video games after school.
On Friday morning I dragged myself out of bed, dragged myself onto the school bus—and still didn’t finish reading about the Battle of the Bulge because I fell asleep with my head banging against the bus window—then I dragged myself up and down those endless flights of stairs at school. By the end of the day, when I finally dragged myself up our driveway and into the house, all I wanted to do was curl up on my bed and go to sleep. But, oh boy, in half an hour, Sam would launch from his bus like a fast-talking missile.
I looked up at Mia. “Are you ever this tired?” I asked her. “Are you ever so tired you hate everything?”
As usual, Mia didn’t have a lot to say, but it didn’t matter. I knew that anyone who played as hard as she did had to get really, really tired. But no matter how tired she got, no matter how much her muscles might ache, there was one thing I knew she never hated. She never hated basketball.
But standing there in the middle of my bedroom, just wanting to fall onto my bed and sleep forever and knowing I had to get up at six o’clock the next morning to make it to Baltimore in time for our first game, I wasn’t so sure about me.
Clueless
Sam had soccer tryouts that weekend, so Mom needed to stay home with him instead of going to Baltimore with me.
“I’m sorry to miss your first games with this new team,” she said Saturday morning. She stood behind me while I ate breakfast, brushing my hair and pulling it into a high ponytail, then weaving the ponytail into a tight braid, which was how I liked to wear my hair for games—a braid didn’t stick to my neck when I got sweaty.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said between bites of eggs and toast. “I can fix my hair in the car.”
“I know.” Mom kissed the top of my head and kept on braiding. “You’ve done a good job with Sam this week.”
“Except Thursday.”
She laughed. “Except Thursday.”
There was a knock on the side door, and Adria burst into the kitchen. “Ready?”
“Ready.” I jumped up from the table.
Mom handed me the lunch bag she’d packed. “What does your dad always say before games, Adria?”
“Play hard. Have fun.”
“Oh yes.” Mom gave each of us a quick hug. “Play hard. Have fun.”
“We will,” we called, running out.
Adria and I spent the first fifteen minutes of the drive talking about how great our Action team was and how we were going to kill all the other teams.
Then Mr. Lawson said, “Do you remember your first basketball game?”
“In second grade?” I said.
Adria turned around from the front seat. “I remember our team name.”
“The Hello Kitties!” we shouted together.
Mr. Lawson laughed. “I took a lot of ribbing about that from the other coaches. Especially from the woman whose team was named the Timber Wolves.” He glanced at Adria, then at me in the rearview mirror. “Do you remember anything about our first game, though?”
I said, “Not really.” And Adria said, “No.”
“Well, here’s what I remember,” Mr. Lawson said. “The game was complete bedlam. All the girls, both teams, ran around in a pack, grabbing the ball back and forth, maybe dribbling, maybe throwing the ball at the basket.” He glanced at us again. “But the three of us had already spent time working on your skills, remember? So, Adria, you knew how to bank the ball off the backboard to make a basket. It didn’t go in very often, but it did sometimes. None of the other girls knew how to do that.”
“Oh yeah!” Adria danced around in her seat.
Mr. Lawson glanced at me in the mirror again. “And, Nikki, the first time you put up a shot, I heard the other team’s coach say, ‘What the heck? That girl’s actually shooting.’”
Adria turned to look at me. We both shrugged, and she turned back to her dad. “What do you mean?”
“What I mean is, all the other girls threw the ball at the basket,” he said. “Just heaved it up with both hands, as hard as they could. You’d already begun to develop shooting form, Lefty.”
“Had I, too?” Adria said.
Mr. Lawson shook his head. “Not as much, but like I said, you’d learned how to bank the ball off the glass.”
Adria made a hmph kind of sound.
Mr. Lawson laughed, reached over, and patted her knee.
“Who won the game?” I said.
“We did,” Mr. Lawson said. “Eight to two. You each made two baskets, and a girl on the other team, by some miracle, made one.”
“Go, Hello Kitties!” Adria and I yelled.
We kept on like that all the way to Baltimore, laughing, talking about our county-league teams, remembering great plays we made and all those hours we spent practicing in the Lawsons’ driveway, which also made me think about all the hours I’d spent out in my own driveway, shooting on our old, rusty hoop.
When we finally got to the sports center where the tournament was being held, Mr. Lawson dropped Adria and me off in front of the gym while he went to park. We grabbed the handles of the big gym doors, yanked them open, stepped inside…
And froze.
Ten full-sized basketball courts, lined up two-by-two, stretched out in front of us, with ten games going on, full tilt, all at the same time. Twenty teams in twenty sets of colors raced back and forth across the courts, balls booming off the floor, referees’ whistles screeching, coaches yelling, parents cheering, and all that noise crashing up against the gym’s high ceiling and roaring straight back down. More teams swarmed around the sides of the courts, filled the bleachers, and streamed past on the running track that circled the courts, with parents and coaches and little brothers and sisters streaming past, too, bouncing balls, hauling ice chests, laughing and shouting and hollering at the little kids to not run off and get lost. And even though it was only eight o’clock in the morning, the air inside the gym was already hot and thick with pizza and popcorn smells pouring out of the snack bar and sweat rising from the courts.
My gym bag slipped from my shoulder and hit the floor. “How are we going to find our team?”
Adria took a full minute to answer. “Maybe just walk around looking for blue-and-orange jerseys?”
“Or maybe wait for your dad?”
“Good idea.”
So we stood there, watching and listening as all the people and colors and noise spun around us, until Mr. Lawson came in. He whistled through his teeth. “Looks like you girls have hit the big time. Come on, let’s find your team.”
We walked halfway around the gym before I heard someone call our names and looked up to see Kim-Ly, Maura, and Taj waving at us from the bleachers.
“Dude!” Maura hollered before we’d climbed up two steps. “Do you believe this?”
“See that red team?” Kim-Ly said. “I saw their jerseys. They’re from North Carolina, and that green team over there is from New York. And see that huge purple group with ‘Chargers’ on their warm-up jackets? They’re from Philadelphia. My cousin’s on their tenth-grade team.”
Jasmine and her parents came in, and Autumn climbed the bleachers holding up her hands, fingers spread, displaying her blue-and-orange fingernails, and her mom climbed up behind her, teetering on the narrow steps in a pair of hot-pink, pointy-toed high heels.
“Look what my mom got for us,” Autumn said, dropping her gym bag on a bench and pulling out ten pairs of orange-and-blue-striped shoelaces.
“Dude!” Maura whooped, jumping down three steps to grab a pair, her wild red curls flying out around her head. “These are the coolest!”
We thanked Mrs. Milbourne, all talking at once, checking out Autumn’s nails, relacing our shoes—all except JJ, who insisted on keeping her old, dirty white shoelaces because they were “lucky,” and besides, the striped laces were “girlie.”
Linnae came in with her parents. She sat down next to me and pulle
d a pair of padded elbow sleeves from her gym bag. “My mom’s making me wear these,” she said. “She saw you skin your elbows the other night, so now she thinks I’m going to get a floor burn and die.”
“Ohmygod,” Jasmine said. “Don’t let my mom see those. She’ll make me wear them, too.”
Kate came in with her dad. She waved at us and started up the bleachers, but her dad stayed down on the floor, talking to another man. Kate dropped down on a bench in front of Adria and me and groaned.
“Are you okay?” I said.
Kate shook her head. “See that man my dad’s talking to? The guy with the white hair and green shirt?”
“Yeah,” Adria and I said together.
“He’s a college scout. He evaluates high school players and writes a newsletter that college coaches read. My dad recognized him when we came in and asked him to watch me play.”
“But we’re only in eighth grade,” I said.
“Tell that to my dad. He says I need to”—Kate lowered the pitch of her voice to sound like her dad—“take every opportunity to get on the recruiters’ radar.”
“Why?” I said.
Kate looked back at me. “Because according to my dad, that’s what it takes to get a full ride at a big-time D1 program.”
I sat back. “What does that mean?”
Kate laughed. “Sorry. I forget everybody’s family isn’t totally obsessed with basketball scholarships.”
And Adria said, “Oh, Nikki, you know. Division One colleges are the big schools like UConn and Tennessee that you see on TV. They give full scholarships. Full rides.”
Nikki on the Line Page 9
