I guess Kate, her dad, and the other man hadn’t noticed me sitting there, because when I stood up, they all turned and looked at me. I smiled, gave a dumb little wave, and started walking away.
“Hey, Twenty-Three.” It was the recruiter’s voice.
I turned back.
“Heck of a pass.”
“Wasn’t that a great pass?” Kate said.
Mr. Nyquist scowled.
“Coach set up that play for Nikki,” Kate said. “She can make that pass every time.”
“Yeah?” the white-haired man said. “Don’t see many girls your age with the upper-body strength to make that pass. Not with any kind of accuracy. You play softball?”
“I used to,” I said.
“Give it up?”
I nodded.
“How come?”
“Um.” I glanced at Kate, who smiled back at me, then I glanced at her dad, who stared at the floor, scowling worse than ever. “Softball’s kind of slow.”
The white-haired man laughed. “Yeah, I gotta agree with you there. I’ll tell you what, though. You might wanna reconsider. Arm like that, not to mention on a lefty. Might turn some heads.”
“Oh,” I said, which was a totally lame thing to say. But what was I supposed to say?
The man chuckled some more. “Anyway, nice pass. You got a pretty shot, too. Just need to stay out of the trees.”
“Um, okay,” I said. “Thanks.” Which was also a dumb thing to say because I didn’t know what he was talking about—stay out of the trees? I gave another little wave and headed for the snack bar.
“If she’s smart, she’ll take your advice and go back to softball,” Mr. Nyquist said behind me. “Good arm, but the girl’s a black hole on the basketball court.”
“Dad! Shh,” Kate said.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “You know I’m right. Anybody can see a girl like her doesn’t belong in this league.”
Genetics Stinks
I didn’t join Adria and Mr. Lawson in the snack bar right away, because first I had to find a bathroom and lock myself in a stall.
A black hole on the basketball court. A black hole. A Black Hole.
Was I really, truly that bad? I mean, right before the game I found out from Kate and Adria that I knew nothing about college basketball. Was I clueless about club ball, too?
You know I’m right, Mr. Nyquist had said to Kate. Did she? Did she know I didn’t belong in this league? Did everybody?
I stood in the stall, shaking, pressing toilet paper to my eyes, blowing my nose about a thousand times, trying not to sound like I was crying, because I couldn’t stand the thought of every girl who came into the bathroom thinking I was a stupid crybaby on top of thinking I was a Black Hole.
But as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t stay in there forever—Adria had already texted me, asking where I was and if I was okay. (Yeah. In the bathroom, I replied). So finally, when I couldn’t hear anybody else in there with me, I got myself together, left the stall, and stood in front of a sink, splashing cold water on my face until my whole face was red, not just my eyes and nose. Then I found Adria and Mr. Lawson and sat down with them. I pulled my lunch out of my gym bag and tried to look normal.
“You okay, Lefty?” Mr. Lawson said. “You look like you don’t feel well.”
So much for trying to look normal. “I have a headache,” I said, which was true, but obviously not why I felt bad.
“Dehydration.” Mr. Lawson fished a blue Gatorade out of the little cooler he’d brought along and handed it to me. “Drink the whole thing. It’s hot in here, and you girls have never played a game at that pace before. You need to stay hydrated.” He handed a yellow Gatorade to Adria. “You too,” he said.
So I drank the Gatorade and tried to eat some of the turkey sandwich Mom had packed for me, and Adria and Mr. Lawson talked about her footwork, and when we got up to leave, Mr. Lawson patted my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, Lefty. The next game’ll be better.”
Which should have made me feel better, because it meant Mr. Lawson had noticed me struggling in the first game and was trying to give me a little pep talk. But it actually made me feel worse, because it meant that even Mr. Lawson, who’d spent the last six years teaching me to play basketball and the last three years telling me I was the best point guard in all of county league, even he thought I played like a Black Hole.
And on top of that, the next game wasn’t better. It was worse.
Because in addition to all the noise and the screeching whistles from the other courts and the game moving twice as fast as a county-league game, now I was also scared. Scared of doing more stupid stuff that would make my team lose. Scared of making my teammates hate me. Which made me play even worse.
And when I was on the bench, I sat there feeling like I might throw up, and instead of bouncing around in my seat, clapping and cheering and chomping at the bit to get back in the game, I sat there hoping Coach wouldn’t put me in. A hope I’d never, ever, ever had before.
And then, when I got home, I realized I’d spent so much time feeling awful between games, I’d completely forgotten about my genetics project and hadn’t measured my teammates. Which meant I could only do some of the work on my big poster-board graphs on Saturday night and would have to finish the whole huge project Sunday night.
Ugh.
Sunday morning, before I left for the tournament, I wrote measure across the back of my hand with a black marker. Then, between the first try-not-to-be-a-Black-Hole game and the second try-not-to-be-a-Black-Hole game, I reminded the girls about my project, and we all went over to the side of the gym so I could measure them. Kate and Adria helped, Adria pulling the tape measure up along the wall, and Kate laying a ruler flat across the top of each girl’s head and marking the spot where the ruler hit the tape measure.
Just like in class, it took longer than I thought it would, because most of the girls had their hair in ponytails or buns that got in the way of the ruler, so they all had to pull out their elastic bands and grumble about having to spend a bunch of time fixing their hair again. Plus about half the girls didn’t take their basketball shoes off between games, so they all had to grumble about taking their shoes off to be measured.
Kate was last. She took off her shoes and stood up against the wall, and Taj laid the ruler on Kate’s head, stretching up on her tiptoes to make sure it was level.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Mr. Nyquist’s voice said behind me.
I spun around.
He glowered down at me.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Kate said. “Nikki’s just measuring us.”
He shifted his gaze to her. “Put your shoes on.”
“I will as soon as Nikki finishes—”
“Put your shoes on now.” Mr. Nyquist didn’t raise his voice, but he might as well have roared, because his words hit hard and sharp as a knife.
Kate stepped toward her dad. “I’ll put them back on in a minute. As soon as—”
“Now!”
Her eyes teared up. She dropped her head, swiped the back of her arm across her eyes, grabbed her shoes, and shoved her feet into them.
Mr. Nyquist dropped his hands into the pockets of his khakis and rocked back on his heels. “You’re a basketball player, Kate. The only height that matters is your height on the court. And on the court, you have your shoes on.”
“This is just for my science project,” I said, my voice coming out in a squeak. “I’m not putting girls’ names on my charts. Just their heights.”
Mr. Nyquist didn’t even glance at me. In fact, he turned sideways so his back was toward me, still looking at Kate. “Don’t ever let anyone measure you with your shoes off,” he said. “Not unless they’ve already offered you a scholarship.” Then he walked away.
Kate, Adria, Taj, and I stood there for a moment, not moving, maybe not even breathing. Then Kate stepped back against the tape measure and whispered, “Subtract an inch. Measure me like this and subtract an inch.”<
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Which we did. And subtracting an inch, Kate was still six foot two.
And I was still five foot four.
Playing four basketball games in one weekend is a lot, especially if you’ve never done it before. So even if you’re trying your best to not be a Black Hole and not get in the way of the girls who belong in that league, it’s still four games of sprinting up and down the court, playing tough defense, diving for loose balls, fighting for rebounds, and colliding with JJ-like players on the other teams.
By the time I poured myself out of Mr. Lawson’s car on Sunday evening, every muscle and tendon and ligament and every other thing in my whole entire body was groaning, begging me to take a hot shower, gobble down dinner, and fall into bed.
But that wasn’t going to happen. I had my genetics project to finish.
Which meant that when I limped into science class Monday morning, I was tired, I was grumpy, and I was all-around ticked off.
Because here’s another thing about being left-handed. If you’re left-handed, it’s really hard to write stuff left-to-right, the way we do in English, and not smear every letter with the side of your hand as you move along. So if you want your work to look good, you have to be careful and go slowly, holding your wrist up away from your paper. When I was little, it always took me ten times as long as everybody else to do my classwork because I couldn’t stand it if my writing wasn’t perfect.
But after playing four basketball games in one weekend, not to mention already having a sore wrist from one of the times I hit the court diving for a loose ball, I didn’t want to go slowly.
I wanted to be done.
Which meant my big height charts, my charts that were worth half my grade for the quarter, looked like dog doo.
And then, on top of all that, I was also major-league bummed out about what I’d learned about the “heritability” of height.
And oh yeah, if all that wasn’t enough, I was a Black Hole on the Basketball Court.
But I guess none of that stuff had happened to Mr. Bukowski over the weekend, because he grinned and rubbed his hands together. “Okay, people, who’s first?” He looked around the room. “No volunteers? Really? Well, let’s see. Sunil, why don’t you start us off?”
Sunil mumbled, “Why me?” But as it turned out, he didn’t have any reason to be nervous, because he’d done a PowerPoint presentation that he projected up on the classroom screen, and instead of just making a chart, he’d taken pictures of all his relatives’ ears, or had them email him pictures of their ears. And when you look at a whole screen full of ears, without any faces attached to them, it’s pretty weird and interesting. Especially since Sunil’s little cousin had decorated her ear with pink and silver glitter, and his great-aunt’s ear hung down about an inch because she’d worn huge gold earrings all her life, and his grandfather had the top part of his ear cut off in a car accident. So it was a pretty interesting project to look at. Or it would have been if I hadn’t been so grumpy.
Mary Katherine Pentangeli’s project would have been interesting, too. She’d drawn her family tree on a giant piece of butcher paper that she rolled out and taped up across the entire whiteboard, because that’s how much space she needed to fit her family. Each of Mary Katherine’s parents had five or six brothers and sisters, and each of them had at least two or three children, which meant Mary Katherine had thirty-two cousins and eight cousins-once-removed because some of her cousins already had their own children. Plus all four of her grandparents were still alive, and they each had five or six brothers and sisters, and each of them had a couple of kids and a bunch of grandkids, which meant Mary Katherine had eighty-seven second cousins. And somehow she’d managed to get in touch with almost all of those people to find out what kind of earlobes they had.
Obviously, Mary Katherine was going to get an A on her project.
And just as obviously, Kyle Moffett was not, because he stood up and showed us a piece of binder paper with three squares drawn on it. One was labeled Mom, Dangling. One was labeled Dad, Attached. And one was labeled Me, Dangling.
“What about your brother?” Mr. Bukowski said.
“My brother?” Kyle said.
“Yes, your brother, who was in my class last year and is now in ninth grade. Remember him?”
“Oh, yeah.” Kyle looked at his paper, like maybe he expected his brother’s square to magically appear. “He had a baseball game last night, so I didn’t get to see what kind of ears he has.”
“Mmm,” Mr. Bukowski said. “Sounds like maybe you waited a little too long to start your project?”
“I kind of forgot about it.”
“Uh-huh. Well, any effort is better than none, I suppose.” Mr. Bukowski looked around the room. “Okay, let’s see. Nikki, what have you got to show us?”
Oh boy.
I climbed off my lab stool, limped to the front of the classroom, and set my three big charts on the tray beneath the whiteboard, leaning them up against Mary Katherine’s fabulous family tree. The graphs looked even worse in the sharp fluorescent light of the classroom than they did at midnight in our kitchen, and I had a momentary urge to turn them around so nobody could see how messy they looked, but just as quickly I realized it would be impossible to explain my project without the graphs, so I frowned at them and turned to face the class.
“Um, well, I researched the genetic links to height,” I said. Then I told the class about what I’d learned—how scientists call height a polygenic trait, because your height is controlled by a bunch of different genes, but is also affected by whether or not you get enough to eat when you’re a kid and stuff like that, but that genes are the most important part because they account for 90 percent of your height, and all the other stuff accounts for only 10 percent. So what that means is, if both your parents are tall, but you don’t get a whole lot to eat while you’re a kid, you’ll still grow up to be pretty tall. But if both your parents are short, even if you get plenty to eat, you’ll still grow up to be short.
So then I showed the class my graphs. And what the graphs showed was that in our class, the tallest girl (Adria) was five foot ten, the shortest girl (Min Bui) was four foot ten, and the average height of the girls was five foot two. The average height of the moms of the girls in the class was five foot four and the average height of the dads was five foot ten.
In other words—which I didn’t share with the class—my mom and my dad were each an inch taller than the average mom and dad in the class, and I was two whole inches taller than the average girl.
But on my basketball team, the average height of the girls was five foot six, from Kate at six foot two to Kim-Ly at five foot three. The average height of the moms was five foot seven, and the average height of the dads was six foot two.
Which meant that I was two inches shorter than the average girl on my team, my mom was two inches shorter than the average mom, and my dumb old paper dad was three whole inches shorter than the average dad.
And what all that meant was that even though I might be slightly tall compared with girls who didn’t play basketball, I would never be actually tall. Not compared with basketball players. And even though Mom might say stuff like, Don’t worry, Nikki, you’ll grow more, I now knew I’d never grow enough, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it because height was 90 percent genetics. And Genetics Stinks.
But, you know, I didn’t mention that to my class.
“Very interesting, Nikki,” Mr. Bukowski said. “So one might conclude, from looking at your graphs, that height is a desirable trait for basketball players. In fact, one might conclude that people of average height are at a distinct disadvantage on the basketball court.” He chuckled, then said, “It’s like a person my size who wants to play football, isn’t it? He’d better learn to kick field goals if he wants to make the team.”
I wanted to say, Gee, Mr. Bukowski, thanks for pointing that out. But I didn’t. What I said was, “Um, yeah,” which was pretty lame, but it was the best I could do.<
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“Interesting project, Nikki,” Mr. Bukowski said. “Your charts aren’t up to your usual standard of neatness and attention to detail, but an interesting project.”
I grabbed my charts and started hobbling back to my lab stool, but Mr. Bukowski said, “Leave your graphs, Nikki. Remember, we’re going to display the projects in the science hallway?”
Oh yeah.
Great.
Adria got up to give her presentation. She had a PowerPoint, like Sunil, and also like Sunil, she’d included pictures of her relatives. But Adria had pictures of whole faces, not just ears, and since all the people in her mom’s family had skin that was various shades of brown and tan and all the people in her dad’s family had skin that was so white it probably glowed in the dark, her PowerPoint slides looked interesting, too. Plus, instead of showing which of her relatives had attached or dangling earlobes like most of the kids in class, Adria showed which ones could roll up the sides of their tongues and which ones couldn’t—which is also an inherited trait—so Adria stood up in front of the class with PowerPoint slides full of people sticking out their tongues. Everybody thought that was hilarious, and even though I was still grumpy and ticked off, I couldn’t help laughing, too.
Some more kids got up to give their presentations, and some were good and some weren’t, and then Mr. Bukowski called on Booker.
Booker shook his hair back from his face. “I wrote a report, Mr. Bukowski. I don’t have charts to show or anything.”
“That’s all right,” Mr. Bukowski said. “Tell us what you learned.”
Booker got up slowly and walked to the front of the classroom. He set his report on the counter where Mr. Bukowski demonstrated experiments and stared down at it. “I did my report on the genetic links to drug addiction.”
He turned the first page of his report, then turned the next page, then started talking. And I couldn’t help thinking about him standing in my driveway, telling me about how he got wound up about science, because after he started talking, he kept right on, talking faster and faster, all the way to the end of the class period, telling us about the three different “alleles” of the “mu-opioid gene” and the “alteration of dopamine receptors” and the development of the “prefrontal cortex” and how all that relates to addiction in teenagers and on and on with a bunch of other eight-foot-long science words that got Mr. Bukowski so excited his nutsy Einstein hair just about vibrated right off his head.
Nikki on the Line Page 11
