Nikki on the Line

by Barbara Carroll Roberts

  “Too bad Mr. Bukowski isn’t here,” I said. “He’d be so impressed.”

  Booker climbed down. “Do you want to draw the whole three-point line? Or just mark a few spots?”

  “Well…” I looked around at the driveway. “Maybe I should start with just a few spots.”

  Booker pulled out the end of the tape measure and held it down in the middle of the X, and I walked the tape measure away from the basket, right past my favorite spot, and out to nineteen feet, nine inches. I drew a thick chalk line on the driveway, then walked around in an arc, marking more spots.

  I stepped behind my last chalk mark, turned, and looked at the hoop. “Whoa, the basket looks a long way off from here.”

  Booker stood up and walked the tape measure toward me, letting it spool itself back into the case. “It won’t look so far once you get used to it. It’ll be just like that one-handed shooting you do right in front of the hoop.” The end of the tape measure snapped in, and Booker turned to look back at the basket. “Or maybe not.”

  We both cracked up.

  “Hey,” Booker said. “If it was easy to shoot three-pointers, everybody would do it. Do you have a plan?”

  “A plan?”

  “How you’re going to learn to do it.”

  “Not exactly.” I told Booker what I’d done before—starting close to the hoop, then taking a step back after I made a basket at each spot.

  “That sounds as good as anything,” Booker said. “And probably better than standing out here, jacking up shots until one finally goes in.”

  We gathered up all the stuff we’d been using to measure, and just as Booker climbed back up the ladder to grab the plant stakes, Mom’s car turned into the driveway.

  Sam’s head appeared out the passenger-side window, hollering, “Booker!”

  “You better climb down,” I said. “Sam’s going to launch out of the car.”

  Before the car came to a full stop in the garage, Sam’s door burst open. He yelled, “Nikki! Booker! I scored a goal!” and zoomed out, his cleats clattering across the asphalt as he ran. Fortunately Booker had one foot on the ground when Sam jumped to hug him, so they didn’t have far to fall.

  “Sam!” Mom called, getting out of the car and hurrying after him. “Be careful.”

  That made me laugh. “You really think Sam will ever be careful?”

  “No. But I keep hoping.”

  Booker stood up with Sam still clinging to one arm.

  “Mom, this is my friend Booker,” I said. “He’s in my science class.”

  Mom smiled. “Hello, Booker.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Doyle.” Booker reached out to shake Mom’s hand, which was probably difficult with Sam hanging on his arm.

  Mom looked up at the basketball hoop, then down the string to the X on the driveway. “It looks like you have some kind of engineering project going on.”

  “I needed to find the center of the basket so I could measure out where the three-point line would be,” I said. “Booker knew how to make a… what did you call it?”

  “A plumb line.”

  Mom smiled. “Quite ingenious.” She looked back up at the hoop. “Are those my plant stakes?”

  I nodded.

  “Mmm. Well, please remember to put them away when you’re finished. I’ll need them in a few weeks when the peonies get taller.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “All right, I’ll leave you to your project,” Mom said. “Sam, please take off those cleats and put on your tennis shoes if you’re staying out here. We don’t need you slipping on the asphalt and cutting your head open.”

  Sam ran back to the car, hauled out his soccer bag, and sat at the edge of the garage to put on his sneakers, his mouth going the whole time. “Nikki, I scored a goal. The first one of our whole team. Then Omar scored two. He’s really good. Everybody has to take a turn playing goalie, but being goalie is boring. All you get to do is stand there while everybody else gets to run around, and then—”

  “Sam!” I shouted. “I’m glad you scored a goal. That’s very cool, but Booker and I are doing something here. Could you get on your bike or jump on your pogo stick or something? You can tell us all about soccer in a little while, okay?”

  “Okay!” Sam grabbed his pogo stick.

  “Put your helmet on.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “And jump down there at the end of the driveway, okay? Not up here by the basketball hoop.” I turned back to Booker. “I can’t remember what we were doing.”

  Booker laughed. He climbed up the ladder and grabbed the plant stakes, pulled up the string, and tossed it all to me, then jumped down from the ladder and put it back in the garage.

  I gathered up all the other stuff.

  “Okay, let’s go.” Booker picked up my ball and tossed it to me. “I’ll rebound.”

  “Really? You don’t mind?”

  He smiled his crooked half smile. “It’s better than weed-whacking.”

  “Okay.” I walked to my favorite spot, bounced my ball, squared up, shot, and—clang. The ball hit the front of the rim and ricocheted straight back.

  “Uh, let me try that again.” This time the ball went in the hoop but still skimmed the front rim, so I stayed in that spot and shot three more times before I swished one, then I stepped back.

  Then I kept going like that, not stepping back until I felt like I’d made a good shot from each spot. The ball careened all over the place on my misses, but Booker kept chasing it, sprinting down the driveway to catch it before it went into the street, jumping over the hedge into our neighbor’s yard, fighting through the jungle of azaleas that lined our front walkway.

  Sam bounced his way back up the driveway, cheering each time I made a basket. But when I was two steps inside the three-point line, the ball absolutely refused to fall through the hoop. I took eighteen shots from that spot before I finally made one. Sam cheered, which sounded like “Yay-ay-ay,” because his voice bounced right along with the pogo stick. And instead of taking one step back, I decided to take those last two steps together to stand all the way back behind my chalked three-point line.

  I took a big pre-free-throw breath and blew it out slow, bounced the ball, caught it, stepped into my shot, jumped, and shot. The ball arced up away from me, a bird flying from my hand… and dropped through the net.

  I whooped and Booker whooped and Sam whooped and jumped off his pogo stick. It flew up, away from him, and crashed back down, banging and clanging like a car wreck.

  Mom threw open the side door and charged onto the porch, calling, “What happened? Are you all right? What happened?”

  And somehow I managed to stop whooping long enough to shout, “I swished a three! I swished a three!”

  Mom looked at me, her face still creased with fear, then at Sam, who was spinning in circles, then at Booker, who had grabbed the ball after it fell through the hoop and was jumping around, holding the ball over his head.

  Mom’s face softened. “Well,” she said. “I’m glad you swished a three, whatever that might mean.”

  Sam fell over on the lawn, laughing and shouting, “The world is twirling!”

  “Oh, honestly.” Mom put her hands on her hips. “What did I do to deserve such wild children?” She smiled, shaking her head, and went back inside.

  And Booker and I looked at each other, then bent over and made the sound that explodes out of you when you’ve been trying not to laugh: “Ppppbbbbfffftttt!”

  Later, when Mom and Sam and I were eating supper, Mom said, “What was all that business about ‘swishing a three’?”

  “IT WAS AWESOME!” Sam yelled.

  Mom looked at him.

  “Oh yeah, inside voice.” He took a bite of his mashed potatoes.

  Mom turned back to me. “What was that all about?”

  “Well, you know those chalk marks we made on the driveway?” I said.

  Mom nodded.

  “That’s where the three-point line would
be on a basketball court. If you can shoot from behind that line and make a basket, it counts for three points. All the baskets you make inside that line only count for two points.”

  Mom nodded again. “And?”

  “And I need to learn to shoot from behind the three-point line.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because… um…” And then it all came spilling out. Everything that had been going on—well, not the Black Hole stuff, but everything else. Not playing point guard, and all the big, fast players on the other teams who made it impossible for me to make the shots I’d always been good at, and being afraid of getting in the way of players like Kate who were so much better than me, and Coach saying he’d have to bench me if I didn’t start competing harder. And then I told Mom about John Wooden, the UCLA coach, and how he said you shouldn’t let what you can’t do stop you from doing things you can do, and that if I could learn to shoot from outside, the bigger, faster players couldn’t stop me from playing basketball.

  By the time I finished talking, Mom had long since put down her fork and stopped eating. And now she just sat there, leaning toward me a little bit, her arms folded along the edge of the table. “I’m proud of you, Nikki,” she said.

  “For?”

  “For not giving up.” She picked up her fork. “I’ve told you before that I don’t understand your enjoyment of this kind of physical challenge but…” She reached over and patted my arm with her other hand. “Must be those sports genes.”

  We finished eating, and Sam and I got up to clear the table.

  “Mom,” I said, picking up her plate, “I know I’m not allowed to have friends over after school when you’re not home, and I know I shouldn’t have had Booker over today, but he really helped me with my shooting. Would it be okay if he comes over to rebound for me sometimes? It’s a lot easier to work on shooting if I have a rebounder.”

  Mom tapped her fingers on the table. “I’ll need to talk with his parents.”

  “I’ll get their phone number.”

  “And you will stay in the driveway. You will not invite him into the house until I get home.”

  “I know.”

  “And the same rules apply,” she said, looking square at me. “Taking care of Sam is your top priority. And as much as you may love basketball, schoolwork comes before sports.”

  “I know,” I said again. Even though I also knew that now that I’d figured out what I needed to do, I’d have a hard time putting anything ahead of basketball.

  Mutants

  “What’d you do yesterday?” Adria asked when she sat down next to me on the school bus Monday morning.

  On any other day, in all the years I’d known Adria—all the years we’d been best friends—I would have told her exactly what I’d done on Sunday. Told her all about chalking the three-point line on my driveway and Booker coming over and my swishing that three. But that’s not what I said. Somehow, I wasn’t ready to talk about it. Not even with Adria.

  So I said, “Not much. Slept late. Ate pancakes.”

  “Oh, your mom’s pancakes!” Adria slid down and rested her head on the seat back. “To die for.”

  “What about you?” I said. “What’d you do?”

  She sat back up. “Homework, mostly. And I went to an extra strength-and-conditioning class with Kate, since we didn’t have games. My dad wants me to train more, especially after we got run to death by that first team on Saturday.”

  “I think I’m still tired from that game,” I said.

  Adria laughed. “Me too.”

  And I was tired. Not just from that first game on Saturday, but also from all the shooting I did with Booker on Sunday. My left arm ached and my feet hurt, including a new blister on my heel. I had it covered in salve and a big, thick bandage, but it still stung. I hauled myself up and down the school stairs, feeling like roadkill again, hobbled into science, and climbed onto my lab stool, groaning.

  Booker laughed. “You sore?”

  “It’s not funny,” I said.

  He laughed harder, then said, “Does that mean you’re not shooting this afternoon?”

  I shook my head. “I’m shooting. I’ve only got two weeks until the next tournament.”

  “Nikki and Booker!” Mr. Bukowski said.

  We sat up. “Sorry.”

  Mr. Bukowski adjusted his glasses, and I think he tried to look stern, but it’s hard to look stern when you also look like an Albert Einstein bobblehead, and besides that, he was smiling.

  He nodded at us, then said, “The DNA molecule.”

  He held up two parallel strings of colored plastic pop beads that were connected together by more pop beads, in different colors, spaced out like the rungs of a ladder. Holding the top and the bottom, he twisted the ladder of beads in opposite directions, making it look exactly like the picture of the DNA double helix in our science books.

  “DNA is the instruction set that resides in the nucleus of every cell in your body,” Mr. Bukowski said. “It’s what makes you, you.”

  He turned his little double helix back and forth, staring at it, and I wondered if he’d forgotten he had a class of kids watching him, because he looked like he was totally lost in the fabulousness of DNA. But then he said, “Today you’re going to work with your lab partner to make a model of DNA.”

  He passed out instruction sheets and boxes of pop beads and explained how we were supposed to build our models, using the different colored beads to represent each of the different molecules that make up the big DNA molecule.

  “Pay attention to the instructions,” Mr. Bukowski said. “The four base molecules of DNA always pair up the same way, so make sure yours do, too. Okay, get going.”

  Booker and I grabbed our box of beads and started popping beads together.

  “I feel like I’m in preschool,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s cool, though.”

  “You are such a science nerd.”

  Booker gave me a little shove on my shoulder, and even though my arm was tired and sore, his hand on my shoulder still felt kind of nice.

  Mr. Bukowski walked around the room, looking at the pop-bead DNA molecules kids were making and pointing out mistakes and answering questions. He got over to our table just as Booker and I finished our ladder. I held it up and twisted it.

  “Very good,” Mr. Bukowski said. “All your molecules are paired up just right.”

  We looked at it for a minute, dangling there from my hand. Then I said, “Mr. Bukowski, each of these beads represents a single chemical, right? A single molecule?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Well, so the same molecules make up everyone’s DNA?”

  “Yes.”

  “So then…”

  “Yes?”

  “So then, if we’re all made of the same stuff, how can we all be so different?”

  “Ahh, excellent question.” Mr. Bukowski adjusted his glasses. “To answer that, let’s think first about how we’re the same.” He looked back and forth from me to Booker. “What do you think?”

  Booker shook his hair away from his face. “Well, we all have a head and a body. And a heart and lungs and all that.”

  “Right,” Mr. Bukowski said. “And a brain and skin and arteries—all the organs and systems that make our bodies function. All those things are the same, right?”

  Booker and I nodded.

  “So what are the differences?” Mr. Bukowski asked.

  “The size and shape of all the stuff,” I said. “The color of your hair and skin. The shape of your face. The size of your body.”

  “Exactly right.” Mr. Bukowski tapped his knuckles against our lab table. “It’s only the details that make us different. More than ninety-nine percent of our genetic code is the same in every human. But there are three billion of these base pairs in our genome, so even if only a fraction of one percent of them differ, that’s still thirty or forty million possible differences in the sequence of the bases.”

  “But i
t says in our textbook that DNA copies itself every time a cell divides.” I looked back at our pop-bead model. “If it copies itself, how do the differences happen?”

  “Another excellent question,” Mr. Bukowski said. “This is getting into material you’ll learn in high school, but there’s something called spontaneous rearrangement, which means that the genes you inherit from each of your parents get mixed together. So for example, while you might look similar to each of your parents, you don’t look exactly like either one. And then, of course, mutations occur. Sometimes there are mistakes when the DNA copies itself.”

  Booker laughed. “So we’re all mutants?”

  Mr. Bukowski laughed, too. “I don’t think I’d put it quite that way, Booker. But, yes, that’s the basic concept. As genes mutate, changes occur.”

  I twisted our DNA model back and forth. “That’s what happened with my eyes, isn’t it? The DNA copied itself the wrong way. So my eyes came out different colors.”

  Mr. Bukowski pushed his glasses up. “You know, Nikki, when we talk about mutations in genetics, we’re not saying they’re bad or wrong. In genetics, mutations simply cause variations. I don’t want you to think there’s something genetically wrong with your eyes. Heterochromia occurs in about one percent of people. And it’s fairly common in some breeds of dogs and cats.”

  “It’s the same kind of mutation that causes calico coloring in cats, right?” Booker said.

  I stared at him.

  He shrugged. “I looked it up.”

  Mr. Bukowski smiled. “Yes, I believe you’re right, Booker. In any case, it’s the mutations that make us interesting, isn’t it? It would be a pretty dull world if we were all exactly alike.”

  “Like clones,” Booker said.

  I set down our DNA model. “I guess I’d rather be a mutant than a clone.”

  That cracked us all up.