Nikki on the Line

by Barbara Carroll Roberts

Booker and Sam got to our driveway at the same time that afternoon, Booker jumping off his bike and leaning it against a tree and Sam slamming up the street, hollering, “Nikki! Booker! Guess what!”

  I’d already finished warming up, so we just had to listen to the third-grade news before we could get to work.

  “We starting in the same place?” Booker said.

  “I guess.” I turned to Sam. “Do you think we can spend half an hour out here today instead of twenty minutes, then work extra hard to get our homework done when we go in?”

  “Okay!” Sam yelled.

  Booker and I both put our hands up to our ears.

  “Oops, sorry,” Sam whispered. “I’m gonna jump on my pogo stick.”

  “Put your helmet on!” I called after him.

  I went to my favorite spot, left of the free throw lane, and Booker got ready to rebound, and then… and then it was like magic happened, like the ball really was a bird flying from my hand, arcing up away from me, slipping through the net. Over and over, as I stepped back and back.

  “Awesome shooting,” Booker said, firing the ball to me.

  “Yeah, well, here comes the hard part.” I stepped back to just inside the three-point line.

  And it was definitely harder from there—I missed five shots before making one—but the shots still felt good, still felt smooth. And even when I stepped behind the line and shot ten times before I made one and took six more shots before I made another, I felt focused, locked in, almost like I was in the zone during a game. Like I could have kept going forever.

  But I couldn’t. Our half hour was up.

  Booker grabbed the last rebound and tossed the ball to me. “Making progress.”

  “It felt good,” I said.

  “Looked good, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. You’ve got a supernice shot, Nikki. All that one-armed shooting must be paying off.”

  My face was getting hot. “Thanks,” I said.

  “Okay, gotta go.” Booker got on his bike, rode a lap around Sam and me, then headed for the street. “See you later, mutant,” he called.

  “You’re the mutant,” I yelled after him, and Sam bounced down the driveway, shouting, “Bye, Booker-er-er!”

  And standing there, watching Booker pedal away, I thought, Wow, that was fun. I mean, being with Booker was fun, but my shooting… my shooting was so fun. Feeling the energy zing up from my feet all the way out through my fingertips, the ball sailing from my hand, the swish of the net. It was the most fun I’d had with a basketball in my hand since I’d started playing on the Action. And it made me hope that if I really could learn to shoot from outside, then maybe, maybe, playing on this team could be fun, too.

  I was still thinking about that the next night when Mom and Sam and I got to the gym for Action practice, and still thinking about it when I stepped into line next to Kate for our warm-up.

  We all headed up the court doing ankle flips, and when we turned to come back the other way, I said, “Kate, do you think basketball’s fun?”

  “Yeah, I love this team. Everybody’s fun.”

  “No, I mean when you’re playing. Do you think it’s fun then?”

  “If we’re winning.”

  “How about the rest of the time? Practice and everything?”

  “Well, I hate sprints,” Kate said. “And Coach’s ridiculous planks and sit-ups. I really hate them.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  We got to the baseline, turned, and Frankenstein-walked the other way.

  “I guess I never really think about whether or not basketball’s fun,” Kate said. “It’s just, like, my job. It’s what I do.” She laughed. “That sounds dumb, doesn’t it? That basketball’s my job? But, yeah, I guess I do kind of think of it like that. It’s always been so important to my dad. I guess it’s always been important to me, too.”

  We turned again.

  “But do you like playing?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah, I love playing. I love competing in games. Unless I don’t play well. Then it’s no fun at all, because Dad spends the whole drive home telling me everything I did wrong. And now he’s keeping a shot chart every game because he wants me to shoot farther away from the basket.”

  “Is that why you always throw up?”

  “Yeah, I get nervous.”

  We got to the baseline again and headed back the other way, skipping backward.

  “Does your mom ever come to games?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I couldn’t believe I said them, because, you know, it wasn’t like my paper dad ever came to games. Or anything else.

  But Kate didn’t seem to mind. “My mom lives in Florida with my brother right now. He goes to this big tennis academy down there. It’s only for another year, though. Then he’ll graduate from high school and either turn pro if he’s good enough or play in college. When our Action season’s over, I get to spend the rest of the summer with him and Mom.”

  I was about to say something about sports genes, but Coach blew his whistle, so it was time for sprints and line drills and all the rest, and even though I wanted to keep talking to Kate, it’s pretty darned impossible to talk while you’re gasping for breath.

  We had to make twenty-five layups in a row with the heavy yellow balls that week, but somehow I wasn’t thinking of them as horrible anymore, and maybe we’d already started getting stronger, because most of us made all our layups, and it only took us a few minutes to get to twenty-five in a row. We all clapped and slapped hands, and Maura did this goofy high-five-low-five-behind-the-back-five thing with Sam.

  Then we worked on defensive closeouts, which meant springing forward and sprinting two or three steps, then screeching to a stop with our butts down and our hands up. Which also meant that every time we hit that stop, our toes slammed up against the front of our shoes, and after about ten minutes of that, all I wanted to do was tear my shoes and socks off and lie down with my feet in a bucket of ice water.

  Lying down was definitely not part of the program, though. As soon as we finished the closeouts, we went straight into learning a complicated new offensive pattern. It got us all bumping into each other, going the wrong way, or passing the ball where somebody wasn’t, so I had to think so hard I forgot about my feet.

  Maybe Coach had planned it that way.

  At the end of practice, after we shot free throws and ran sprints for the misses, we all dropped down by our gym bags, pulled off our shoes, and rubbed our feet.

  “Ohmygod, my toes hurt so bad,” Jasmine said.

  “Dude,” Maura said. “I already had an ingrown nail. I think it just grew all the way through my toe.”

  “I’m asking my mom to get me thicker socks,” Autumn said.

  “I’m asking my mom to get me socks with those little grippers on the bottom like babies wear,” Taj said.

  And I don’t know why, but sitting there, listening to everybody complain, made me think about what Mr. Bukowski had talked about the day before, except sort of in reverse. I mean, looking around at my teammates, we all looked so different from one another, ran at different speeds, jumped high or low. But defensive closeouts made everybody’s feet hurt exactly the same way.

  We were all sore-toed mutants.

  We finished taking off our shoes and gathering up our stuff. And just about the exact second we pushed open the big gym doors to step outside, there was a gigantic crack of thunder and rain came gushing down out of the sky. We all shrieked and ran, and I don’t know about everybody else, but by the time Mom and Sam and I got to our car, we were soaked.

  Which meant we had a long, wet, clammy ride home.

  It also meant that by the time we got home, every last speck of my three-point line was streaming down the driveway in big, multicolored, wet-chalk streaks.

  Mom and Sam and I stood in the garage and watched it disappear, and Sam slipped his hand into mine.

  “Don’t worry, Nikki,” he said. “I’ll help you draw it again.”


  A Librarian Finds Some Answers

  Booker and Sam and I had just begun rechalking the three-point line the next afternoon when Mom pulled into the driveway.

  “Why are you home so early?” I asked her.

  “I took the afternoon off.” She opened the trunk of the car and lifted out a can of paint and a paintbrush. “I had a small research project of my own to do, and I wanted to get this for you.” She held the paint can toward me.

  “Paint?”

  “Asphalt paint. It’s what they use to mark the lines on the road. It won’t wash off.”

  “Really? We can paint a permanent three-point line on the driveway?”

  Mom nodded.

  I hugged her and thanked her about a hundred times. Then Booker and I decided that since we wouldn’t have to do this again, we should go ahead and mark the whole arc. There was no way we could paint a long, smooth line like the ones on real basketball courts, though, so we decided to make a dotted line, with a big dot of paint every six inches or so.

  Sam wanted to help, so he held the end of the tape measure on the big X under the basket, Booker measured out nineteen feet nine inches, and I painted the dots. After about five dots, Sam got bored and needed to run around, so Mom put her foot—in her hideous clog—on the end of the tape measure at the X, re-adjusting as Booker and I moved around the three-point arc.

  “Would you like to hear about my research project?” she said.

  Listening to Mom talk about research projects was usually about as exciting as, well, worms or oranges, but since I was pretty happy with Mom right then, and since Booker always wanted to know about everything, we both said, “Sure.”

  Mom pulled a little notepad out of the pocket of her pants. “I went over to the university athletics department this afternoon and met with the women’s basketball coach.”

  I looked up from my paint dot. “Why?”

  “To ask her about three-point shooting.”

  “You just walked into her office and asked her about shooting threes?”

  “Actually, I called her first to see if she had a few minutes to talk. We’ve been friends—well, friendly acquaintances—for a long time.” Mom flipped the notepad open. “The coach, whose name is Becky Wheeler, by the way, said that when you’re learning to shoot from outside, the most important thing is to maintain your shooting form and rhythm, so that you shoot the same way, whether you’re six feet from the basket or behind the three-point line. She said they videotape their players during shooting drills so the players can see if they’re altering their shots, because if they have to alter their shot, they’re not ready to shoot threes.”

  I didn’t know what to say. This was my mom, my clueless, book-obsessed librarian mom, giving me information straight from a college basketball coach.

  Booker knew what to say. “Your phone takes video, doesn’t it, Nikki? I can videotape you while you shoot.”

  Mom turned a page in her notebook. “Becky said you shouldn’t worry too much about whether or not the ball goes in at first; you should concentrate on shooting in rhythm. Also it’s important to shoot straight. It’s okay to miss long or short, but if you consistently miss left or right, you don’t have sufficient control of your release.” Mom looked at me. “I don’t know what that means. Do you?”

  I nodded. “That’s something Adria’s dad made us work on. Shooting straight and holding our follow-through straight.”

  “Nikki doesn’t miss left or right much,” Booker said.

  “Well, good. You’ve already got that down.” Mom turned another page in her notepad. “Becky also said you should email your schedule to her, and if your team plays in one of the recruiting tournaments she goes to, she’ll come by to watch you play.”

  You know, sometimes having a mom who’s a university research librarian is beyond annoying. But right then it was beyond cool.

  I smiled up at her, and she smiled back at me. Then she told Sam to stop beating our neighbor’s hedge with a stick and suggested he help us finish the rest of our three-point dots.

  “Only if I can paint the dots,” Sam said.

  “Fine,” I said. “But I’m going to help you.”

  “I want Booker to help me.”

  “Fine.”

  Mom went inside, and I took over at the X, and by the time Booker and Sam finished all the paint dots—which weren’t quite as neat as my paint dots—it was time for Booker to go home. So then, since we had to let the paint dry, Sam and I went in to do our homework and eat dinner. But after dinner, Mom said that since it was still light outside, she’d help Sam finish his homework if I wanted to go back out to try out my new three-point line.

  I did a quick warm-up, then started my take-a-step-back-after-a-make shooting routine. It went pretty well at first, and I didn’t have to chase too many wild rebounds until I got two steps inside the three-point line.

  Then it went terrible.

  I shot and shot and shot—twenty-six shots—with the rebounds flying all over the place. The sky was on the dark side of twilight, and the net hanging from our old, rusty hoop looked like a black spiderweb against the last glow of the sky before my ball finally dropped through the basket.

  Mom opened the side door and stepped out on the porch. “Time to call it a night, Nikki.”

  “I haven’t made a three-pointer yet.”

  Mom looked from me to the basket, then back to me. “Did you make your last shot?”

  I nodded.

  “Then it’s time to stop. It’s too dark to see what you’re doing anymore.”

  “I don’t want to quit yet.”

  “You’re not quitting,” Mom said. “You’re postponing the rest of your shooting until tomorrow. And you still have homework to finish, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” I put my ball away in the garage and climbed the little porch steps to stand next to Mom. “Thanks,” I said.

  “For?”

  “For the driveway paint. And for talking to Coach Wheeler.”

  “You’re welcome.” Mom put her arm around my shoulders, and we watched the last glimmer of light fade from the sky and the first stars come out.

  “Remember when I was little I used to make wishes on stars?”

  Mom patted my shoulder. “You usually wished for a puppy, as I recall.”

  “Maybe I could make a wish that one of those stars will help me learn to shoot threes.”

  “Did the stars help you get a puppy?”

  I laughed. “Good point.”

  “I guess you’ll have to keep practicing,” Mom said.

  “I guess so.”

  I couldn’t practice threes on Thursday, because Sam and I both had too much homework to finish before Action practice, but when I got off the school bus Friday afternoon, I was ready to go to work. Unfortunately, since we didn’t have a tournament that weekend, Coach had worked us extra hard in practice, including having us run a passing drill with the heavy yellow balls. So by the time I finished warming up on Friday and Sam thundered up the street and Booker rode up the driveway on his bike, my left arm was already tired.

  “Ready for filming?” Booker said.

  “I might need a new arm first.”

  “Complain, complain.”

  I laughed. “Easy for you to say.”

  I talked Sam into rebounding for me, gave my phone to Booker, and trotted over to my favorite spot. I shot from there until I swished one, then took two steps back after each make, figuring I’d try to save my arm a little bit. That turned out to be a good idea, because my arm was so tired by the time I got back to the three-point line I didn’t know how I could shoot anymore. But I bit down on my bottom lip and thought about Mia and how she probably pushed herself this hard every day. So I bounced my ball, squared up, and shot. It took me seven tries to sink a three. It wasn’t pretty—the ball bounced all around the rim and up against the backboard before it finally dropped through the net—but it was a three and it was good enough.

  Booker hadn’t filmed th
e whole time, but he got me shooting from each spot a few times. We all grouped around the phone to watch. It wasn’t all that interesting at first—just me shooting from midrange. But when my video-self shot from the three-point line, my real-self saw a big problem.

  “I’m jumping forward,” I said. “Look.” I pointed my finger at tiny video-me. With each three-point shot my whole body leaned forward and my feet landed three feet ahead of where I’d jumped from.

  We ran the video again. “See,” I said. “When I’m shooting close in, my body is pretty straight and my feet land only eight or ten inches from where I jumped up. But when I get back by the three-point line, I jump forward. I’m altering my shot.” I clicked off the video. “If I have to alter my shot, I’m not ready to shoot threes. Isn’t that what the coach at Mom’s college said?”

  “I bet you’re just tired,” Booker said. “You said your arm was sore.”

  “You’re just being nice.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m, umm…” Booker paused, which let me know he was just being nice, but then he said, “I don’t think you were jumping forward that much Monday night. And anyway, you can’t change your plan based on one data point. It wouldn’t be scientific.”

  I laughed. “You’re good, Booker.”

  “Yeah, I’m serious, though.”

  An SUV drove by, stopped, backed up, and stopped again right at the end of our driveway. The front passenger window rolled down, and Kate stuck her head out. “Hey, Nikki!” she called.

  I trotted down the driveway with my ball tucked under my arm. “Hi, Kate,” I said.

  “Hi, Kate!” Sam bellowed.

  “Hi, Sam!” she yelled back.

  I ducked my head to look inside the car. “Hi, Mr. Nyquist.”

  He nodded at me, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

  Then the back window rolled down. Adria sat in the back seat. “Hi,” she said.

  “Oh, hi,” I said. “You guys going to a strength-and-conditioning class?”

  “Yeah. An extra one.” Kate opened her mouth and stuck her finger in, like she was gagging.

  But Adria looked past me up the driveway. “I thought you weren’t allowed to have kids over when your mom’s not here,” she said.