I looked back at Sam and Booker. They both waved at her.
“Oh, um,” I said. “Um… Mom made an exception. Booker’s helping me with a project.”
“A project?” Adria said. “With your basketball? In the driveway?”
“Um, yeah.” It sounded so lame, even to me.
“Hey!” Kate said. “Do you have a three-point line painted on your driveway?”
Mr. Nyquist snapped his head around and raised himself up in his seat, looking at the driveway, too. “Doesn’t look very accurate.”
I turned and looked back at my “court.” The dotted-line arc did look lopsided from this far away. “It’s accurate,” I said. “We measured it really carefully.”
“You painted it yourself?” Kate said.
“I had some help.”
Mr. Nyquist pulled off his sunglasses. “You’re working on three-pointers?”
Man, Mr. Nyquist was about the last person I wanted to talk to about this, but I couldn’t really deny it, so I said, “Yeah.”
“Who are you working with?”
“Well, uh…” I looked back at Booker and Sam again. “My little brother and my friend Booker.”
“Oh, for crying out loud. You know what I mean. Which shooting coach are you working with?”
“Well, really just my little brother and Booker. And my mom helps, too.”
Mr. Nyquist gave a sharp bark of laughter. “Good luck with that.”
Kate’s face reddened, and my face got hot, too. It was one thing to call me a Black Hole on the Basketball Court—it was a whole other thing to laugh at my mom.
I glanced at Adria, but she had her arms folded and was looking away from me, so I bounced my ball a couple of times, then bent down and looked right at Mr. Nyquist. “Actually, Becky Wheeler is helping me, too. Do you know her? She’s the women’s basketball coach at Wilder University. My mom is a research librarian there. She might not know a lot about basketball, but she knows how to find out about anything, and she’s good friends with Coach Wheeler.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.
“Wow,” Kate said. “Cool.”
But I wasn’t really looking at her. I was looking at Mr. Nyquist, who wasn’t laughing anymore. Now he was clenching his teeth. He slammed his sunglasses back on and threw the car into gear.
Kate waved out the window as her dad drove off. “Good luck with your shooting,” she called. “See you Tuesday.”
But Adria didn’t say anything. She just rolled her window up.
Oh boy.
Booker walked his bike down the driveway. “What was wrong with Adria?”
“She knows I’m not allowed to have friends here after school.” I rotated my ball around my waist. “I haven’t told her about working on three-pointers. Or about working with you.”
“You think she’s mad?” Booker said.
“Yeah, she looked pretty mad. I’ll call her later.”
Booker rolled his bike back and forth. “I’ve gotta go. See you tomorrow?”
“Don’t you have better things to do on the weekend?”
Booker shrugged. “How’m I going to know if you quit jumping forward if I don’t come to watch? I’ll be over after I cut the grass and stuff.”
“Um…” I said.
“Um?”
“I could come over and help you,” I said.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“You’re helping me.”
Booker smiled. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll text you in the morning. Wear jeans.”
“What?”
“Wear jeans or sweats or something. Not shorts.”
He swung onto his bike, waved, and headed off.
Sam and I went inside. He wanted to play a video game, but I told him I needed to start my weekend homework so I’d have more time on Saturday and Sunday to work on threes. I went up to my bedroom and dropped onto my bed, but before I pulled my books out of my backpack, I looked up at Mia.
“Can I do this?” I asked her. “Teach myself to be a three-point shooter?”
As usual, Mia didn’t have a lot to say, but the determination on her face, the effort straining through every muscle, made me think that if she were actually here in my room, not just in a poster on my wall, if she were here talking to me, she’d say, There’s only one way to find out. Keep trying. Then try harder.
The Three-Point Line
I tried calling Adria three times that night, but she didn’t answer her phone.
I texted her, Call me. But she didn’t do that, either.
I tried again—three times—Saturday morning. Same result.
So I gave up and headed over to Booker’s.
When I got there, he was standing in his driveway with his parents. For a second I thought, Wow, he doesn’t look anything like his parents, until I remembered, duh, they adopted him. But Mr. and Mrs. Wallace really didn’t look like Booker. Booker had blondish hair and blue eyes. Both his parents had dark brown hair and brown eyes. But more than that, they were totally different shapes and sizes. I mean, Booker was pretty tall and really skinny. His dad was shorter than Adria. And Booker’s mom wasn’t just short. She was tiny. Like maybe-not-quite-five-feet-tall tiny. And a little bit round. She wore wire-rimmed glasses and, honestly, if she were older and had white hair, you might think she was Mrs. Santa Claus. Which probably made her a perfect person to teach kindergarten.
She came over to shake my hand when I got off my bike. I had to tilt my head down to look at her, which felt funny—I was so used to craning my neck to look up at basketball moms.
“Isn’t it nice of you to help Booker with his chores?” she said.
“He’s been helping me a lot,” I said.
“Even so.” She smiled with her whole face, her eyes crinkling up into little crescents.
Yeah, the perfect kindergarten teacher.
“Ah, the basketball phenom,” Mr. Wallace said, and Booker said, “Dad, don’t embarrass her!”
“I’m hardly a phenom,” I said, laughing.
“Oh, I’ve heard you’re quite the shooter. But the question is”—he whipped a Weedwacker out from behind his back—“how are you with the business end of a Weedwacker?”
“I, uh…”
Booker shook his head. “Dad, come on, you’re scaring her. Sorry, Nikki,” he said. “I should have warned you my dad thinks he’s hilarious.” He took the Weedwacker from his dad and held it out to me. “I thought it’d be easiest if I mow and you weed-whack.”
“Okay.” I took it from him and turned it around, looking at it.
“Have you used one of these before?” Mr. Wallace asked.
“Well, actually, no. A boy who lives on our street mows our lawn. My mom says it’s her one indulgence.”
“Your mother sounds like a smart woman,” he said. “But there’s nothing to weed-whacking. You’ll pick it up in a minute. Booker will show you. Meanwhile…” He picked up something that looked like a giant’s scissors, clacked the blades together, and said, “Chop, chop.”
I jumped back, and Mrs. Wallace said, “Honestly, Len, Nikki’s going to think you’re an ax murderer. Put those hedge clippers down.”
I looked at Booker.
He was clearly trying not to laugh. “Come on, Dad. I thought you wanted me to make friends. You think Nikki’s ever going to come over again?”
Mr. Wallace smiled. “I’m sorry, Nikki. I’m not really an ax murderer.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I didn’t really think you were.” Even though the thought maybe had crossed my mind for a second.
He put the clippers down and handed me a pair of plastic glasses. “Please, wear these while you’re working.”
“So I’ll look goofy?” I said.
Mr. Wallace shouted one big “Ha!” of laughter. “No, not to look goofy. To protect your eyes in case the Weedwacker kicks up a rock or a stick. I pulled a piece of barbed wire out of the backyard last week. God knows how that got there. But you can see how overgrown everything i
s. Who knows what’s lurking in the bushes.” He made his voice sound like an old-movie vampire.
“Dad!” Booker said.
Mr. Wallace laughed again. “Sorry,” he said. “Please wear the glasses, Nikki. You only get one set of eyes.”
“Okay.” I put them on.
“Sharp,” Booker said.
I gave him a shove. “Don’t you have to wear them?”
“Yeah.” He pulled a pair out of his back pocket. “Okay, let me show you how to weed-whack.”
Mr. Wallace was right—it didn’t take long to learn how to use a Weedwacker. But, boy, was I glad Booker told me to wear jeans. I was covered in little weed shreds in about two minutes.
Booker mowed the grass and Mrs. Wallace went around with a wheelbarrow and collected sticks and piles of old leaves and the big clumps of weeds I whacked down. And Mr. Wallace chop-chopped away at the huge bushes that grew across the front of the house.
When Booker and I finished our jobs, he asked his mom what else we should do.
She set down the wheelbarrow. “You’ve done plenty. Go help Nikki with her basketball.” She smiled up at us with her whole face and waved us away.
Booker went inside to change into basketball shorts, then we got our bikes out of the garage.
I turned back to say good-bye to Mr. Wallace. He was up on a ladder now, singing, clipping away at a tall bush near their front door.
“Booker,” I said. “Does it look like, um, does it look like your dad’s clipping that bush into the shape of a giraffe?”
Booker looked at his dad’s creation for a minute, then shook his head and laughed. “Oh my god,” he said.
We got on our bikes and headed for my house.
“What does your dad do?” I asked.
“You mean for work?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s a high school physics teacher.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Go figure.”
When we got to my house, I ran in to change into shorts and hollered to Sam that Booker and I were back. Sam exploded out of the house before I’d even gotten my shoes tied.
Sam wanted to do the filming, and Booker said he didn’t mind rebounding. So I did a quick warm-up, then shot and stepped back, shot and stepped back, over and over. Then we grouped around the phone to watch the video. And when little video-me shot from the three-point line, I didn’t jump forward nearly as much as I had the day before.
“See?” Booker said. “You were tired yesterday.”
“I’m still jumping forward, though.”
So we went back and did it again, with me trying hard to think about shooting the same way, no matter where I was. I got a little better, but still not great, so we did it again and again until Sam got bored and ran down the street to play with Jeffrey and Omar.
Booker and I went inside to get something to drink. I asked Mom if she’d come out to rebound or shoot video, but she was reading—what a surprise—and said, “I’d like to finish this book. Can I help you later?”
“Is it the oranges book?” I asked.
“No, I finished that last weekend.”
“Worms?”
Mom laughed. “No, I’m afraid I’m reading about tectonic plates.”
“Wow. Fascinating,” I said.
“Oh, it is. They’re—”
“Mom! Could you tell me later?”
She smiled. “Yes, I can tell you all about it later.”
Booker and I took our drinks and went back outside.
“It’s times like this that I wish I had an actual dad who would come out and rebound or something, instead of just a paper dad,” I said.
Booker looked at me funny. “Paper dad?”
“Oh, that’s what I call the guy who was the, um, the, you know, donor. My mom has a report that tells about him. I read it a couple of weeks ago. So now I kind of think of him as my paper dad.”
“What does the report say?” Booker asked. “Does it tell you who he is?”
I shook my head. “Donors are anonymous. There’s no information about who they are. Just a description of what my dad looks like and where he went to college and his hobbies and stuff.”
“So, what’s he like?”
“Um…”
“Sorry. You don’t have to answer that.” Booker played with the pull tab on the top of his soda can. “My mom keeps telling me I ask questions that are too personal.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “It was actually interesting. The donor report, I mean. It made my dad sound like a cool guy. He lived in a bunch of different countries when he was a kid. And he was on the track team at the University of Virginia.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. He ran track in college.”
“Wow,” Booker said. “I guess you know where you got the sports gene.”
“Well, I hope I got it. Hey, but listen to this—he could ride a unicycle and juggle.”
“What?” Booker burst out laughing. “Whose dad can do that? Don’t you want to meet him?”
I sat down on the porch steps. “I can’t.”
“How come?”
“Like I said, donors are anonymous.”
Booker sat down next to me.
“Mom says I can try to find him when I get older, if I want to.”
“Do you think you will?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But maybe not. It’s not like he’s ever been part of my life or anything. And, um, maybe he wouldn’t want to know me, you know?”
Booker frowned. “I hadn’t thought about that. That would suck.”
“Yeah.” I scuffed my feet on the step. “What about you? Do you think you’ll get back in touch with your birth parents sometime?”
Booker reached down and picked up my basketball from the driveway. “I don’t think so.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “They were… they were horrible parents. I think they forgot I was there most of the time. When I was little, if I got hungry, I’d go over to the neighbors and they’d feed me.”
We sat quiet for a minute.
“Also…” Booker bounced the ball on his knees. “You know how I did my science project on genetic links to addiction?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I could’ve inherited that, you know? I could’ve inherited a trait that makes it easy for me to get addicted to stuff.” He stopped bouncing the ball. “I guess it sounds stupid, but that scares me. It makes me not want to have anything to do with my birth family.”
“It doesn’t sound stupid,” I said.
We sat quiet again until it felt weird not saying anything.
“Hey!” I grabbed the ball and jumped up. “You want to play H-O-R-S-E?”
Booker looked at his watch. “I have to go soon. Don’t you want to work on threes?”
“My mom said she’d help me later.” I spun the ball on my finger. “Come on, I need a break from threes anyway.”
“I haven’t shot in a while.” Booker stood up. “I’m probably pretty rusty.”
“Good, then I’ll win.” I bounced the ball to him. “Just kidding. You go first.”
Booker dribbled the ball right up to the basket, then took six steps back, turned to face away from the basket, closed his eyes, and tossed the ball backward over his head. It hit the backboard and dropped through the net.
“You are such a liar!” I yelled, and I would have slugged him, but he jumped away from me. “That’s what you call rusty?”
Booker was practically doubled over, he was laughing so hard. “That’s my one trick shot,” he said. “Honest.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.” I picked up the ball, went over to the spot he shot from, and turned away from the hoop. “Cheater,” I said. “Just wait until I go first.” I closed my eyes, tossed the ball backward, and turned around in time to see it sail over the backboard.
I was laughing almost as hard as Booker when I grabbed the ball out of our neighbor’s hedge, but I still managed to make a mea
n face and throw the ball at him. “Just wait,” I said again.
“Oooh, I’m scared. You get an H.”
Booker dribbled to the hoop and made a right-handed layup, so I did, too. Then he made a basket from around the free throw line, so I did, too. Then he did kind of a runner, dribbling straight toward the hoop and launching the ball up in a little arc. The ball banged the rim and bounced out.
“Ha!” I said. “My turn.” I went over to my favorite spot, about ten feet back from the hoop, left of center, and put up a sweet little shot that dropped through the net without even touching the rim. “Oh yeah. Let’s see you swish one.”
“Swishes aren’t in the rules.”
“Maybe they are now.”
We both cracked up again.
“Okay, you don’t have to swish it,” I said. “Let’s see you make the shot.”
Booker shot from my favorite spot, and even though the ball rattled on the rim before it fell through the net, it was a pretty shot—nice arc, nice spin.
I spun the ball in my hands. “Okay, let’s see how you do on the left.” I dribbled in for a left-handed layup, then tossed the ball to Booker.
“Yeah, left’s not my best.” He dribbled in for a layup. His form looked fine, but the ball didn’t go in.
“H!” I called, pointing at him.
“Yeah, yeah, whatever.”
I bounced the ball, trying to decide what to do next, what kind of shot I’d probably make that he maybe wouldn’t. And that’s when I saw Sam’s pogo stick propped against the side of the garage. I ran over and grabbed it.
“What?” Booker said. “Are you nuts? You think you’re going to shoot a basket while you’re jumping on a pogo stick?”
“Sure. It’s easy.”
“You ever done it before?”
“Millions of times.”
Booker made the Pppppppbbbbfffffttttt sound.
“Okay, I’ve never done it. But I bet I can. Here, hold the ball.” I got on the pogo stick, bounced twice, and my foot slipped off. “I haven’t pogoed in a while. Let me get going.”
I got back on and bounced around in a circle. It really had been a while since I’d been on Sam’s pogo stick, like maybe a year. But I got my balance and held out my hand. “Give me the ball.”
Nikki on the Line Page 18
