Play Makers

by Mike Lupica

  Sometimes he would text Sam or Coop or Shawn. Or Lily. But mostly if he wanted to talk to them, he’d just call them. And only if he actually had something to say. Ben had promised himself he would never be one of those kids who were checking their phones every minute or so, afraid they would be missing another incoming text about nothing.

  One other thing with Ben McBain: He didn’t think it was against the law to have an unspoken thought occasionally.

  But he texted Lily now. Not just because he felt like he had to explain what she might have thought she saw at the end of the game, but because he wanted to.

  Or maybe needed to.

  He couldn’t let her think he was the jerk. At Pinocchio’s, yeah, he had been, everybody heard what he said, everybody knew what happened. Just not this time. He had to make sure she knew what had really happened this time, even if Chase had already given her his version.

  U around? Need to talk to somebody smart.

  And waited.

  Waited through dinner, trying to do the kind of phone check with his eyes he hated when he saw other kids doing it, looking down at the phone in his lap when he thought his parents weren’t watching, knowing he probably wasn’t fooling either one of them.

  No message.

  No message when his dad drove him over to Sam’s for the sleepover, no message back from Lily until Ben was walking up the front walk to Sam Brown’s front door.

  Cant help u until u stop acting so dumb.

  He waited until after lunch on Sunday to text her back.

  Dumb, she’d said.

  Not trying to be funny, that was pretty clear. Not talking about the kind of dumb that meant she was making fun of Ben or somebody else in the Core Four for doing what she called “Dumb Guy Stuff.”

  Or Extremely Dumb Guy Stuff.

  This wasn’t about a movie being dumb, or a song, or about dumb behavior from somebody at school.

  No.

  This time Lily had called Ben dumb and meant it, and that meant she did think he’d acted like a blockhead at the end of the Darby game.

  Which meant she had gotten another version of it from the real blockhead — Chase — who’d started the whole thing and probably had left out the part about calling Ben a choker.

  And Ben couldn’t let that go, not even with Lily, especially with Lily. Couldn’t wait until Monday and school to set the record straight with her once and for all. That was why he texted her now and told her — asked, actually — to meet him at the swings as soon as she could.

  If calling him out as dumb was serious, so were the swings at McBain Field.

  Those were the swings where their moms had pushed them as soon as they were old enough, the swings where they still went to have their best quiet time and their best talks, when they needed to have a talk.

  This time Lily texted him back fast, asked him, like when? Ben’s answer went back just as fast.

  Like now.

  She was wearing a Packers hoodie that Ben had given her last Christmas. Ben had ended up with two, his aunt Mary not knowing his parents were getting him one. Green from his parents, yellow from his aunt.

  When Lily had told him she liked the green one better, Ben had given it to her on the spot, just like that, saying, “It’ll look better on you.”

  She had said, well, when he put it that way, how could she not accept his generous offer?

  Ben was waiting for her at the swings when she pulled up on her bike. And even with everything that had been going on lately, the weirdness, he couldn’t help himself, he was happy to see her.

  So that much hadn’t changed.

  “Nice sweatshirt,” he said.

  Lily said, “I practically stole it off this guy.”

  Sat down on the swing next to him. As soon as she did, Ben had this flash that the two of them had been sitting right here — together — their whole lives.

  “How come you’re not watching the Packers?” she said.

  “Sunday night game,” he said.

  She smiled. “Oh, I get it,” she said. “You’re just killing time with me.”

  “You know that’s not why I asked you to come over,” he said, and then didn’t mess around, got right to it, saying, “I asked you to come over so I could tell you I’m not dumb.”

  “Well,” she said, still smiling, good sign, “you’re going to have to be more specific than that. You’re not dumb in general? Or not dumb, like, say, Pretty Little Liars?”

  It was a show all the girls in their grade were obsessed with, except for Lily, who thought it tried way too hard to be way too scary and wouldn’t watch. Or maybe she just didn’t want to run with the crowd.

  “You pretty much came out and said I acted dumb at the game,” Ben said. “But I didn’t do anything.”

  “You didn’t shove him?” Lily said.

  “No!” Ben said, with so much force he was surprised his swing didn’t suddenly elevate on its own. “I didn’t touch him, Lils.”

  “All I know is that I saw him go flying backward,” she said.

  “A flop,” Ben said. “Just like guys flop in games, trying to draw fouls.”

  “Not what he said.”

  “You talked to him about it?” Ben said. “Before you talked to me?”

  Knowing he sounded hurt, not caring.

  “He just texted me last night, is all. It wasn’t like some case I was trying to crack.”

  Ben took a deep breath.

  “In his text,” he said, “did he maybe mention that he’d called me a choker?”

  Lily was a good enough athlete and knew enough about sports to know what a bad word it was, in any sport.

  “No,” Lily said.

  “Well, he did.”

  Lily said, “He just said that he tried to tell you that you made their team look like jokers at the end, going past everybody the way you did.”

  “And you believe that garbage?” Ben said. “I know what he said and I know what I heard.”

  “What I really don’t know,” Lily said, “is how I ended up in the middle of this.” She put air quotes around the last word. “Whatever ‘this’ is.”

  In a quiet voice, at quiet McBain Field, nobody else around, no cars on the street, nobody even walking a dog, just Ben and Lily, Ben said, “I didn’t think you could be caught in the middle of anything. I just thought it was you and me, like against the world.”

  “It’s supposed to be, the way it always has been,” Lily said. “Except for the way you’ve been acting. And I don’t just mean yesterday. The way you’ve been acting practically since the end of football. That Ben McBain … I don’t know the guy.”

  “But, see, that’s the thing, Lils. You’re right. Totally. I was acting like a dope. But I’m not, anymore. And I wasn’t yesterday.”

  “Hard to tell at the end of the game,” she said.

  Ben shook his head, looking down at the bare patch of dirt where his feet were. “He called me a choker for missing the layup,” Ben said. “I couldn’t let that go. But all I said back was that he didn’t even know how to win with class. Then he went out of his way to make me look bad, in front of everybody.” Paused and added, “Mostly you.”

  “We’re talking about Chase and you,” Lily said, her face turned toward him, Ben wondering as always how she could sit cross-legged on a swing and not fall. “This isn’t about Chase and me.”

  “Yes,” Ben said, his voice quiet as quiet as before, maybe more. “Yes, it is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he wants to be friends with you the way you and are I friends,” Ben said. “And I don’t want you to be friends with him like that.”

  “That’s what all this is about?” Lily said.

  “You’re the smartest person our age I know,” Ben said. “You’re telling me you couldn’t see that’s what he wants?”

  Lily smiled again. “What do you mean the smartest person our age?”

  Ben said, “So do you?”

  “What?”

&n
bsp; “Want to be friends with him?”

  “I thought I kind of did for a while,” Lily said. “But it turns out I didn’t know him well enough. But even if he had become my friend, he was never going to be the kind of friend to me you are.”

  In that moment Ben felt like he’d come up for air.

  “Doesn’t matter now, anyway,” Lily said. “I could never like anybody who makes stuff up. Or trust them.”

  “You believe me, then.”

  “I always believe you, McBain.”

  Ben thinking to himself: Get it all out now, before you lose your nerve. You’re the one who wanted to have a talk at the swings. So have one.

  “Why did you like him in the first place?” Ben said.

  “Because he was fun, silly,” she said. “And he was being fun at a time when you were being no fun at all.” She put her feet on the ground, twisted her swing so she was facing him, dead on. “When you were acting dumb.”

  “Maybe,” Ben said. “But that guy is a bonehead.”

  “No, you are, for letting this guy get to you from the first day you played against him,” Lily said. “You know I’m right, whether you want to admit it or not. Don’t even try to deny it.”

  Ben smiled.

  “We’re both right,” he said. “The guy is a bonehead. But this is way more on me than it is on him.”

  They talked after that, really talked, Ben doing most of it, about how he let Chase get under his skin that first preseason game, how he got so fixed on getting the best of him that he got Sam hurt. How it took him way too long to figure that out. And how he should have been fixed a lot more on getting the best out of himself and his teammates.

  Like he always had in the past.

  “Wow,” Lily said again.

  “What?”

  “Maybe you’re not so dumb after all.”

  “I was thinking about a lot of this stuff before you showed up today,” Ben said. “How much I let it bother me that he’s better than me.”

  “Not so sure about that,” Lily said. “Bigger maybe. Not better.”

  “He is.”

  “Wasn’t yesterday,” Lily said. “You guys were great yesterday. You were great. You just missed that dumb layup.”

  “Whatever,” Ben said. “But my thing is, I let all of it jam me up: his game, the way he chirped on me. And the way he started to hang around you.”

  She waited, eyes on him, face calm, like they both knew he was finally getting to it now.

  Ben said, “All of a sudden a kid I didn’t even know a month ago, I was treating him like the most important kid in my world.”

  “I know, Big Ben.”

  It had been a while since she’d called him that.

  “I should’ve been big enough to walk away yesterday,” he said. “But I swear, all I said is what I told you I said.”

  “I told you. I believe you.”

  “So we’re good?”

  “We are always good, even when you’re doing Dumb Guy Stuff,” Lily said. “I want to know if you’re good.”

  “Now I am,” he said. “I told myself before the Darby game, like, way before, that I needed to change my attitude. And as steamed as I was that we lost the game and what Chase did afterward, when I thought about it, I had played that game with a better attitude. My old attitude. I just missed the last shot.” Nodded, to himself mostly, and said, “So, yeah, I am good.”

  “Season’s not over, you know.”

  “Our chance to win the championship is,” Ben said.

  Lily hit him with her biggest smile of this day now and said, “So?”

  “So?”

  “So go win the rest of your games and see what happens, you bozo.”

  Both swings were in the air then, practically at the same moment, both Ben and Lily trying to get as high as they could, trying to outdo each other, the way they always had.

  When they finally stopped, they were both out of breath. Ben asked Lily if she had to be anywhere.

  “Just here,” she said.

  Even the practices were great now.

  Nobody talked about the record, or looked ahead to the Darby game. The only game they talked about was the next one, this coming Saturday, at home against Hewitt.

  The Rams were working harder than ever before, but having fun doing it, the kind of fun you could have in sports without goofing around, everybody on the same page, all of the guys acting almost sad every night when they looked up at the clock and realized practice was over.

  Even Sam felt like he was at least part of the action, Coach making sure there was some kind of free-throw shooting contest at the end of practice, Sam able to participate in that. Ben would still seem him grimace if he made too quick a move to pick up a ball, and the doctor said he was still a couple of weeks away from running, but he could stand there and shoot. And even beat everybody some nights.

  When they were collecting the balls on Thursday, last practice before Hewitt, Coach came over to Ben and said, “As a coach, you always hope it will happen like this for your team, but you never know.”

  “Hoping what happens?” Ben said, casually flipping one of the practice balls to Coach behind his back.

  “Guys becoming a real team,” Coach Wright said. “And I know you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “Believe me, I know,” Ben said. “I’m sorry the season is about to end.”

  “That’s something that does happen every year,” Coach said. “All of a sudden you’re closer to the end than the beginning. Way closer.”

  Ben said, “Don’t you just hate when that happens?”

  “Yeah. But I love coaching my team right now.”

  “I love playing on it.”

  “Right now you just love playing period,” Coach said. “Wasn’t so sure about that earlier in the year.”

  “Same.”

  “So what changed?”

  “Just remembered why I play,” Ben said. “And how important it is to me to be part of a team like this.”

  “Hey,” Coach said. “Better late than never.”

  “Coach,” Ben said, “you always say that your goal is for everybody on the team to be better at the end of the season than the start, right?”

  “Totally.”

  “Well, this year I want everybody we play at the end to know how much better we got,” Ben said. “And to think that even without Sam, we ended up the best team in the league.”

  Coach smiled now. “Are you sure you’re just eleven?”

  “Are you serious?” Ben said. “I spent the first half of the season acting like I was five.”

  Then he said to Coach, “Can I get five more minutes?”

  Coach nodded. Ben took a ball out of the rack and dribbled it over and challenged Sam to a free-throw shooting contest.

  Sam Brown wasn’t back on the court the way Ben wanted him to be, the way Ben had held out hope that he would be from the time he hurt his ankle. But he was moving around so much better now, just a slight limp, down to an ACE bandage wrapping the ankle, carefully shooting around before and after every practice as long as he didn’t have to move around too much.

  Ben told Sam what he’d just said to Coach, about wanting to finish up looking like the best team in the whole league.

  “Dude,” Sam said, “trust me on something: I think we already are.”

  “What about the undefeated Darby Bragging Bears?” Ben said.

  Sam reached out, asking for the ball, barely looked as he turned and shot, both of them watching the ball go through the basket without coming close to touching iron.

  “Just wait,” Sam said.

  They went home after that and went to bed and woke up Friday morning finding out they still had a chance to prove they were the best team in the league for real.

  That they still had an outside shot of playing themselves into the championship game.

  It all had to do with Parkerville losing the night before to a Glendale team that hadn’t won a game all season, Robbi
e Burnett missing the game with the flu. It had to do with that, and the possibility of a tie for second place at the end of the regular season, and tiebreakers.

  Even Ben got dizzy trying to explain it to the other guys at lunch. But the bottom line was this: Parkerville now had three losses, Kingsland had three, the Rams had three.

  Parkerville vs. Kingsland on Saturday was the last game of the regular season for those two teams, four-thirty on Saturday in Kingsland. If Parkerville won, that knocked out the Rams, because the Patriots had beaten them on that crazy, falling-down shot by Robbie a few weeks ago. Head-to-head matchups were always a tiebreaker, any league.

  But:

  If Kingsland beat Parkerville and the Rams won their last two games, the Rams would end up tied with Kingsland in second place, and would have the tiebreaker on Kingsland, having beaten them on MJ Lau’s crazy shot.

  Now it sounded crazy to Ben laying this all out for his buds, but the Rams could play Chase Braggs and Darby twice more this season:

  Once to end the regular season.

  And if they beat them in that one, they’d get them again in the championship game.

  “I feel like I’m listening to the announcers trying to explain all the playoff possibilities on the last day of the NFL season,” Shawn said.

  “I feel like I’m gonna be sick,” Coop said.

  “Sick?” Sam said.

  “You know what happens when I start spinning around,” he said.

  “You want me to go through it all again?” Ben said.

  “No!” they all shouted at once.

  Shawn said, “But this is really happening? We actually still have a shot?”

  “We do,” Ben said. “And if we beat Hewitt on Saturday, I figure we gotta make a quick road trip to Kingsland to watch them play Parkerville.”

  “You know what the really sick part of this is?” Coop said. “If we beat Hewitt —”

  “When we beat Hewitt,” Sam said.

  “— the Kingsland Knights become our favorite basketball team in the whole world.”

  After the other guys left, Ben and Sam were still at the table. In a quiet voice Sam said, “Don’t tell anybody, but the doc says I can start running in two weeks. Really running. If we make it to the championship game …”