Worse, I thought, Renata could abandon me. She doesn’t know I had violence problems in Poland, too, and so I try hard to be a good kid, to stay clear of any trouble.
But Kase is worse than everyone. He insults me not because I am his opponent on the court, but because he hates who I am as a person. I have seen some bad people in my life. My dad was one of them, too. But of all the people I have encountered, Kase Kinshaw is the worst.
Kase makes me want to hurt him.
But after Ms. Hader explained MVP to me, I don’t care about Kase. All day long I jog between my classrooms because I am MVP. Other students want to high-five me because I am MVP. In English class, Zachary Hilderbrand says I need a good nickname.
“How about the Polish Hammer?” he asks. “Because of your dunks?”
I know this nickname has been used before, but I also like it. “Okay,” I say. “That is dope.”
“Yeah, it is!” he says.
Yeah, it is. Very dope.
Who cares about Kase Kinshaw?
FOUR
HATE VICTORY
It is the second round of the playoffs. I jog out onto the floor. Caleb Olson is right behind me. “Let’s get after them, Adam. Let’s do this,” he says. Before now he has called me Duh, because, like everyone, he thought that was no problem.
“Okay,” I say.
There is one opposing player who is taller than me on the Blue Earth Spartans. His name is Percy Reynolds. He is well known in Minnesota. He is actually huge, six foot ten. He averages over twenty points a game and six blocks.
I watch him warm up. Nice stroke, but very slow. He dunks the ball and looks at me like he is a warrior. He clenches his fist and glares. But he has barely jumped. Everything about him is slow. In fact, Coach Jenson has said to the team at practice during the week, “Attack Reynolds! Attack that guy! Make him work on defense. His feet are lead balloons!”
The game is at Minnesota State University in Mankato, at the Taylor Center, which is named after the owner of the NBA Timberwolves. It is a big arena that looks like the ones on TV. I breathe deep, and I get goose bumps. Maybe this move to the “middle of the middle of nowhere,” as Renata calls Northrup, Minnesota, will work out? Maybe this was the best move? Maybe things are getting better all the time?
Not really.
The gym is only a twenty-minute trip from Northrup, so the old farmers have driven in their pickups, and so have the dentists and hairdressers and all the city workers. Many, many students from school have made the drive, too, which is okay, except Kase Kinshaw. He sits with two girls behind our bench. One girl is Carli Anderson, the tall one, who has crutches and wears a brace on her leg. She has been very nice to me all week. She has told me she wants to play one-on-one against me when her leg is better. But how can she be sitting with Kase Kinshaw? How can she be laughing at his jokes? As I pass him, I make eye contact. He shakes his head, then looks away like I make him so sick to his stomach.
I hate Kase Kinshaw. Adrenaline grows.
The whistle blows.
I use this energy to destroy Percy Reynolds. I crush Percy Reynolds, bash away his weak shots, slam the ball through the hoop and onto his stupid face. I play so mad, I am almost scared, almost dangerous. I get whistled. I get warned. I don’t hear the crowd. I feel shaky in my insides. I don’t hear the coach. I have no fun playing my game, because I hate Kase Kinshaw. His voice comes to me during time-outs. He makes Carli Anderson laugh more behind us. I want to turn and whip the ball into his face and make him bleed, but I can’t hurt people. Instead I destroy Percy Reynolds and his lead feet. I leap over him. I run past him. I punch the ball out of his hands whenever he catches it.
Averages twenty a game? No. This game Percy Reynolds scores four points, and all on foul shots (I fouled him).
We win huge.
Caleb Olson scores twenty-two. He makes six three-pointers.
I score twenty-eight. The gym once again echoes with chants of M-V-P near the end of the game. But I don’t care.
Carli Anderson stands, propped up on crutches. “You’re going to get recruited big-time, dude!” she says. “Huge!”
I don’t care.
Coach Jenson huddles us up. “On to the next round! We’re going deep!” he says.
I don’t care.
I pull on warm-ups, run off the court and out the gym door, and find the school bus so I can sit in the last row and everyone will leave me alone. There I tremble and shiver and press my eyes shut.
My anger lasts longer into the night. I think of everything bad. Kase calls Barry retard. Kase punched Barry’s kidney at a city park a few years ago. Barry peed blood. Every time I close my eyes, I see the face of Kase Kinshaw and I want to crush it. It won’t stop. I feel crazy, and I feel like I’m dangerous. This makes me quiet at McDonald’s, which is not too bad for Barry Roland, because Barry Roland likes to talk and talk.
“I kicked, like, ten different trees today, so the impact zones would be different,” he says.
“Oh,” I reply. “Okay,” I say. Barry limped badly into McDonald’s.
“Because you don’t want to just kick the same spot on your shin over and over? Because you might just get a really bad contusion or maybe you might break your shin instead of micro-splinter? The impact has to be spread out.”
“Oh,” I say.
Maybe it is not so great for Barry that I don’t pay attention?
“Are you even listening, dude?” he asks.
I exhale. I look down at the table. “You should use your metal shins to kick Kase Kinshaw in half,” I say.
“No,” Barry says. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Why wouldn’t you? He calls you retard. He punched your kidney.”
Barry takes a deep breath. “Self-control,” he whispers.
“What?” I ask.
“Kase Kinshaw is not a worthy opponent?” Barry says, his voice drifting up into a question that is not a question. His mustache scrunches underneath his nose. “Kase Kinshaw is just a bad jerk?”
“Yeah. Okay,” I say. “But . . .”
“You must forget about Kase Kinshaw,” Barry says.
“But—” I say.
“Indomitable spirit,” Barry says. He puts his right fist into the palm of his left hand. He drops his head like a nun in Poland praying.
“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”
FIVE
THE INK
Sometimes I have bad nightmares about Poland. My first town, Kulesze Kościelne, was in the east, near Bialystok and not so far from the country called Belarus. There my grandpa ran his dairy farm. It was a good place to be a little boy. I kicked a soccer ball across big meadows.
It was a bad place to be for my mom. She is gone.
It was a bad place to be for my dad. He grew up in Warsaw, in the big city, and he didn’t want to pull cow teats (he said this to me many, many times—but I remember the machines, so he never had to milk with his hands—he is a liar). When my mom followed Grandma in cancer, Dad left Grandpa and his farm to die together. Dad took me, age seven, to Warsaw.
My nightmares are in Warsaw in a tall apartment building with a big window and black darkness outside. It is day, but the air has filled with ink from an octopus. The blackness starts to leak in through cracks in the cinder block. I try to plug the cracks with my hands, but there is no chance to stop the ink. My dad isn’t there. He can’t help me. The ink flows in.
I wake. It is three a.m. Renata is in my room. She sits on my bed. Her hand is on my forehead. “You’re screaming, Adam,” she whispers. “It’s just a dream. It’s just a bad dream. You’re okay.”
“Okay,” I say. But I toss and turn for the rest of the night. I am awake. I am asleep. I am both awake and asleep. For much of it I’m not sure where I am. Kulesze with meadows outside? Warsaw with broken cement in my park? Philadelphia in the brownstone apartment? Northrup? Does it matter at all?
There is ink. There is darkness coming for me.
SIX
; BUT SOMETIMES . . .
I also dream that my real mom and my real grandpa are wearing red tracksuits, like the Polish Olympic team when I was little, and we are on a nice, big white boat with giant windows overlooking the calm blue ocean. Together we just bob along and eat good food and laugh. This is a good dream, except it is weird. Sometimes there are sheep on the boat, too, and I fall asleep and they lie down next to me. It is comfortable, but I wake up thinking, “Dude, you are a crazy boy.”
SEVEN
PASSPORT
“You should teach Tiffany how to cook, Mrs. Renata.” Barry Roland now calls his mom by her first name, Tiffany, like I call Renata, Renata (my dead mom is the only mom I have, so . . .).
“Maybe I could teach her?” Renata says, but I know that she doesn’t mean it.
“That’d be sweet,” Barry says.
“But if she cooks as well as I do, you won’t want to come over, and I’d really hate that,” Renata says.
Barry’s face blushes underneath his thick glasses. “Oh yeah,” he mumbles. “I’d still want to come over.”
I know Renata tells the truth about wanting Barry here. He talks a lot. In Philadelphia, she had so many friends who were teachers and scholars. In Northrup, she hasn’t yet found too many people like her. Everybody at the college where she teaches seems much older. Barry is good entertainment.
“Tiffany doesn’t want to cook, so don’t worry, okay?” Barry says.
“Deal,” Renata says.
At school, Barry disappears to the other side of the building, because he has some classes that are meant to help him get better at reading, except he says the letters get so turned around in his brain he doesn’t think that he will ever be able to figure it out. I have no special teachers in Northrup. Philadelphia taught me English well enough. Here there are some Mexican students and two Somali sisters who are brand-new. They receive the special teachers’ attention.
I go to my locker. Carli Anderson is standing there propped on her crutches. I stop in place, unable to move. What is she doing?
“Hey. I’ve been waiting here for ten minutes, dude.”
“I didn’t know that,” I mumble.
She shakes her head. “Yeah, I know. How could you know?”
“I don’t know. So?” I say.
“So, I wanted to tell you my dad called some AAU coaches from up in the Cities last night. He doesn’t think you should play with the MN Rise.”
“Play with who?” I ask. “What about your dad? What coaches?”
She raises her eyebrows and opens her big eyes, which are green, like the spring fields by Grandpa’s farm. “Maybe this is a longer conversation?” she says. She looks past me. Her friend, who is short and not as amazing, has stopped and is pouting and waiting and looking crabby. “Gotta run. But, seriously, Dad is pretty pumped about you.”
Then she rocks away on her crutches.
I wonder why her dad would spend his time thinking about me. Then I must move fast to make gym on time. As I cross the cafeteria, cheerleaders are hanging a giant banner that says: “Go, Polar Bears, Beat Austin!” There is a depiction of the number-thirty-four player (me) hanging on the rim, and it looks like he is shouting the slogan from his mouth.
My coach in Philadelphia once told me this game, basketball, could be my passport. I already had a passport from coming to America. I didn’t understand why I would need another passport, and I never asked anyone what he meant. But as I stare at this banner, I begin to suspect.
A second later, a freshman girl shouts, “Hi, Adam!” Then she blushes and runs away from me.
Passport to a good life.
Basketball is everything.
I go to gym.
EIGHT
SURPRISE RETURN
This game is at a community college very close to the Iowa border. We are on a bus for an hour and a half. Snow swirls all over the road, which makes me nervous about falling off a cliff to our death. Lucky that the land is flat.
I listen to Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. Then I listen to Jevetta Mitchell, the only great jazz singer I have ever seen in concert. Jevetta performed at the University of Pennsylvania, where Renata got her doctorate. All these songs keep me steady, like I am just on the couch with a blanket instead of all alone in the back of a dark bus in the middle of the frozen lands.
Then I see lights. The college seems to have no town attached. It just rises out of a flat emptiness where snow blows fast.
Still, our fans are here. They cheer for us as we make our way to the door. Carli Anderson and her friend give us a big whoo-whoo. There are so many. So many. All the people.
Lots of people from Austin, too.
The gym is warm. Both teams have brought pep bands and the drums from each rattle in my heart and ribs.
I survey our opponent. There is no height like mine on the Austin team. Their tallest guy is more like our Greg Day, a big football player wearing gym shorts. I see no one getting to the rim in their layup drill.
But they are slick. The ball movement is like cannons firing. And they are fast. Coach Jenson told us that Austin won many games by going very, very fast. They are run-and-gun. Before the whistle, Coach says what he’s told me all week. “Adam, when they get the ball, you sprint back and guard the rim.”
It becomes clear from the start they have a big problem. I am just as fast, but I am also tall, and I can see what they are trying to do before they do it.
The Austin Packers cannot run their style of fast-break offense very well, because as soon as they steal from us or get a rebound from us, I explode downcourt. I beat their own players to the other end. I recognize their break and get to the ball before they can score. I slap away layups and jump to block jumpers. Soon they are misfiring all around the bucket.
They start to lose their composure. They start to foul me hard. Greg Day and their center get in a tussle right after half. Both are tossed from the game, and then even our bench players score. Austin has fallen to pieces.
Caleb Olson hits his three-pointers. He scores nineteen.
I have five dunks and three short jumpers, and I go to the free-throw line ten times. I hit seven, which is very good for me. This means I score twenty-three points. The rest of our team scores fifteen points.
We beat those Packers by fourteen.
At the end of the game, our fans are so hyped. I am hyped, too, but I want to get out of there, away from this crowd, because it’s hot and people want to talk to me, but I don’t like to talk, because I can’t talk right. I jump up and down and look over everyone. No. There is no quick route from the gym. No way. To leave, our team must walk through all the fans.
Okay. Okay. Just walk. Smile. Don’t worry.
The old men from Northrup all shake my hand, pat my back.
And it is good. It is okay. “Thank you. Thank you,” I say when they tell me I am great. They make jokes I don’t understand, and Derrick Oppegaard pounds the drum, and the cheerleaders dance. And it is fun. And then I see Carli Anderson with her shiny brown hair. She waves at me. Her friend, who is another pouty-faced girl like so many in Northrup, also sort of smiles, but not really.
“You need to talk to my dad!” Carli shouts.
“Okay!” I shout back.
And I am okay. I am fine. Maybe I should have stayed in the gym after all our big victories this season? “M-V-P!” a few boys from my grade shout. Nate Arndt jumps down from the stands and slaps me a big high five, as big as Barry Roland ever would.
After we return from Albert Community College, Greg Day drops me off, because Barry had a tae kwon do class. Greg wishes me good night. I am almost unable to respond. Something is strange. It is late on Thursday, but my usually dark house is not dark. There are lights on in every window. Has Renata died before turning off the lights?
“Okay, bye,” I say.
Inside, the scene is more strange than I could imagine. There are not dead bodies, but there are bodies. Two little girls are asleep on the floor of the living roo
m. I bend down and stare and I know who they are. I have seen them climbing the college lawn mower shed. I have seen them carrying sticks, chasing a cat across the street. In the fall, I found them halfway up the front yard pine tree spying on me when I was in the driveway completing my dribbling drills. They have messy hair cut at their chins. They look like wild children from anime cartoons.
I stand and smell. Renata has cooked Indian food. She would not do this for herself. I listen. There is quiet conversation in another room. I tiptoe down the hallway. I peek in the door of Renata’s study. She wears her black turtleneck sweater. This is what she wears when she wants to look good. She talks to a man, but he is not visible from the crack in the doorway. But I know who he is, because this has been brewing for some time.
I have a hard time breathing. I don’t know what to do, so I tiptoe down to my room and I climb into bed, which is gross, because I need to shower, but I’m not going to shower with other people in my house.
NINE
I HIDE ME
I do not ever talk about this.
After me and my dad moved to Warsaw, after my mom succumbed to her ovary cancer, I went to a lyceum, which is a school, but I didn’t go all the time, because my dad didn’t make me do anything. One morning, though, he was drinking a lot and he threw me out of the apartment door by the top of my shirt. I fell down in the hallway. He told me I was stupid like a dog who followed him around and I had to go to school or he would get in trouble for my stupidity. He locked the door.
I had on only a T-shirt and tan pants. I wore Spider-Man slippers. There was snow all over the ground. I went to school and my feet were wet and I slept in my desk. They made us go outside for fresh air in the midmorning. They made me wear a girl’s coat from the lost and found that was too small for my arms.
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