by Mike Lupica
“I didn’t make it,” Danny said, his words landing harder in his locker than the backpack had.
He turned to face Emma. “But you knew that already, didn’t you, M and M?”
Danny knew she hated that nickname, whether the other kids were talking about the rapper Eminem or the candy. Probably the candy more, since it was generally acknowledged by the male population at St. Patrick’s School that Emma Carson could stand to lose a few.
“I didn’t do anything, Daniel Walker,” she said. “You’re the one who didn’t make travel.”
“Well, you got me there,” he said.
Tess said, “I’m sorry, Danny.”
He wasn’t sure whether this was technically commiserating from Tess or not, since Emma was the one who’d originally brought up the subject of travel, and him not making it. He was sure of this, though: He wanted to talk to Tess about this in the worst way; he’d even thought about going online last night to see if she had her own computer up and running and open for business.
It was a lot easier to talk about stuff like this online. To talk about almost anything, actually.
It’s why he wished his dad would get a computer. Maybe then they could have a real conversation.
Maybe then they could talk.
“Whatever,” he said.
Emma said, “I heard the whole team is from Springs.”
Danny said, “Boy, you have all the sports news of the day, don’t you? Tell me, Emma, have you ever considered a career in broadcasting?” And then before she could say some smart-mouth thing back to him, Danny said, “Wait a second, considering how you spread news around this place, you’ve started your career in broadcasting already, haven’t you?”
“C’mon, Tess,” she said. “I guess it must be our fault he won’t be playing travel basketball this season.”
Tess looked as if she wanted to stay, but knew that would be violating some code of girl friendship. So the two of them walked away from him down the hall.
Before they turned the corner, Tess quickly wheeled around, made a typing motion with her fingers without Emma seeing, and mouthed the word “Later.”
Danny nodded at her, and then she was gone.
If yesterday was the worst day of his whole life, you had to say that today was at least going to be in the picture.
His best friend at St. Pat’s was Will Stoddard, whose main claim to sports fame in Middletown was that his uncle was the old baseball pitcher Charlie Stoddard, who’d been a phenom with the Mets once and then made this amazing comeback a few years ago with the Red Sox, pitching on the same team with his son, Tom, Will’s cousin.
Will’s other claim to fame, much more meaningful to all those who knew and loved him—or just knew him—was this:
He could talk the way fish could swim.
He talked from the moment he woke up in the morning—this Danny knew from sleepovers—until he went to bed, and then he talked in his sleep after that. He talked in class, in the halls, in study halls, on the practice field, in the car when Ali Walker would drive him to St. Pat’s, on the computer. When Danny would go to Will’s house, he would watch in amazement as Will would carry on one conversation with him, another on the phone, and have four instant-message boxes going on his computer screen at the same time.
Knowing that he was going to have to listen to Will go on about travel basketball for the entire school day wasn’t the most exciting prospect for Danny, but he’d caught a break when Will didn’t show up at the locker next to his before the bell for first period; didn’t, in fact, show up for algebra until about two minutes after Mr. Moriarty had everybody in their seats and pulling out their homework assignments.
When Will came bursting through the door, red-faced as always, his thick dark curly hair looking as if it had been piled on top of his head in scoops, Mr. Moriarty looked over the top of his reading glasses and said, “So nice of you to join us, Mr. Stoddard.”
At which point Will stopped in front of the class and theatrically produced a note from the pocket of his St. Pat’s–required khaki pants, like it was a “Get Out of Jail Free” card he’d saved from Monopoly.
“From my mother, sir,” he said. “Car trouble. We had to drop the Suburban off at Tully Chevrolet this morning, and pick up a loaner, which turned out to be a piece of cra…junk, which meant we had to turn around and go back and get another one when we were halfway here. Plus, my father is out of town, and the car conked out at the end of the driveway….”
“If it’s just the same with you, Mr. Stoddard, I’ll wait for the movie to find out the rest of it.”
As he walked past Danny’s desk at the front of the classroom, Will said, “Does this suck, or what?”
Danny knowing he meant travel, not being late for class.
Will had tried out for travel even though he knew he wasn’t going to make it the way he hadn’t made it last year or the year before. He had more heart than anybody Danny knew, more heart than Danny himself, he had always tried out, had always spent more time diving for loose balls than anybody in the gym.
But knowing the whole time he wasn’t good enough.
Sometimes Danny thought that the only reason Will was even there was to cheer him on, to watch his back.
That kind of friend.
Now he was the friend saying “suck” too loud in Mr. Moriarty’s classroom.
Mr. Moriarty said, “I don’t believe I quite caught that, Mr. Stoddard.”
Will stopped where he was, turned to face the music.
“I said,” Will said, “that being late for a great class like yours, sir, really stinks.”
There were some stifled laughs from behind Danny. When they subsided, Mr. Moriarty said, “Why don’t we just say it now, and get it over with.”
To the rest of the class, Will Stoddard said, “You’ve been a great audience, don’t forget to tip your waitresses.”
It was his favorite line from some old Saved by the Bell rerun.
As always, there was a brief round of applause. Mr. Moriarty was older than water and liked to carry himself like a bit of a stiff, but he was a good guy. One who seemed to get it.
Or most of it, anyway.
Will was definitely right about one thing, though:
This did suck.
Even for a streak of light, even in the light of stinking day.
5
EVEN WHEN THE WEEK SHOULD HAVE BEEN OVER, AT THE END OF SCHOOL ON Friday, it wasn’t over.
Because the Middletown Vikings were going to have their first practice, at five-thirty sharp, in the gym at St. Pat’s.
Danny’s mom had told him at lunch. The new basketball floor they’d put down in the Springs gym had suddenly turned lumpier than a bowl of Quaker oatmeal, and they were talking about tearing it up and starting all over again. And the high school gym was booked and there was an art fair at the Y.
And St. Pat’s was always looking for any new ways to raise money and now they had this exciting moneymaking opportunity from the Middletown Basketball Travel Team.
Starting today.
“Figured you ought to hear it from me, sport,” she said.
“They’re coming to my school?” he said. “My gym? What’s the next thing I’m going to find out, they expect me to ball boy for them?”
“Why don’t you go with Will after school today instead of playing ball?” she said. “Or take the bus and I’ll meet you at home?”
His mom usually had teacher conferences after school on Friday, and Danny would get the gym to himself.
He shook his head no, closing his eyes good and tight.
No crying in basketball.
“I’m staying until they come,” he said.
“But I’m going to be late today.”
Danny said, “I’m staying.”
Will tried to get Danny to take the town bus with him after school. Or take the bus he took to the Flats, on the north side of town where he lived, a few blocks from Danny, and play his new NCAA Footbal
l 2005 video game.
“My dad played college football,” Will said. “He says NCAA 2005 is better.”
Will Stoddard basically said Danny should do anything except be anywhere near the St. Pat’s gym when the “Springers”—it’s what he called Springs School kids, in honor of The Jerry Springer Show—showed up for their first practice.
But Danny kept shaking his head every time Will came at him with a new alternative plan, even after they’d started playing one-on-one in the gym, and all the St. Pat’s buses, including Tess’s, were long gone.
Occasionally Will would whip out his cell phone, which he kept in his baggy white North Carolina shorts even when playing basketball. There was a part of Will, Danny knew, that believed that cell phones could even make sick people better.
“I’ll call my brother,” he said. “He got his license yesterday. He’s looking for reasons to ride around. He wants to come get us, and he usually doesn’t want anything to do with either one of us.”
Danny shook his head from side to side, more slowly than before, trying to get through to him. “This is my day to have the gym to myself,” he said. “I’m not going to go hide in my locker.”
They had finished their first game of one-on-one, Danny winning, 10–7. The game was only that close because Danny had given Will his usual spot of five baskets. Sometimes he’d given him seven baskets in a game of ten and still beat him.
Will always took the points and always acted as if he was the one doing Danny the favor.
But then Danny would watch with great admiration sometimes as Will would borrow money off one of their other classmates and make the other kid feel as if this was his lucky day, that handing over five bucks to Will Stoddard was somehow exactly the same as the other kid winning the lottery.
Danny had just scored the winning basket by pushing the ball between Will’s legs, flashing around him to collect it, and banking a combination hook-layup high off the backboard.
“Where’d you get that one?” Will said.
“My dad showed me.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you all day—is he still in town?”
They had finished playing now, were sitting on the stage, still sweaty, legs dangling over the side. Danny bounced the ball on St. Pat’s floor. “Unless he left while I was in school today.”
“You haven’t seen him since…?”
“No,” Danny said. “But no biggie. You know how my dad is.” He turned to look at Will and shrugged. “Sometimes he’s as hard to cover as ever.”
“Yeah,” Will said. “I know what you mean.”
Danny thinking: But how could you know, really? Danny knew how most people in Middletown were still obsessed with Richie Walker’s comings and goings, how the Town Biddies still loved to gossip up a storm about the biggest star to ever come out of here, the kid who put Middletown on the map because of travel basketball, the kid who finally made it to the NBA, then left his wife and child not too long after the car accident that ended his career.
They didn’t really know anything about his dad, any more than people who’d only ever seen him play on television or read about him in the newspapers knew about his dad.
Of course Danny felt the exact same way sometimes, not that he was going to put an ad in the Middletown Dispatch about that.
Danny said, “You don’t have to stay until they come.”
Will, whose hair looked even more like steel wool when he’d start to sweat, the Bob Marley T-shirt his parents had brought him back from Jamaica looking as wet as if he’d just gone swimming in it off Main Beach, said, “Correction: You don’t have to stay.”
“They’re going to be practicing here for a couple of months,” Danny said. “I’m going to have to see them around here eventually. I might as well get it out of the way today.”
He hopped off the stage. “Like I said, I’m not running away, dude.”
Will sighed, the sound like air coming out of a balloon. “No, why do something like that when you can get your butt run over by the Springers instead?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Danny said. “But I don’t remember asking for your opinion about any of this.”
“Let me ask you something,” Will said. “When have I ever cared whether you asked for my opinion or not?”
“You want me to spot you seven this time?”
Will said, “I don’t want your pity. Make it six.”
They were finishing that game when Ty Ross showed up. The first of the Middletown Vikings.
Ty Ross had gotten both taller and skinnier during the summer, which Danny knew from the tryouts.
He also knew Ty was still great.
Could still dribble with either hand, shoot with either hand when he got close in to the basket, see the whole court as if he had two sets of eyes going for him. He would pass the ball if somebody else even remotely had a better shot than he did every single time. Sometimes he would just give it up because in addition to all his other qualities as a ballplayer, Ty Ross was completely unselfish, sometimes to a fault. He wasn’t the fastest kid in town, wasn’t nearly as fast as Danny was, but he knew when to drive to the basket, when to step back and make one from the outside, from as far away as the three-point arc in the gym at Middletown High, when to pull the ball down and just set the offense all over again.
As far as Danny was concerned, Ty knew as much about the way the game should be played as he did. The two of them just seemed to know stuff that other kids their age didn’t. Ty had been that way when they played fifth-grade travel together, and when they’d played sixth-grade travel together. He didn’t just know more about basketball than the rest of the players, he knew more than the coaches, too.
He sure knew more than any parent yelling at them to do this or that from the stands.
All in the name of being good sports parents, of course.
That even went for Ty’s dad, who, according to Danny’s dad, acted as if he’d invented basketball, not Dr. James Naismith.
“You know those peach baskets Dr. Naismith used for the first basketball games?” Richie Walker had said one time. “Jeff Ross thinks he invented those, too.”
On top of everything else, Ty Ross was such a nice kid that Will Stoddard said it made him physically ill.
He had dark hair, like his father, almost black, cut short this school year, his summer buzz still not having grown all the way out. He was wearing his own baggy basketball shorts, looking even baggier on him because his legs were so skinny they looked like stick-figure legs somebody had drawn on him. He was wearing a maroon Williams College T-shirt that looked to be about three sizes too big. Williams, Danny knew, was where Mr. Ross had gone to school.
Ali Walker had told Danny once that Ty was the player his father had always wanted to be. That he’d been the second-best player on the Vikings team that had won the World Series, behind Richie Walker, and that it had been pretty much the same way in high school. Danny’s dad had then selected Syracuse—and the chance to play in front of thirty or forty thousand people every night in the Carrier Dome—after passing on most of the big ACC schools and even schools as far away as UCLA.
Mr. Ross, who had the grades, thought he’d have a better chance to play at a small school like Williams. Only he didn’t, his mom said, never getting off the bench there before quitting the team his senior year.
“You know how your father says that the town never got over their team winning the travel-team World Series?” his mom said. “I’m not sure Tyler’s dad ever got over being number two to your father during all their growing-up years.”
“So,” Danny remembered saying to her that night, “Mr. Ross was a real number two guard.”
“That’s basketball talk, right?”
“Mom,” he said. “You know the point guard is called a one, the shooting guard is called a two, the center—”
“Stop,” she said, and not for the first time when the subject was basketball, “I’ll pay the ransom.”
; Ty and Danny had been teammates, starters both of them, on the fifth-grade team. Same thing the next year. Just not teammates this year. And maybe not ever again.
Now Danny watched as Ty came walking toward him with that pigeon-toed walk of his, walking straight down the middle of the gym, Danny knowing as he watched him what every kid in town knew already, that for as long as Ty Ross lived in Middletown, he was going to be the best kid walking into every gym.
All this time later, Danny thought to himself, it had worked out that a Walker was finally jealous of a Ross when it came to playing basketball.
Ty saw them over by the stage and came over, dribbling his own ball as he did.
“Hey, dude,” Danny said to him.
Ty got right to it, not messing around, not even bothering with a greeting of his own.
“You should have made it,” he said. “I should have called you as soon as I found out. You can ask my mom, I told her that night that you should have made it ahead of a lot of the guys who did.”
It was the closest thing to a speech for him, coming out almost as if he’d rehearsed it.
“Thanks,” Danny said, not knowing what else to say.
Wondering if Ty had expressed that same opinion to his dad, even though Ty was probably as intimidated by Mr. Ross as everybody else in town was.
Ty wouldn’t let it go, as if this had been bothering him all week as much as it had bothered Danny himself. “You can play rings around some of the guards they picked ahead of you. And you know how to play better than everybody they picked ahead of you, that’s for sure. And the whole thing is stupid and I wanted you to know it.”
“Quick heads-up?” Will said. “I wouldn’t let any of those other nose pickers who got picked ahead of our boy hear you saying that.”
“Will,” Danny said in a sharp voice, “I will pay you to shut up.”
Will said, “I hate to reduce our relationship to money—but how much?” Then he said he was going to beat the soft drink machine out of a Coke, and did they want anything? Danny and Ty both said no.
