Stealing the Game

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  He stared at me with a surprised expression. “Do Mom and Dad know?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t tell them.”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  He sat up anxiously. “Don’t say anything to them, Chris. Please. It’s important.”

  “Then tell me what’s going on, Jax. Tell me where you’ve been for more than a year while we all thought you were studying law.”

  “Can’t you just trust me, SP?” He slapped on his big, fat charming smile. “You know, Bro Code. Brothers have each other’s backs.”

  “That’s the thing, man. You haven’t really had my back since you got back home. And I want to know why, or I’m going right down to tell Mom and Dad what I know.”

  “Things are…complicated.”

  I snorted (Brooke would have been proud). “Complicated? That’s a line from every ABC Family show ever.”

  “Good point,” he said. “I’m asking you to trust me, Chris.”

  “How can I trust you when all you’ve done is lie to us?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “Great. Tell them to me.”

  He sighed. He tossed his book onto his desk. It slid across and knocked his keys to the floor.

  “Crap,” he said. He started to get up from the bed to retrieve them when he suddenly winced and grabbed his right side. The pain was so intense that he sat back on the bed.

  “Jax!” I shouted, and knelt beside him. I lifted up his shirt and saw a bag of frozen corn strapped to his ribs with an elastic ankle wrap.

  He tried to push me away, but he was weak. “I’m fine, bro.”

  I removed the wrap and bag of corn. A huge boot-shaped bruise darkened his skin like a giant tattoo. “Oh my God, Jax! What happened?”

  “Basketball accident?” he said with a weak chuckle.

  When I looked at his back, I saw several more bruises. I got up and marched toward the door.

  “Hey! Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To get Mom and Dad. You need medical help. And maybe even a lawyer.”

  Jax jumped up, winced, and hugged his bruised ribs. He blocked the door. “You can’t do that, Chris. Seriously. For all of your sakes.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I don’t want to put you guys in danger. But if you tell Mom and Dad, that’s exactly what will happen.”

  I said nothing. I had to think. All this was happening so fast that I didn’t know what to do.

  “I know it looks bad, Chris. And I know you’re only looking out for me. But I need you to just sit down and listen for a minute.” He pointed to the desk chair.

  “This better be good,” I said as I sat. “Otherwise, I’m telling Mom and Dad.”

  “Okay.” Jax sat back on the bed. He grabbed the bag of frozen corn and slipped it under his shirt, pinning it to his ribs with his arm. “At least we’ll have a healthy snack of corn and peas after this is over.” He smiled.

  I didn’t. “Just talk.”

  “I’m involved in something, Chris,” he began, carefully choosing his words. “I can’t tell you what, because I don’t want you involved.”

  “I am involved.”

  “Not really.”

  “Did the basketball game today with the Undertakers have something to do with what you’re into?”

  He nodded. “Only a little.”

  I took the bag of peas off my face to show him the swelling. “Then I’m involved.”

  He groaned. “You don’t understand and I can’t explain it to you. Not yet. For now, I need you to trust me and not tell Mom and Dad. Or any of your friends.”

  “Because they’d be in danger?” I said sarcastically.

  “Yes. It’s not a game, bro. These people don’t play around.” He nodded at his bruised body. “As you can see.”

  “Who did this? Was it Faux—I mean Rand?”

  Jax shrugged. “He wears very thick boots.”

  “Why did he do this?”

  “I owe him money.”

  “How much?”

  “A lot.”

  “How much? I have savings. Almost a thousand dollars.”

  “Really?” Jax laughed. “I’ve never saved more than a hundred bucks in my life. Anyway, I appreciate the gesture, man, but it’s not enough. Not nearly.”

  We both sat there for a minute, neither speaking.

  “So, is he going to kill you or something if you don’t give him the money?”

  Jax shrugged. “No, because then he wouldn’t get his money. But he can make me very uncomfortable until I pay.”

  Tears were starting to form in my eyes. I tried to force them back. This wasn’t the time to fall apart. My brother needed help.

  “And you thought you could win the money back if we beat the Undertakers? You had to know we couldn’t. They’re older and bigger and probably even better.”

  “Rand gave me great odds. If you had won, I would’ve been out of debt. Free and clear. It was worth the risk.”

  “What about the risk to us? Those guys were monsters.”

  Jax looked down, embarrassed. “Yeah, you’re right. I got so caught up in my own problems I didn’t stop to think.”

  “So all this is because you have a gambling problem?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You dropped out of Stanford Law School to gamble?”

  “Ironic, huh?” he said.

  “Don’t try to be cute, Jax!” I hollered. “Not now! Not about all this!”

  He nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “So what do we do now?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How do we fix this? Make Rand go away?”

  Jax sat up and looked me straight in the eye. I’d never seen him so serious. “You know how you’re always checking places out, trying to figure how Master Thief would rob them?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I need you to give me a plan for how to rob a local business.”

  “What?!”

  “I need to go in after hours, when the place is closed, and steal enough stuff to pay off my debt.”

  I slumped over. My stomach felt like a WWE wrestling ring and someone was slamming metal chairs into my intestines. “That’s just going to make things worse, Jax. What if you get caught?”

  “I won’t.”

  “Yeah, right, because no criminal ever gets caught.”

  “I’m not your average criminal.”

  “Since when did you start being any kind of criminal?”The tears were back and I was fighting a losing battle keeping them in. I wiped my eyes, pretending I was just tired.

  “I’m not a criminal, Chris. Not really. This is a onetime thing. And I promise you that I will make it up to everyone involved. I swear to you. I just need you to trust me.” He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “You saved my life when you were just a baby. Now I’m asking you to do it again.”

  I frowned at him. “Dude, that line’s even cheesier than ‘It’s complicated.’”

  “Desperate times call for desperate cheese.” He squeezed my shoulder in a brotherly way. “Will you do it, Chris? Will you help me?”

  I was still trying to process everything when the bedroom door opened and Dad walked in. “So, what are you guys talking about?”

  MIDWEEK TERROR

  THE house was dark.

  Evil dark. Like the dark when you wake up inside a sealed coffin.

  The only light was from a dim flashlight that would start to fade out until whacked against the leg.

  In the room down the hall on the right was a creepy moaning, like someone in a hospital for the criminally insane.

  Which is exactly where we were.

  Suddenly the door on the left flew open and a woman in a shredded white dress leaped out with an ax. Her face was ghastly: the skin burned off from acid, one eye hanging half out of its socket, her thin lips stretched over her teeth like a skeleton face. Her wedding dress was
covered in blood.

  Fortunately, all this was happening to someone else on the movie screen. Nevertheless, Dad and I crouched down in our seats. We were both wearing sweatshirts with the hoods up and cinched tight around our faces so only our eyes were visible. This is how we always dressed when we went to a horror film.

  I wasn’t sure why Dad had insisted we go to the movies on a school night. He’d just walked into Jax’s room, interrupted our discussion of committing a felony, and said, “Who wants to go see Dark Evil 2?”

  Jax had declined, of course, but I could tell by Dad’s look that this was something he wanted to do with me, so I said yes. This was our thing anyway. Dad had been taking me to scary films ever since I was ten. I never got nightmares, so we just kept going. Mom hated them (“I don’t see what’s so entertaining about horrible girls with stringy hair crawling out of your TV screen”), so it was just Dad and me. We always tanked up at the concession counter with popcorn, candy, and giant sodas. Then, once the movie started, we flipped on our hoods, tightened them around our faces like masks, and hunched down in our seats, giving in to the fear. Dad had spilled more than one popcorn by jumping in his seat when something suddenly lunged out on the screen.

  On the ride home after the movie, Dad was quiet. Usually we dissected the film, reliving all the best scenes and recalling how stupid the characters were to wind up alone with a homicidal demon. Not tonight. Something was on his mind. I eventually realized that the whole point of our going out to the movies on a school night was so we could have this time alone.

  I waited. I could outwait anyone in the silent game.

  Finally, he said, “Are you okay, Chris?”

  This took me by surprise, though you’d think that after Jax asked me to help him rob a store, nothing would surprise me.

  “I’m fine, Dad,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “It’s just that there have been a lot of changes in the last couple days. Jax coming home…”

  He let that hang, as if waiting for me to add something. I let it hang, too.

  “I know his dropping out of Stanford must have come as a shock to you.”

  “He’s on a leave of absence,” I said. I don’t know why I said that, why I was defending Jax’s lies.

  Dad shrugged. “Now Mom and I are dumping Stanford catalogs on you, hiring tutors, enrolling you in PSAT classes—”

  “In what?” I snapped.

  “Sorry, we forgot to tell you. It’s just once a month for now. Later, when you get closer to taking them for real, we’ll do it every Saturday.”

  I didn’t say anything. What was the point? Apparently, he and Mom had my life all figured out.

  “We’ve also been looking into club teams for basketball.”

  This time I spoke up. “I told you, I don’t want to join a club team. I’m happy playing for the school.”

  “Like we said before, Chris, playing club will—”

  “Get me noticed more. I know. But I don’t want to be noticed more. I just want to play ball with my friends, mind my own business, and have you and Mom mind your own business!”

  Uh-oh.

  My heart beat a drum solo against my chest. I wished I could pull my hoodie over my face, cinch it up, and scrunch down in my seat. I’d never yelled at him like that, so I wasn’t sure what reaction to expect.

  “Son,” he said quietly, “I love you.”

  Okay, I hadn’t expected that.

  “And I know you think Mom and I are suddenly interfering in your life because of Jax’s screwing up. That’s partially true. But that’s not all of it.”

  He was silent a minute, like he wasn’t sure what to say, or maybe how much he wanted to tell me.

  “When Jax was about, I don’t know, ten or eleven, Mom and I were watching this old movie on TV called And Justice for All.”

  “I’ve heard Jax quote it before. ‘You’re out of order! You’re out of order! The whole trial is out of order!’ He loves that part.”

  Dad chuckled. “Yeah, he does. Thing is, the movie was too mature for him at that age, but we didn’t think he was watching it. He was over at the dining room table, reading some Harry Potter novel. Anyway, the movie is about this crusading young lawyer fighting a corrupt legal system. Mom and I had both seen it in college and it had influenced us to become lawyers.” He paused again, scrunching his face as if remembering something bad. “In the movie, the lawyer has a young client who’s innocent but gets sent to jail because of some misfiled paperwork. The innocent kid hangs himself in prison.”

  “Why did he do that if he was innocent?”

  Dad sighed. “Bad things can happen to you in prison. Doesn’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty.”

  I thought about Jax. About the robbery he wanted me to help him with. Would the same bad things happen to us?

  “The thing is, when the movie was over, your mom and I looked over at Jax and saw that he was crying. He was being quiet about it, but his shoulders were shaking, and when he looked up, his face was wet with tears. We asked him what was wrong and he said, ‘It’s not fair! It’s just not fair!’” Dad looked over at me. “He was so outraged by the injustice that he couldn’t stand it. After that, he went through our DVD collection and started watching movies on his own. Not the Harry Potter or Adam Sandler films like before, but To Kill a Mockingbird and Twelve Angry Men. Movies about justice and the law. All he talked about was how one day he would become a lawyer and stop the injustice. That’s why we did everything we could to help him get into Stanford Law School. Because that was his dream. Not ours.”

  I hadn’t known all that about Jax. I wondered why he’d never told me.

  “See,” Dad continued, “with Jax it was easy for us, because he always knew what he wanted. He had a passion. But with you, Chris…you’ve never shown passion for anything. Not that you have to yet—heck, you’re only thirteen. But we want to at least lay out some sort of path for you. Right now it’s law. But that’s only a suggestion. If you choose another path, that’s fine with us. You want to be a teacher or a trapeze artist, it doesn’t matter. But Mom and I want you to be able to have choices. So, if we’re acting a little crazy right now, it’s because seeing Jax crash and burn like this has made us worry even more for you. I mean, if someone like Jax, who knew exactly what he wanted from the age of ten, could fail…”

  He left the rest unspoken. But I filled in the words for myself: Then what chance does someone as unfocused as you have?

  Did it really matter? After all, I had only been conceived to be some sort of life-support system for Jax. My path was to give him a future. Now his future was flat-lining.

  During the whole ride I’d been debating with myself about whether or not to tell Dad the truth about Jax. I had hoped he might be able to help. But now I thought it would only make Mom and Dad feel like bigger failures.

  I swallowed something thick in my throat. I’d rather get another elbow to my nose than feel this bad.

  “My point is, son, that I’m sorry if Mom and I are acting like helicopter parents, or whatever the term is now. But we’re trying to make sure you succeed where Jax didn’t.”

  I could have told him that I did have a passion: comic books. But compared to ridding the world of injustice, that would seem so lame. I still hadn’t even figured out everything about Master Thief yet. Plus, having a secret is like having a hidden treasure to use in an emergency. Like Hot Pockets.

  “You understand, Chris?” Dad asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. And we were silent the rest of the drive home.

  SAVIOR SIBLING—AGAIN

  “SO, are you going to help me, or what?” Jax asked.

  I looked at him, sitting on the edge of my bed, holding a fresh bag of ice to his ribs. Was this the same guy who’d cried at injustice? The same guy who’d vowed to end it, like Bruce Wayne after his parents were murdered, or the Punisher after his family was mowed down by gangsters, or Hit Girl after Big Daddy was killed? The same guy who’d taken me a
long on his dates, to beach parties, to Lakers games when he didn’t have to?

  I didn’t know the answer. In the end, all I knew was that this guy asking me to help him rob a store wasn’t the real Jax, and it was my job as his brother—his spare parts—to help him get back to himself. He’d promised me that he would make everything right, even with the place he robbed. Given all that had happened in the past few days, I had no reason to believe him. But I chose to believe him anyway. I guess, after all we’d been through together, I didn’t want to live in a world where I couldn’t believe him.

  I also figured that I might be able to control the situation, to keep it from getting any worse.

  “Yes, I’ll help you,” I said.

  He sighed with relief. “Thanks, bro. I owe you big-time.”

  “Don’t you ever get sick of saying that? Isn’t it about time you pay me back?”

  “I will, after this,” Jax said. “All my debts will be settled after this.”

  Yeah, sure, I thought to myself. Out loud I said, “How much money do you need?”

  “I need goods worth ten thousand dollars.”

  I gagged. “Ten grand?! I thought we were talking about a couple hundred or something. That’s insane, not to mention impossible.”

  “Nothing’s impossible. Haven’t you seen the inspirational posters in Ms. Truman’s office?” He curled his fingers and held them in front of him in imitation of the cat in the poster dangling by his front paws from a bar. “Hang in there, baby!”

  “Where would you even get that kind of stuff?” I said, my stomach turning over.

  “Angelo’s—you know, the pawnshop. There’s bound to be some jewelry there.”

  He scooched closer to the desk where I was sitting. “Let’s get cracking on the plans. I’ve got to do it tonight.”

  “Tonight?!” He was getting crazier with each passing second. I had to stop this, or at least slow him down. “No way, dude. I have to think things through, look at every angle, double-check the store.”

  Jax scoffed. “Come on, Chris. You’ve been doing all that for the past couple years for your comics. You know the layout of most of the local stores, their alarm systems, and a dozen different ways that Master Thief could break in.”