Playing The Game

by Jeff Shelby

  “Sound system is on full blast,” he continued. “It's seriously sick, dude.”

  Ty looked at me. He was okay looking, but I wasn't quite sure how he'd scored Cayla Rafferty. Maybe she had a thing for basketball players. “You throw down like you did at tryouts and it's gonna be insane,” he said, nodding his head. “Insane.”

  “And there will be motherfucking pussy everywhere,” Ken said with a smile. Zits dotted his face like freckles, white puffy ones and angry red ones and scabbed over ones.

  Heat rose up my neck, and I pulled an Oreo from the plastic bag in my lunch sack and stuffed it in my mouth so I wouldn’t have to respond. It was stale but I chewed and swallowed because it was still food and I was still hungry.

  “You got a chick?” Ken asked, eyeing me.

  I shook my head and looked away so I wouldn't be caught staring at the massive zit on his forehead. It looked like a third eye.

  “You will, dude,” he said, nodding. “Basketball is fucking king here.”

  Ty reached for his Coke and swallowed a mouthful. “Only because football blows.”

  Derek laughed. “We do benefit.”

  “But no shit,” Ken said. His eyes were huge, like he’d swallowed some meth along with his bag of chips. “The entire school comes to the games. And that was when we were just all right. But with you, dude? We're actually gonna be good. I'm gonna stock up on rubbers now.”

  “You use rubbers to jerk off?” Ty asked. His grin widened. “You don't like the mess?”

  Ken raised his eyebrows and showed him his middle finger.

  It probably wasn't a good time to mention I hadn't had sex yet. Really, there's never a good time to announce that. But when your newly minted friends are all testosteroned out and including you in the convo, you don't want to blurt out that you've never had the need to pull on a rubber, let alone stock up on them.

  Blake Trucott shook his head. “You're so full of shit, Blanton. Not a girl in this school who'd let you put your dick in her.”

  Ken scowled at him. “What do you know? Last time you kissed a girl, I think you were in fourth grade. And that was because you lost a bet.”

  Blake rolled his eyes.

  “You can admit it, Blakey,” Ken said, his voice all sing-songy. “You like dudes. It's fine. We still got your back. Just not your ass.”

  Several of the guys laughed. Blake rolled his eyes again and shook his head. I had no idea if he was really gay or if they were just giving him shit. He did sorta look like a walking advertisement, with his gelled hair and too-nice jeans and fitted gray V-neck, but that could have just meant that he actually cared what he looked like, not that he was batting for the other team. And it didn't matter to me one way or the other. But I did wonder, only because he didn't feel the need to respond.

  “Where you from again, Mickelson?” Derek asked.

  All eyes returned to me, and I reached for my water bottle. It was a Dasani, one I’d bought a couple weeks ago that I just kept filling with tap water. “Denver.”

  He nodded. “You play varsity at your school last year?” His tone was like it was a foregone conclusion that I had.

  I shifted on the bench and shook my head. “Nah. The coach didn't think sophomores should be on varsity. Said I'd play more on JV.” I shrugged. “So I played JV.”

  Derek laughed. “Well, that's one dumbass coach.”

  He was right. Coach Ehrlich had been a dumbass. I was better than any single guy on the varsity at my old school and he knew it. Hell, the players knew it. When we matched up against them in practice, I devoured his team, just to show him he was screwing up. It wasn't fair. But he held to his archaic rule that only juniors and seniors made the varsity team.

  When I'd complained to my dad, he listened, then nodded.

  “You want my advice?” he'd asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “There are assholes everywhere,” he said matter-of-factly. “Figure out how to deal with them. Get used to it now.”

  Not exactly what I'd been hoping for.

  He'd told me to play hard on the JV and show Coach that I deserved to move up. So I did, at first. But then my mom announced she was moving out and I heard my dad yell at her because she'd been fucking some guy named Dan, and playing hard on the JV didn't seem so important anymore. So I'd coasted. And found my ass on the bench. Something that should've pissed me off, but it hardly registered because I just kept thinking about my mom fucking Dan. It’s never good to picture your parents having sex; it’s even worse imagining them doing it with someone else.

  The bell rang and Ty stood. “Party at my house Friday night. Kind of a kick-off thing.” He toed my shoe with his. Not hard but enough to get my attention. “Make sure you're there.”

  See?

  Make the team and you're in.

  SEVEN

  It's a strange thing, waking up and all of a sudden having a life.

  Which is pretty much what I had after people found out I was on the basketball team.

  Every day, people talked to me in class. Teachers said hi to me when I got to their room, the same teachers who'd basically looked through me the first couple months of school. Girls smiled at me when I inadvertently made eye contact with them, the same girls who'd turned their noses up at me or totally ignored me.

  Which is all just bullshit when you think about it.

  I wasn't any different than before the rosters were announced. I hadn't gotten better looking or smarter or taller or friendlier or anything. People who had treated me like I was invisible for the first two months of school now acted like they'd been talking to me since day one.

  As if I had no memory.

  “Heard you made it,” Jake Slattery said to me as I slid into my desk in history class.

  Jake actually had been talking to me since day one. He was as close to a friend as I'd made. I’d had no idea where I was going the first day and he pointed out where my classrooms were, showed me the shortcuts, and basically didn't treat me like a pariah. He was short, with thick arms and legs, and the makings of a beard on his round face. Always wore cargo shorts, always wore a red hoodie, and always drew comics in a separate notebook in history.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “You gonna be a dick now?” he asked with a smile. “Like the rest of 'em?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Just giving you shit,” he said. “But those guys. Those guys have the dick thing going on.”

  “Who?”

  “Hammerling. Jesus, Blanton, he's the biggest one. Stoddard can be a prick. Trucott's okay, in the sense that he's never been an overt dick to me or anyone else. At least that I've seen.” He waved his hands in the air when he talked, almost like he was doing sign language. “Kings of the school, man. And they know it. Even the guys who don't play. You get handed a uni and a warm-up and it's pretty much license to look down your nose at the rest of us non-basketball playing peons.”

  I knew exactly what he was talking about. But I shrugged and said, “I just wanna play.”

  Jake raised his eyebrows. “We'll see what happens when you stop talking to me.”

  “Why wouldn't I talk to you?”

  “Because you're a king now.”

  I glanced at him. “You wanna be in my court?”

  He smiled and choked back a laugh. “Not in a million years, dude. Not in a million years.”

  I shifted my eyes to his notebook. “What are you working on?”

  He looked down at his notebook like he was noticing it for the first time. “Something new. I don't have a title yet. But these two chicks work for this super-secret government wing and they're investigating—”

  “Chupacabras.” I’d been studying the illustrations in the panels on his paper.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah. Chupacabras. How the hell did you guess that?”

  I nodded at the notebook. “I could tell by the creature thing you drew. Totally looks like one.”

  “You know about chupacabras?” It
was like he was asking me about the second coming of Christ.

  I leaned back in my seat as the bell rang. “Chupacabras are badass.” I grinned. “And totally real.”

  Jake studied me for a long moment, then held out a fist. “Damn right they are.”

  I bumped his fist.

  “People are always saying chupacabras aren't real and I'm like, you're wrong,” he said. “They are fucking real.”

  “You're wrong about those horns,” a female voice said.

  We both turned in our seats. Amy Mitchell was standing besides us, her backpack sliding down her arm.

  “Chupacabras don't have horns,” she said.

  Jake eyed her. “How do you know?”

  She dropped her bag to the floor. “Everyone knows. Duh.”

  Amy was one of those girls who’d caught my eye on the first day of school but who I didn't have the nerve to flirt with. Not because she wasn't hot. She was. She was Tinkerbell tiny, at least compared to me, with short dark hair and huge brown eyes that were always ringed with black eyeliner. She was wearing calf-length leggings today and a white hippie-looking shirt. The shirt wasn’t see-through but it was made of this flimsy, filmy material and I could tell that her bra was dark. Probably black.

  Amy Mitchell wasn’t just pretty. Cayla was pretty—way better looking than Amy—but Amy was…more. She seemed smarter than me and everyone else in the room, and not just because I never saw less than an A scrawled across the top of her returned homework. She was funny, and she constantly ragged on Jake in a way that annoyed the crap out of him and made me laugh. She carried herself differently: not stuck-up, no superiority complex. She just didn’t seem to care what people thought of her because she knew what she thought of herself. And that was enough.

  In other words, she was way out of my league.

  “And you two are adorable, by the way,” she said. “With the whole fist bump and shared love of chupacabras. I'd call it a bromance but I hate when people use that word because it's not a word.”

  “Whatever,” Jake muttered. He tucked his chin to his neck and traced the lines of his drawing with the tip of his pencil.

  “But if you were a real friend,” she said, pointing at me, “you'd tell him the horns are wrong.”

  “So, what? You two are real friends, then?” I asked.

  She snorted. “No one has friends here. Not real friends, anyway.”

  Jake's eyes widened. “And here I thought it was just me.”

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “I mean, this explains everything,” Jake continued. He stroked his almost-beard, as if he were deep in thought. “Why I sit by myself at lunch, why everyone treats me like I have Ebola. If only I'd known this earlier.” He shook his head dramatically. “It would have made my entire high school career more bearable, knowing I wasn't the only friendless person wandering the halls here.”

  “You should try out for the school play. Pretty sure they'd cast you in every role.” She turned her attention to me, looked me up and down. “But he's right.” She was now talking to me. “You probably will turn into a dick.”

  “He’s not gonna turn into a dick,” Jake said.

  Amy sat back in the desk and crossed her legs beneath the desktop. I tried not to look at her bare calves, or the bra straps visible through her shirt.

  “Good chance you will,” she said, as if I were the one who’d answered her, not Jake. “He’s right, you know. Once your ability to throw a sphere into a cylinder becomes public knowledge, the adoring public will throw themselves at you, causing your head to swell so much you'll have to turn sideways to get in this classroom.” She shrugged. “We'll miss you, young hoopster. Slattery will miss having his one friend.”

  Jake held up his middle finger over his shoulder. Amy laughed.

  This time, I did speak. “You don't know me.”

  She squinted at me, her eyes so dark, they were almost black. “Oh, I think I know you.”

  I couldn't stop the blood from rushing to my face. “Why's that?”

  “Look at you,” she said, her face lit with amusement. “You're the new kid. But the new kid who's good at the one thing everyone around here likes. You don't dress like you're blind, and you're all nice and shit to people. Quiet, but nice. You don’t get in anyone’s business; you keep to yourself but are approachable. You're cultivating the whole good guy persona. I'll bet the rich parents behind the picket fence are real proud of you when you come home and feed the dog and help with the dishes right before they hand you your allowance.”

  The last stragglers were shuffling into the room and making their way to their seats. And I was thinking about Amy’s words. There were compliments in there, but I was fixated on her assumptions about me. About my parents, about my life.

  “I'm just trying to give both of you a head’s up,” Amy said.

  “Pretty sure she means every girl in this school will want to give you head now,” Jake muttered.

  The bell rang loudly and a pencil flew into the back of Jake's head. “I heard that, asshole,” she said. “I said heads up. Fix your stupid horns because your chupacabras look like fucking unicorns.”

  I leaned toward Amy. My pulse was racing and I knew my face was the color of a tomato.

  I knew I should let her have the last word. Stay the way she’d described me: quiet and nice. Keep to myself. But I couldn’t.

  “My parents are divorced, my dad and I live in an apartment, we don't have a dog, and we aren't rich,” I said. “Sorry to break it to you, but you don't know shit. Just to give you a heads up.”

  EIGHT

  Someone tugged on the sleeve of my sweatshirt. “Hey.”

  Jake and I were making our way down the hall, my bag strapped on my back. A sea of people swarmed in front of us, packed like sardines, a massive wave of humanity being herded from one room to another. A few guys nodded at me, a couple girls smiled. Everyone ignored Jake.

  I looked to my right. Amy Mitchell had her hand on my sleeve.

  “What?” I asked, still walking.

  She quickened her pace and hopped forward to get next to me. “You have long legs. Hard to catch up to you.”

  “He’s the size of a basketball player, remember?” Jake said. “A dick basketball player.”

  “And you’re a dick Yeti,” she shot back.

  “Yetis are awesome.” He tapped my arm with his fist. “Later.” He peeled off and disappeared down another hallway toward his next class.

  “I'm not very good at apologizing,” she said, finally letting go of my sleeve. “So can we pretend that this is me saying sorry for assuming shit I shouldn't have assumed?”

  I wasn’t letting her off that easy. “Nope.”

  “Tough customer.” She sighed. “Fine. I'm sorry. Can we start again?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is that like sure, you really mean it or sure, get away from me, bitch?” she asked, raising an eyebrow and hugging a notebook to her chest.

  I chuckled. “First one.”

  “I have a big mouth,” she said, grimacing. “Sometimes it opens on its own.”

  I nodded. “Been there. It's cool.”

  The crowds had thinned a little and she scooted closer so that we were walking side-by-side.

  “My parents are divorced, too,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Blows.”

  I nodded again. “Pretty much.”

  “My dad's a drunk,” she said. “My mom left him. She was probably right to do it, but still. It's weird getting dropped off in a Burger King parking lot every other weekend so you can spend a couple of days with the dad you used to live with. The dad you don’t really know anymore. The dad you pretty much never really knew, because he wasn’t around to get to know.”

  She was so blasé about it, like she was telling me about a crappy homework assignment or getting rained on during P.E. class.

  “That sucks.”

  She shrugged. “Life and shit, I guess.”

  “I guess.”
/>   I sidestepped a group of really small freshmen girls, all with matching long blond hair, all wearing skin-tight black leggings. They smiled at me and one whispered in her friend’s ear, then turned back to look at me. They both giggled.

  “But Slattery isn't wrong about your teammates,” she said, glancing up at me. “Just so you know. They are dickheads.”

  “Aren't there dickheads everywhere?”

  “Yeah, but in high school, dickheads can make your life suck.”

  “You sound like you've had experience with these particular dickheads.”

  She snorted. “Very intuitive.”

  “Care to explain?”

  She stopped at the corner of a building and I slowed to a stop with her, letting a group of people rush past us. The notebook was still hugged tightly to her chest. She came up to about my elbow. I'm not sure what it was. The leggings, the almost see-through shirt, her eyes—I don't know. But she was super hot and right then, I would've taken her over ten Cayla Raffertys.

  “Not really,” she said, shaking her head. “Old news, anyway.” She pursed her lips. “I assume you're going to the thing at Ty's.”

  “I was kinda told I had to.”

  “Not your thing?”

  “Not really.”

  She studied me. “What is your thing on a Friday night?”

  I hesitated. I'd never been comfortable talking about myself, especially to girls I liked. I was better at playing it cool and aloof. I struggled with the cool part, but the aloof came easy. But there was something about the way she was looking at me that made me want to pull back the curtain, at least for a second.

  “Headphones on, nose in a book,” I said. “Probably getting shots up in a gym.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “You're full of shit.”

  “Serious.”

  “A basketball player who reads?” She chuckled. “Now I've heard everything.”

  “Oh, did you assume I was a dumb jock?” I asked. “Your whole not assuming thing lasted, what? Minute and a half?”