Sasquatch in the Paint

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  “Is that why you didn’t want to get together Sunday?” Brian asked.

  Partially. Plus, he’d spent several hours shooting baskets at the park. He’d gone there early, before anyone else showed up. As soon as he saw kids approaching on their bikes with basketballs under their arms, he’d taken off. But he couldn’t tell Brian that. “No, dude. I had homework to catch up on. The basketball team is taking up a lot of my time.”

  “We have a basketball team?” Daryl asked.

  “That’s debatable,” Brian said, turning away from Theo.

  Theo felt bad, but he promised himself he’d make it up to Brian later by telling him about his dad’s computer dating secret. Brian would have a lot to say about that.

  “Hey, what’s this?” Tunes said. He’d picked up Gavin’s CD from the floor next to Theo’s open backpack.

  “Nothing,” Theo said, grabbing for it. He’d forgotten it was in there.

  “Not so fast, Young Skywalker.” Tunes ran over to the computer on Mr. J’s desk. He slid the CD into the slot and tapped some keys.

  Theo stood up and walked to the desk. “Come on, Tunes. Give it back.”

  “I want to hear what kind of music is so important to you that you carry it around on this ancient disc.”

  Daryl said, “Maybe it’s a mix-tape for some girl.” He said “girl” like it was a foreign word he’d just learned. “Probably all songs by Disney chicks like Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato.”

  Theo looked to Brian for help, but Brian pretended not to notice. Punishment for not confiding in him about what had happened at the park.

  Suddenly Gavin’s voice blew through the tinny computer speakers. After the first verse, Tunes grabbed his phone and started recording the song. The only musical accompaniment was a few keyboard chords here and there. During the song, no one spoke. Even Brooke looked up for a few seconds before returning to her studies.

  When the first song was over, Theo ejected the CD and slid it back into the folded notebook paper.

  “Hey, man,” a voice called from the doorway. Three students were crowded around. “Who was that? It was awesome. Is it on iTunes?”

  Theo shook his head. “No. Just a home recording by my cousin.”

  They shrugged and left.

  “That was Gavin?” Brian asked in shock.

  “Yeah,” Theo admitted. He didn’t want to discuss it anymore. He hated that everyone liked it so much. It was bad enough he had to see Gavin in L.A. He didn’t want Gavin’s presence spilling into his life here.

  “The dude has talent,” Tunes said. He held up his phone and started replaying the song. “I should post this on Facebook, see how many Likes he gets.”

  “No!” Theo said, trying to snatch the phone. “Come on, man. Don’t. He’d kill me.”

  Daryl laughed. “Relax, dude. I’m just kidding. I wouldn’t do that to you. We’re a team, right? The Unstoppable Brain Train.” He deleted the song. “See?”

  “Right,” Theo said. “Thanks.”

  But he was thinking that they didn’t feel like a team. Not like when he was playing basketball. In basketball, there was all this silent movement, relying on the others to go where they were supposed to, to run out and help you when you were trapped. To feed you the ball when you were open. The Brain Train was five overachievers who didn’t play well with others, answering questions as if they were by themselves at home in their rooms. How was that a team?

  Just then, Mr. J appeared in the doorway holding a grocery bag. He grinned. “Now that music appreciation is over, who’s ready for sudden death?”

  EVERYONE scrambled to set up their chessboards, arranging the pieces as they had been left the last time they’d all played “sudden death.” As Theo carefully placed the queen and rooks, he felt especially confident about his chances of finally beating Mr. J.

  No one ever had. Yet.

  “Tunes!” Mr. J suddenly barked, pointing at him. He then sang, “‘I went to Kansas City on a Friday.’ What’s the next lyric? Go!”

  “‘By Saturday I learned a thang or two.’ Title: ‘Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City.’ From the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!”

  “Very good. Now move.”

  Sudden death involved playing Mr. J in a game of chess while he shouted out questions from each kid’s special area of knowledge. His theory was that if they could answer questions while concentrating on chess, they wouldn’t feel as pressured in the real competition. It seemed to work. In their first Aca-lympic match of the season, two weeks ago against Fullerton, they’d won. Not just won, but crushed them into oblivion, 145–23. However, Fullerton was always a bottom-feeder team that rarely made the regional tournament, so he’d warned them not to get cocky.

  Mr. J stood in front of Daryl’s chessboard. Daryl finally moved his queen. Mr. J studied the pieces for three seconds, and then moved his knight. “Checkmate in six moves,” he said, slapping the clock. Daryl frowned in disbelief as if he’d just been told he had an extra ear growing out of his neck.

  “How? I’ve got your rook and both bishops and I’m closing in on your other rook.”

  Mr. J said, “Where does the word ‘algebra’ come from?”

  Daryl looked up, confused.

  Mr. J snapped his fingers. “Come on, come on, Daryl. This game is lost anyway. Focus on what you still can win.”

  “You’re bluffing. Trying to rattle me because I’m about to beat you.” He slid his queen across the board and knocked over Mr. J’s rook. He looked up at Mr. J with a delighted grin. “Warned ya.” He slapped the clock.

  Mr. J instantly hopped his knight over Daryl’s pawn. “Check. Next you’re going to go here, since it’s your only move.” He tapped the square with his finger. “Then I go here, check again. You bring the rook in to threaten my knight, but I go here and…checkmate. In six.” He knocked over Daryl’s king. “Warned ya. Now, answer my question.”

  Daryl sighed in defeat. “‘Algebra’ comes from the Arabic al-jebr, meaning ‘reunion of broken parts.’”

  Mr. J shrugged. “Correct, but too late. You let yourself get distracted by personal thoughts of glory and forgot about the goal: answering the question.”

  “Yo, Mr. J,” Brian said. “I think I’ve got you this time.”

  “Yo, Brian,” Mr. J said, walking to his chessboard. “‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.’ Author and work?”

  Brian absently chewed on a captured pawn. “Uh, John Donne. ‘Meditation,’ uh…‘Ten’?”

  “Seventeen,” Mr. J corrected. “And what famous novel takes its title from this poem?”

  “Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

  “‘And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’” Mr. J slid a pawn forward one space and said, “Checkmate in eight moves.”

  “Crap!” Brian said, and started gnawing on the pawn again.

  Mr. J clapped his hands loudly. “Anyone here order an extra-large can of whup-ass? ’Cuz that’s exactly what Lansing Middle School is going to deliver to you five sitting in front of me. Any of you pretenders to the throne going to prove them wrong?”

  No one said anything. Lansing had beaten Orangetree every year for the past eight years. They’d won the gold medal in the state Aca-lympics for the past three years. Theo had heard all kinds of stories about the effects Lansing had on their competitors. Opposing teams would get so intimidated that they’d forget even basic information. Some kids burst into tears during matches. One guy peed himself when he forgot who’d assassinated Lincoln. All the members of the Turtle Rock Middle School team quit after getting stomped by Lansing, and one of them had started seeing a therapist. Another kid had stopped speaking altogether and only communicated through writing with purple crayons on yellow sticky notes. Theo didn’t believe that one.

  Mr. J shook his head at their silence. “Not exactly the rousing cheer of enthusiasm I had hoped for. Or is this a case of ‘Me
n of few words are the best men’? What’s that from, Brian?”

  “Shakespeare’s Henry V,” Brian announced proudly, happy to redeem himself.

  Mr. J opened the grocery bag on his desk and removed the contents: a six-pack of Coke and a bag of Snickers bars. “I smuggled in this contraband against state nutritional guidelines, common sense, and every rule of dental hygiene, because you guys are going to need a morning caffeine-and-sugar jolt to get through the next hour of practice.” He handed out the Cokes and Snickers bars. “Let me assure you, lady and gentlemen, there will be blood!”

  Everyone ripped into their snack. Even Brooke.

  Clinton Jacobson was Orangetree’s STEM teacher (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) as well as the Brain Train’s faculty adviser. On the wall behind his desk was a poster of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue. That kind of summed up Mr. J: he didn’t seem to take much seriously, and he was the smartest person any of them had ever met. He was so smart, in fact, that everyone wondered why he was teaching middle school when he could’ve had a much better job. Rumor was that he had taught at a famous university, but he’d accidentally killed a student during a failed time-travel experiment. Blew up half the classroom. Someone else heard he’d shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but Tunes said that was a line from a country song, so none of them knew what to believe.

  “You know, Mr. J,” Brooke said after swallowing the last bite of her Snickers, “the whole ‘sugar leads to hyperactivity in children’ theory is wrong. Scientists disproved that years ago.” She swigged the last of her Coke and smugly clunked the can down on her desk.

  “True,” Mr. J said. “The only question I have is, why didn’t our science expert point that out?” He turned to face Theo, who was chewing an especially large bite of candy bar.

  With everyone in the room staring at him, Theo tried to talk, but all the chocolate and Snickers stuffing muffled his words. Just as well. All he had to say was, “I don’t know.”

  Brooke took Theo’s faltering as an opportunity to deliver a kung fu deathblow. “In fact, experts say that there is no correlation between food and behavior. More likely, kids’ hyperactivity results from the excitement caused by parties and holidays, when they get more sweets than usual. Hence the mistaken blame on sugar.”

  “Great answer, Brooke,” Mr. J said. “Except I’m deducting three points for using the word ‘hence.’ That’s too geeky even for us.”

  Brooke snorted. Snorting was her major form of expression. Theo had started numbering her snorts the way he numbered his shrugs. Her Number 7 meant: “You are too stupid to say anything to me that I would ever want to hear.” Snort Number 3 meant: “If you continue to breathe the same air as me, you will wake up one morning in a burlap bag in the middle of an African desert.” They were all pretty much variations of those two.

  Mr. J stood in front of Theo. He wasn’t much taller standing than Theo was sitting. He had long brown hair that he wore pulled back into a thick braid, like rope on a whaling ship. He black jeans hung loose around his thin legs. He always wore a white (well, whitish) shirt that was so wrinkled it looked like he’d slept in it. For a month. Under a bridge.

  He looked down at Theo’s chessboard and smiled. “You’re getting better.”

  “Thanks,” Theo said, genuinely pleased. He felt a small chill at the back of his neck. His mouth went slightly dry. Maybe this time… The excitement made him shift uncomfortably in the small desk.

  “By the way, Theo,” Mr. J said, “what is Maggot Debridement Therapy?”

  Theo felt all the blood rush from his head like panicky residents abandoning a burning building. “I think it’s…uh…well, maggots are…uh—”

  Brooke interrupted. Somehow, she managed to snort out the words. “Maggot Debridement Therapy is when live disinfected maggots—a.k.a. fly larvae—are dropped into an infected open wound, because they eat the dead skin cells as well as the bacteria.”

  “I concur,” said Tunes.

  “Shut up,” Brooke said, and Tunes ducked his head as if she’d hurled the words at him. “Anyway, they discovered this on the battlefield. Doctors noticed that wounded soldiers with maggots in their wounds healed faster than soldiers without maggots. Now we have antibiotics, but because so many microbes are becoming resistant to them, lots of major modern hospitals around the world are using maggots. Even here in the U.S.”

  “No way,” Daryl said, his face scrunched in disgust. “That’s gross.”

  “About eight hundred medical centers in the U.S. use them,” Brooke said.

  Mr. J nodded in approval and Brooke went back to studying her chessboard. “That’s the kind of thinking we’re going to need to beat Lansing. As Shakespeare has Henry V saying:

  “In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

  As modest stillness and humility;

  But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

  Then imitate the action of the tiger:

  Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.”

  He practically shouted “summon up the blood,” and everyone—even Brooke—jumped a little in their seats. For a few seconds, as his heart beat wildly in his chest, Theo could see on their faces that they each believed they might just beat Lansing.

  “By the way, Theo,” Mr. J said softly, nudging his queen two spaces, “checkmate in four moves.”

  IN the cafeteria, everyone Theo passed gave him a weird look. Some looked mildly amused, as if watching an Internet video of a dog walking on its hind legs carrying a tray. Most just looked surprised, as if this was the first time they realized he went to their school. One kid punched the air and then gave him a thumbs-up.

  “How did word about the fight get out so fast?” Theo asked. “I just told you guys.”

  Daryl took a bite from his hamburger while they walked. “I texted Wolfman while Mr. J was wiping up the chessboard with your carcass.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “That you were in a bare-knuckle brawl in the park. I might’ve mentioned that an ambulance was called. Oh, and that you threw rocks at a Hell’s Angels biker who was hitting on your girlfriend. Admittedly, I embellished a little to hook the reader.”

  Theo spun, his carton of milk and plate of pizza almost sliding off his tray. “I didn’t want the whole school to know!”

  “Then why’d you tell us? You know none of us can keep our mouth shut.”

  Thing was, Daryl was right. Why had he told them—notorious blabbermouths—if he’d wanted it to remain a secret? Deep down, did he want everyone to know?

  Theo shook off that question and walked away. “Never mind,” he said. “Just never mind.”

  He walked outside to the metal picnic tables.

  Daryl and Tunes hurried off in a different direction to join their buddies at the World of Warcraft table. They would spend the rest of the lunch break discussing their online strategies against the Horde.

  Brian followed Theo to an empty table at the edge of the eating area. No one ever sat there because it was just outside the shade and the metal got as hot as a frying pan. But it was private.

  They plopped their trays down opposite each other. Brian started right in. “What’s up with you, dude?”

  “Nothing. I told you what happened. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “I’m not talking about the fight. I’m talking about Mr. J’s practice session. Maggot Debridement Therapy, Theo! It has ‘maggot’ in the title. We joked about it when we first read that article in the Aca-lympics study material. Last year you knew all about it.”

  It was true. Theo remembered now. Why hadn’t he remembered in the classroom?

  “What’s going on with you? You grew a few inches and it stretched your brain out of shape?”

  “I’m just…distracted. Suddenly Gavin’s got talent and—”

  “I hate to admit it, man, but he really is good.”

  Not what Theo wanted to hear. He continued his sentence. “—and I found out Friday
night that my dad has secretly joined some online dating service.”

  “Whoa, Marcus is on the prowl?” Brian laughed. “‘Imitate the action of the tiger: Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.’”

  Theo chuckled. Brian could always make him laugh, even when he was feeling low.

  “Has he actually gone out with any women yet?” Brian asked.

  “No, he just joined.”

  “How’d you find out so fast?”

  Theo told him about sneaking downstairs and breaking into the computer.

  Brian stared with his mouth open. “Who are you, dude?”

  Theo shrugged. “I’ve been asking myself that a lot lately.”

  They ate in silence for a while. Brian gobbled down two pieces of pizza, a bottle of water, and a chocolate cookie. Then he ate Theo’s cookie. “Have you considered quitting basketball? Maybe that’s the cause of all this chaos in your life. It’s messing with your mind.”

  “It’s not basketball. Basketball is just a game.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s a cult. Every sport at school is a cult. A bunch of kids playing because”—he peeled a finger for each reason—“one, their parents want to raise a sports hero so they can attend all the games and prove to everyone else what great parents they are.”

  “That’s not my dad.”

  Brian shrugged, as if not wanting to debate it yet. “Okay. Two, because the players want everyone to notice them and think they are massively cool.”

  “Does that sound like me?”

  “Three, because they’re poor and a sports scholarship is their only hope of attending college. There are only about five kids at this whole school who qualify as poor, and none of them is on a sports team here.”

  Theo snorted. (Brooke would have appreciated that.) “What about just for the fun of playing the game?”

  “You hadn’t even heard of the game until a couple months ago, when Coach Mandrake asked you to join the team.”

  “I had heard of basketball. I’d even played in that summer camp, remember? We both did.”

  “That was for one week when we were eight and our parents still hoped we’d be normal kids instead of nerds.”