Fast Break

by Mike Lupica

  None of it had been good.

  The store manager, who’d told Jayson to call him Pete, like they were buddies, had asked him a lot of the same questions Ms. Moretti was asking him now. “How old are you?” “Where are your parents?” “Where do you live and who do you live with?”

  Pete had eventually called the Moreland police and told them what happened. He offered to drive Jayson over to Moreland himself, but the policeman said that’s not the way it worked. An officer would pick Jayson up and drive him to the Child Protective Services office at the town hall, and a social worker would meet them there.

  The social worker turned out to be Ms. Moretti. She had long red hair and glasses on top of her head. She went over every detail of his life, asking every question twice, making sure she felt Jayson was telling her the truth.

  “You said your mom passed away last month?”

  “She didn’t pass away,” he said. “She died.”

  “And you don’t know where your father is.”

  “I don’t know who my father is.”

  “You never even had a name?”

  “Jamie.”

  “No last name?”

  Jayson shook his head.

  “Do you know if he still lives in North Carolina?”

  “I asked my mom one time where he was and she said, ‘A bar.’”

  “So you never had any contact with him?”

  Jayson shook his head and looked out the window, the lights of Moreland coming on. It occurred to him that he was only a few blocks away from Mr. Karlini’s store, where he’d convinced himself he was so good at stealing food that he could steal a pair of basketball shoes without getting caught.

  “And after your mom died, you lived with her friend Richie until he left?”

  “I told the man at the store all of this already, and then the police when they asked me.”

  “Jayson?” she said in a soft voice. “I’m not them. I’m trying to help you.”

  “Then let me go. I’ll earn the money and pay the man back for the shoes, swear.”

  “We’re past that,” she said. “You understand that, right?”

  He nodded.

  “You’ve been living by yourself since Richie left. Weren’t you afraid?”

  “Just of ending up here.”

  “You’re telling me that nobody in your building knew a twelve-year-old boy was living by himself?”

  Jayson shook his head. “We never got to really know anyone else at the Pines.”

  “And your friends? Nobody asked about your mom?”

  “If they had, I would’ve told them she was sick but getting better.”

  “What about your teachers?”

  “If you do good enough at school, they leave you alone. Richie signed my papers once before he left. I’ve been doing it since then.”

  “A seventh grader living on his own. No one noticed. That’s sad.”

  Jayson just shrugged.

  “What were you doing for food?”

  Jayson stared at the floor. “I stole.”

  Ms. Moretti took her glasses off her head and put them on, like she needed something to do with her hands while she thought of what she wanted to say next. Jayson could see the pity in her eyes.

  “I don’t need you feeling sorry for me,” he said. “I’m all right.”

  “You are? How can that be?” she said in a soft voice.

  “I’m not, actually,” Jayson said. “I’m hungry.”

  She said she could do something about that, and asked him what he liked on his pizza.

  “Pepperoni,” he said.

  Ms. Moretti nodded.

  “And sausage,” Jayson added.

  She smiled. “And sausage.”

  After she called in the order, she said, “You mind if I ask one more question, just for now?”

  Jayson sighed. “You’re going to ask it no matter what I say.”

  “What were you going to do when you couldn’t pay the rent or the bills?”

  Just like that, he wanted to cry. He could feel the tears coming, knew he was too tired to fight them back. But he tried, using anger like he always did.

  “I don’t know!” he yelled across the desk. “Okay? I can’t answer the questions you’re asking me!”

  Ms. Moretti was silent. Jayson expected her to get angry back. Instead, she reached out her hand toward his and said, “Okay.”

  That’s when Jayson lost his fight against the tears.

  They ate the pizza in silence at her desk, Ms. Moretti giving Jayson a cold Snapple from the refrigerator in her office to go with it. The pizza was good, and still hot when the kid brought it.

  When they finished eating, Jayson looked at Ms. Moretti and said, “What happens now?”

  She said, “I make some calls.”

  “To who?”

  “To the potential foster care parents on my list.”

  “To see if any of them want to take pity on me?”

  “To see if any of them want to help you get the life you deserve,” she answered.

  Then: “Would you mind sitting in my outer office for a few minutes?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “The choice you’re about to make is about a better life,” she said.

  “Who says I won’t run away once I’m out of here?”

  “No one. And if you did, I don’t think I could catch you, even though I played some high school basketball myself,” she said. “But the two policemen out front probably can.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “I think there are some copies of Sports Illustrated out there.”

  “Awesome,” he said sarcastically.

  Truthfully, he was too tired to bolt, but he didn’t tell her that. The boy who never seemed to get tired on a basketball court, who was always going at full speed when the other guys in the game were starting to slow down, was tired now. Or beat. Or beaten down. He couldn’t decide which. He just thought he could go to sleep right now, without even knowing where he’d end up tonight.

  He took a seat in one of the chairs outside and closed his eyes. After about ten minutes Ms. Moretti came out of her office and said, “Well, that didn’t take long.”

  “Awesome,” he said again.

  He didn’t believe for a second that she’d really found someone who would want him. Ms. Moretti had probably offered them money or something.

  “It took only one phone call, to the Lawtons, first names on my list.”

  “Why would they want me to live with them when they haven’t even met me?”

  “I told them about you.”

  “And they still want me? Are they stupid?”

  She ignored that, shut off the lights in her office, shut the door behind her.

  “Why don’t we go meet them and you can decide for yourself?” She smiled. “Maybe it really will be awesome.”

  They went down to the lobby of the building. She hadn’t been lying about the policemen; the same ones who’d driven him here were sitting in their car out front. Ms. Moretti knocked on the window and said she could take it from here.

  “My car’s just around the corner,” she said, and led the way down Broad Avenue.

  One last time, Jayson thought about making a run for it. No way she’d ever be able to catch him, even with him wearing the flip-flops he’d tried to leave behind at the Foot Locker.

  But then he thought:

  Where would I go?

  It was one more thing he’d have to figure out, just not tonight. Tonight he’d let the social worker woman take him home, wherever home was, at least for now.

  6

  THEIR NAMES, MS. MORETTI TOLD him on the ride over, were Tom and Carol Lawton. He was a doctor at Moreland Memorial, an orthopedic surgeon.

>   “Like a sports doctor?”

  “Yep—like that,” Ms. Moretti said, and then told him Carol Lawton had once been an art history professor at the University of North Carolina before retiring.

  They lived in a big house at the end of a street filled with other big houses on the west side of Moreland. The street was lined with enormous trees. It looked like practically every light in the Lawtons’ house was on as Ms. Moretti drove up the long driveway. There were two SUVs parked in front of a garage that was bigger than Jayson’s apartment at the Pines.

  This wasn’t just the other side of town. To Jayson, this was like a whole other world.

  He knew, even before Ms. Moretti rang the doorbell, just from standing on the front porch with two wicker chairs facing the street, that this was the nicest house he’d ever seen in real life.

  Somehow, the day that had started with all those bus rides over to Percy had brought him here. Him and his social worker.

  He hadn’t said one word to her once they’d left her office. She tried different ways to start the conversation back up, even asking him questions about basketball and his team. But she finally gave up, like she’d grown tired of having her shot blocked.

  The front door opened.

  He whispered to Ms. Moretti, “Why didn’t you tell me that they were black?”

  “You didn’t ask me,” she said. “Does it make a difference?”

  “I just didn’t know.”

  “What? That they had black people on this side of town, or that they lived in houses like this?”

  “Both, I guess,” he said.

  Mr. Lawton was tall, six feet easy. Mrs. Lawton was almost as tall, with lighter skin. The same kind of light-skinned black as Shabazz, whose father was white. She was young-looking, Jayson thought, for someone who had retired.

  “Thank you for doing this on such short notice,” Ms. Moretti said.

  “Kate,” Mrs. Lawton said, “if we didn’t want to get the call, we wouldn’t have our names on your list.”

  Then she turned and said, “You must be Jayson.”

  Jayson took a better look at her, another woman smiling at him, putting out her hand for him to shake. He thought about leaving her hanging, but what was the point? What was the point of any of this, ending up here, just because of a pair of stupid sneakers?

  He gave her a quick handshake and said, “Yeah.”

  “You seemed surprised when you saw us standing in the doorway.”

  “You’re black,” he said.

  It made her laugh, even though he wasn’t trying to be funny. She looked at her husband, then back down at herself, and said, “I guess we are!”

  Jayson felt the heat rushing to his face. He squared up his shoulders and said, “You making fun of me?”

  Ms. Moretti, something hard in her voice for the first time, said, “Be nice, Jayson.”

  Then they all stood there until Mrs. Lawton said, “Please come in.”

  She showed them into the living room. There was a fire going. Jayson saw pictures on the mantel above it, the Lawtons with a boy who was taller than both of them, wearing a basketball uniform. It surprised him for some reason. He’d had this idea in his head that people wanted to be foster parents because they didn’t have kids of their own.

  Jayson sat down next to Kate Moretti on a couch, the Lawtons across from them on another couch that looked exactly the same, a coffee table in between them.

  “Can I get something for you, Jayson?” Mrs. Lawton said. “Something to drink, maybe?”

  “I’m good.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I said I’m good.”

  There was another awkward silence, like the one at the front door. Everybody except Jayson smiling at everybody else. But he wasn’t going to make this easy for them. He didn’t care whether they wanted him to be here or not.

  He didn’t want to be here.

  “Why don’t we do this for now?” Mrs. Lawton said. “Tom and Kate, why don’t you go over some of the details about how we’re going to proceed while I go show Jayson his room?”

  She stood up. Jayson didn’t move, staring down at his hands clenched together in his lap. When he looked up again, he said, “How do you know if you want me to stay? You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Maybe I do,” Carol Lawton said.

  “You don’t know me. You just think I’m some kid likes to steal.”

  “You don’t know what I think, Jayson. But I do know more about you than you realize. You grew up in the Jeff, is that right?”

  He was back to staring down at his hands: already big enough to palm a basketball even though he was only twelve, but right now he was using them to hold himself together. “Yeah,” he said, “living the dream. You think knowing that makes us close?”

  “I grew up about two blocks from there,” she said. “Same neighborhood. Same world.”

  Before he could reply, she added, “But I like it better here. Before you decide you don’t, let’s at least have a look at what’s going to be your bedroom.”

  Jayson said, “So you think you know me because you come from the east side? You’re not anything like me.”

  “Maybe more than you think,” she said.

  “Think whatever you want.”

  “We just met five minutes ago,” she said, “so let’s agree that I don’t know you and you don’t know me. At least not yet.”

  Then she walked toward the stairs he’d seen in the front hall. Jayson followed her, his flip-flop sliders making loud slipping noises on the bare wood floor.

  “Jayson,” Mrs. Lawton said, “Ms. Moretti told us quite a bit about you on the phone. If I don’t know you yet, at least I know something about your life, and how it brought you to us tonight. And I feel like I have at least a little bit of an understanding about your life because we come from the same place. Most of my friends lived in the original Jefferson House. When it was just one building. The Pines hadn’t been built yet.”

  “Awesome,” he said. “Thanks for the history lesson.”

  “And what I believe . . . no, what I’m sure of is that if you can survive living on your own at a place like the Pines, you’re certainly going to be able to survive living with Tom and me, if that’s what you choose.”

  Jayson laughed. “So now I get to choose?”

  “We’re not going to force you to stay,” she said.

  They were at the top of the stairs, walking down a hallway.

  “I don’t need another mom,” he said, the words just spilling out of him.

  “I won’t try to be your mom.”

  “Then why do they call you guys foster parents?” he said. “What are you trying to do? Couldn’t you find someone who wants to live with you?”

  “My husband and I are trying to give you a safe place. And this is a safe place for you, whether you want to believe that or not.”

  “And you’re saying that if I want to leave, I can leave?”

  “I hope you’re not going to want to leave.”

  “But you don’t know that.”

  “No.” She smiled again. “I don’t. The truth. Just an old east side girl talking to an east side boy.”

  “Old is right.” The edge strong in Jayson’s voice.

  “Jayson,” she said. “This is a good place to stop running. But it’s up to you to give it a chance.”

  She said it in the same calm voice she’d been using all along, maybe so it wouldn’t sound as if she were arguing with him.

  It was the same with her as it was with Ms. Moretti: She was just trying to be nice. But what neither one of them realized was that Jayson didn’t want them acting all nice. This wasn’t his home.

  When they reached the bedroom, it only made Jayson more sure. It was bigger than the whole living room at the Pines, with a bed tw
ice as big as his own, a neatly placed blue bedspread on it. There was a large dresser, next to it a TV on a stand. There was a beautiful desk. Through another open door he saw a bathroom.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  “I think it’s a bedroom.”

  “It’s going to be your room,” she said. “Unless you’re even more stubborn than I think.”

  He went over and sat on the bed, feeling how soft it was underneath him.

  “This is really my room now?”

  Mrs. Lawton smiled. “It is.”

  “Then could you please get out of here and leave me alone?”

  7

  HE WOKE UP IN HIS new room, in his new house, on Sunday morning, not knowing where he was at first because of how quiet it was.

  There was no loud rap music from across the hall, nobody yelling at each other in the apartment upstairs, nobody banging pots and pans next door. At the Pines, where the walls were as thin as tissue paper, you heard everyone’s business.

  When Jayson opened his eyes and checked the iPhone docked on the nightstand next to him, he realized he had slept until ten o’clock. Maybe it was because this was the best, softest bed he’d ever slept in in his life: big, soft pillows and blankets, like you could pull the quiet up over your head.

  He took a shower and got dressed in the same clothes he’d worn yesterday. He took another look around the room, at the strangeness of it all. He picked up one of the soft pillows, held it to his chest. Then he swung it as hard as he could at the iPhone, the whole docking station flying off the table, the phone clattering to the ground and bouncing against a wall.

  He went downstairs and found Mr. and Mrs. Lawton waiting to have breakfast with him, the two of them sitting at the table with their coffee. Mrs. Lawton was reading a book while her husband was reading the sports section of a newspaper.

  “How’d you sleep?” Mr. Lawton asked, peering around the newspaper.

  “Okay.”

  Mrs. Lawton gave him that smile of hers. “Must have been more than okay if you’re just coming for breakfast now.”

  “Took me forever to get to sleep,” he said, knowing that was a lie. Even with his head spinning over everything that had happened to him, he was gone the moment his head hit the soft pillows, like somebody had knocked him out.