by Mike Lupica
Wes texted him then, even knowing his dad never texted back.
But he had to try. His dad would know how to handle things with Dinero if he was here. Except that he wasn’t here.
He actually did have homework to finish, for English and history. So he sat at his desk and finished all of it, forcing himself to concentrate, trying to keep his brain away from Dinero and basketball and his dad.
But everything was connected.
His dad had warned him about Dinero. In that way, his dad was the one still thinking one move ahead. But did that mean Dinero really was holding a grudge now, and he’d take that grudge to the next game?
Wes wouldn’t know that until the next game.
What he decided was that he wasn’t going to let his own ego get in the way of the team. He had been taught that nothing was more important than the team. If you elevated it, you elevated yourself in the process. Raise the team’s game, raise your own. Simple as that. And you never put yourself ahead of the team. It always came back to the basics: Shoot if you were open, pass if somebody was more open. Have fun.
But he sure wasn’t having fun right now, even though his team was 1–0.
So, he would have to work harder. He was going to be the best player he could be. He was going to show everybody who needed to be shown that he was ready for AAU ball next season.
And if he could do that, he told himself, there was no way his dad would want him to start on that journey without him. Even if his dad wasn’t living at home, even as distant as he was—would he ever learn the reason why? Would his dad ever open up to him and his mom? He still could be a part of Wes’s season. No way he would want to sit it out. It had to be why he was sneaking into Hawks’ practices. It had to be why he’d come by the driveway so the two of them could talk. It was as if he were trying to come all the way back to Wes, but couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.
He shook his head hard to clear it, and wrote the last page of his Civil War paper, wondering if the best Union soldiers were the equivalent of Navy SEALs in olden days, wondering what they were like when they made it back home, if they made it back home.
These were his last two sentences:
“The only ones who knew how brave they were were the soldiers themselves. They saw what they saw fighting the war but stayed brave until their mission was accomplished.”
He thought that was a pretty good ending.
Wes wanted a happy ending for himself, for his mom, for his dad. He saved his document, closed his laptop, brushed his teeth, gave one last check of his phone.
Nothing.
After his lights were off, his mom came in to say good night and tell him that she loved him. He said he loved her, too.
When he heard the door shut, he reached over and checked the phone again.
Still nothing.
For now, whatever he needed to figure out, he would have to figure out for himself. After all, he was Lt. Michael Davies’s son. Now he was the one who had to be brave, at least in basketball, for both of them.
FIFTEEN
THERE WAS A LATE PRACTICE today, which worked out fine because this was Wes’s day to meet with Mr. Correa after class, and take the late bus home.
Wes met with Mr. Correa more than once a week, sometimes popping into his office between classes. But if you had him as an adviser, you had to be on his calendar, usually on a set day. Today was that day.
Wes was glad. He knew what a great support system he still had, especially with his mom and Emmanuel. He had his teammates, all of whom he liked, even if he liked Dinero Rey a lot less lately.
There was just something about Mr. Correa. Wes wasn’t looking for some kind of substitute dad. Nobody was ever going to substitute for his real dad, even if he never changed all the way back into the person he used to be. Mr. Correa was like a grown-up friend. Or an older brother who was a lot older than Wes was.
“I’ll always be here for you,” Mr. Correa said to him one time, when Wes had first made him aware of what was going on with his dad.
“Here for what, though?” Wes said.
“Here for whatever you need me to be here for. And whenever you need me to be here.”
So today, Wes thought, was a perfect day for whatever and whenever. And the whatever was what was going on between him and Dinero.
“Just gonna throw this out there,” Mr. Correa said when Wes was across the desk from him, both of them once again surrounded by all those books. “But I’m guessing you’re not here to talk about school.”
“More like getting schooled,” Wes said, “on the court.”
“Explain,” Mr. Correa said. “I got nothing but time.”
Wes took his time, trying not to leave out any important parts, starting off from when Dinero had ignored him at the end of the game to take his hero shot, through their game of one-on-one, and what had been said between them at the end of that disaster. Then he told Mr. Correa about what he’d been seeing—and feeling—at practice since then.
“I know I probably sound crazed,” Wes said. “But I’m not.”
Mr. Correa grinned and raked his fingers through his long hair. Then he gave a quick scratch to the little growth of beard, which to Wes always looked to be the same length. It was all part of his look. Wes thought it was cool, the way Mr. Correa was.
“You’re not crazy,” Mr. Correa finally said.
“I’m not?” Wes said.
He laughed as soon as he did, realizing how relieved he sounded.
“Nope,” Mr. Correa said.
Wes waited. He hadn’t come here today expecting Mr. Correa to fix things for him. He just wanted somebody to understand him, not as a seventh-grader, not as someone apart from his own dad. Just as a basketball player. He wanted Mr. Correa to be his basketball adviser today, not his school adviser.
“One thing I’m sure you don’t want to hear from me,” Mr. Correa said, “is that these things have a way of working themselves out, right?”
“When my dad first came back home,” Wes said, “and he started to act strangely, my mom told me that things would work out with him.”
“Well, you got me there,” Mr. Correa said. “Because the truth is, sometimes the big things don’t work themselves out, even when you think they should.”
Wes absently reached over, picked up the small orange Nerf basketball on the desk, turned, and shot it at the stand-up plastic basket in the corner, the basket set in place by the stacks of books on the floor around it.
Nothing but net.
“You always make that look easy,” Mr. Correa said. “My shooting percentage from over here stinks.”
“Something needs to be easy for me,” Wes said.
“Good players on the same team have been working things out, at least eventually, since the beginning of time,” his adviser said. “I could give you a long list of old players out of the past that you’d have to look up.”
“None of them can help me out right now,” Wes said.
“But their history can,” Mr. Correa said. “Because what I’m trying to give you here is a different kind of history class. Think of it as hoops history. Whether we’re talking about American history or basketball history, the thing is, you can learn from it.”
Wes said, “Is this another way of you telling me that this all is gonna work out?”
“Nope,” Mr. Correa said. “I know that for all the stories about guys who did work it out, there are other stories about guys who didn’t. And got themselves traded or became free agents or whatever.”
“I don’t think I’m eligible for free agency,” Wes said.
Mr. Correa pointed a finger at him and smiled.
“And sometimes,” he said, “there are guys who did figure it out and sort of un-figured it out, like LeBron and Kyrie.”
Wes hadn’t even thought about them, but he knew Mr. Correa
was right, totally. LeBron and Kyrie had won a championship together with the Cavaliers, then made it back to the NBA Finals the next year. But then Kyrie Irving decided he didn’t want to be in LeBron’s shadow any longer, even though he didn’t put it that way at the time. But he’d announced that he wanted to be traded, and now he was playing for the Celtics, where he was the man.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Wes said.
“Nope,” Mr. Correa said. “I’m trying to make you understand that if it gets this complicated for the biggest names in basketball, it can be really complicated for a couple of twelve-year-olds. We talk all the time about how LeBron is the greatest teammate in the world, but he turned out to not be great enough for Kyrie.”
Mr. Correa came around the desk, picked up the Nerf ball, went back to his chair. Shot and missed.
“See what I mean,” he said.
“About your poor shooting or LeBron and Kyrie?” Wes said.
“Both.”
“But Kyrie was the one who asked to be traded.”
“True. But I believe another reason was that he thought LeBron was going to be leaving after one more year.”
“He does always sort of do what’s best for himself,” Wes said.
“It goes back to the thing about how sometimes great players are unselfish and selfish at the exact same time,” Mr. Correa said.
“But what if I think Dinero is being more selfish than unselfish?” Wes said.
“Then there’s a problem.”
“Told you.”
“What if I talk to him about this without saying that I talked to you about it?” Mr. Correa said. “Sound him out on how he thinks things are going with the Hawks, keeping it loose, and then see if he leaves me an opening to try to help you both out.”
“No!” Wes said. “He’ll know. And then he’ll think I went running to you.”
“You’re right,” his guidance counselor said. “As much as I’d like to make things right, the only two people who can do that are you and Dinero.”
“But what if he likes things the way they are?”
“Then it will be more on you to let him see that they aren’t, and that it will only hurt the team in the long run.”
“Great,” Wes said.
“Listen,” Mr. Correa said, “from all that I do know about basketball history, when a couple of star hoopers get together, whether it was Durant and Westbrook or Durant and Steph or Westbrook and Paul George or LeBron and Kyrie, one has to give more than the other. You might not want to hear that, either. But it’s true.”
Now Wes got up, retrieved the orange ball, shot again.
Nothing but net, again.
“Glad this isn’t a game of H-O-R-S-E,” Mr. Correa said.
“I could give in a little with you and let you win,” Wes said.
“Listen,” Mr. Correa said. “I know enough about you to know that you’re always going to do what’s best for the team in the end. I know you’re a bigger player than Dinero. So now you got to be the bigger man. So you can both play your best games.”
“Not happening right now.”
“Sounds like.”
“Doesn’t only sound like,” Wes said. “That’s the way it is.”
“It was just one game,” he said. “Maybe you could try talking to him again, maybe in a neutral setting, away from basketball.”
Wes shook his head. “I’ve talked to him, I’ve talked to my mom, I’ve talked to Emmanuel about this. Now I’ve talked to you. I just want to play.”
“So, keep playing your own game, as best you can,” Mr. Correa said. He told Wes he’d try to come to one of the Hawks’ next games to check out for himself what was going on.
“And you gotta keep something else in mind,” Mr. Correa said. “There are more important things in your life right now than basketball.”
He meant with his dad.
“I’m making up about as much ground with him,” Wes said, “as I am with Dinero.”
Joe Correa stood up now, nodded at the clock, and smiled.
“Things will get better,” he said. “Maybe as soon as the next game.”
They did not.
SIXTEEN
THEIR SECOND GAME WAS AGAINST the Montgomery County Grizzlies, in a really nice gym, at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, where the B-CC Barons played.
The place was a lot bigger than the Annapolis Rec Center, with B-CC painted in blue inside the free-throw lines and Barons painted in the same color on the floor behind the baskets. The seats in the bleachers were also blue.
“This is niiiiiiiice,” Emmanuel Pike said when they were warming up.
“But the Grizzlies won’t be nice,” Wes said. “Remember, we’re on the road, in a hostile arena.”
Emmanuel whooped. “Hostile arena?” he said. “You really do watch way too much basketball on television.”
“And that’s a bad thing?” Wes said.
He knew a little about the Grizzlies, from Facebook and Insta. Mostly he knew that their best player was a small forward named Bakari Hogan, who’d scored thirty-two points in their opener against Potomac Valley.
Wes had managed to find a box score online, from one of the local newspapers, and saw that no one else on the Grizzlies had even been in double figures.
He watched Bakari going through his own warmups at the other end of the court, long dreadlocks hanging all the way to his shoulders, pulled together in a ponytail back then. He wore a cool black sleeve on his shooting arm, and high black socks that Wes thought went great with the Grizzlies’ black-and-navy-blue uniforms. Total dude.
“You think I could ever rock hair like that?” Emmanuel said.
“No,” Wes said.
“You’re saying I can’t style?”
“Your styling is not trying to style,” Wes said. “It’s why we’re like brothers.”
“In a hostile arena,” E said.
Wes grinned. “Glad that you remembered,” he said.
They had gone through their layup drills, and were getting ready to just shoot around. Dinero came walking over to them. He hadn’t been ignoring Wes today. Wes hadn’t been ignoring him. They’d said hi to each other when they’d both shown up. Nothing much beyond that. What chirp and chatter there had been from Dinero in the layup line had been directed at Josh and Russ Adams and DeAndre. And Emmanuel. Pretty much everybody except Wes.
Wes imagined them as a couple of cars traveling in different lanes.
Just as long as they didn’t start heading right for each other, on another collision course.
“Better have your big-boy pants on today, Number Thirteen,” Dinero said. “’Cause I hear that this Bakari can really ball.”
Wes stepped back, smiling so that Dinero could see he was just playing and pulled up his own shorts as high as they would go.
“I hear he wants to put it to you good,” Dinero said.
“Who told you that?” Emmanuel said.
“I got my sources,” Dinero said.
Now he smiled.
“Just giving you a big heads-up,” Dinero said to Wes.
“It’s up,” Wes said.
Dinero laughed. “Make sure it’s not up you-know-where.”
Dinero, still smiling, ran over and picked up a loose ball and dribbled it toward the corner, behind his back, through his legs, then drained a jumper, as if he assumed Wes was still watching him.
Wes was watching him, wondering whether their game-within-the-game had started already.
Or if it ever really ended.
Bakari Hogan, the dude with the high socks and the hair and the shooting sleeve, turned out to be an expression that Emmanuel used all the time:
He was allthat.
One word, not two.
He could run the court and pass like a champ, bec
ause he could see the court. That meant all of it, all the time. The Grizzlies’ guards weren’t much, especially their point guard, a kid named Sammy Wilder. Their secondary scorer, and second-best player, was their center, a kid named Bo, with whom Bakari played a two-man game when he wasn’t being a one-man show.
When Bakari wasn’t showing off all his mad skills, he preferred running the Grizzlies’ offense off high picks from Bo, the biggest player in the game. DeAndre couldn’t handle Bo. Neither could Emmanuel, when Coach Saunders switched him over to center late in the first quarter.
But even with all the good things Bakari and Bo were doing, the Hawks were staying even with them. Wes made two straight threes, after not having seen the ball much before that. The Hawks’ offense sure wasn’t running through him the way it was for Bakari at the other end. At least he had managed to get on the board.
And he honestly hadn’t been all that concerned about not getting the ball before he made those two bombs, for the simple reason that Dinero was killing it on offense.
Killing. It.
It didn’t matter who the Grizzlies’ coach matched up on him. There were even a couple of times when he had Bakari try. Didn’t help. Dinero was just on today, even making his outside shots. When somebody would get up on him outside, he’d drive past them, either score himself or dish to Emmanuel or DeAndre.
Dinero had clearly made up his mind, once he determined that they couldn’t guard him, that the matchup that mattered today wasn’t Wes and Bakari. It was Bakari and him. One time, after Dinero had beaten Sammy, their point guard, again and gotten a layup, he didn’t look back at Sammy. He looked over at Bakari and smiled and shook his head. Wes wasn’t even sure if Bakari caught it. Wes did.
It was as if he were saying:
Not your gym.
Mine.
By the end of the first quarter it was Hawks 20, Grizzlies 18. Wes looked up at the big scoreboard above their basket and wondered if more points would be scored in one quarter in their league all season. Other than his two baskets, and a couple of layups from E and DeAndre, the rest of their scoring had come from Dinero.
