Summer Ball

by Mike Lupica

  He’d promised himself he was going to stick it out. Get something out of these three weeks. It was like when you set your mind on getting a good grade in a class you stunk at, or just plain hated. He was going to do it, no matter what. A promise was a promise, even if it was one you made to yourself.

  Only now there Lamar was with Tess.

  Tess.

  She didn’t look as if he was bothering her, but that didn’t mean anything. Maybe he just hadn’t bothered her yet.

  Should he go over or not?

  Danny saw Tess hand Lamar her camera.

  That’s what happened across the lawn, anyway. Inside Danny’s head, he couldn’t help it, he saw Lamar taking Zach Fox’s basketball.

  That’s when he came out from behind the tree, walking over there as fast as he could without it looking like he was running, like this was Danny to the rescue all over again.

  “Hey,” he said, trying to make himself sound casual when he got to them. “What’s doin’?”

  “Hey, yourself,” Tess said. She smiled at Danny, the way she always did when she saw him, at school or at a game or just walking down the street in Middletown.

  As nervous as he was, he smiled back. Then gave a quick look at Lamar, who was smiling himself. Only not because he was as happy to see Danny as Tess Hewitt was.

  To Tess he said, “You’re the one.”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  Lamar was nodding now, saying, “The one we all heard about the night him and his boys took the boat. His girl from back home.”

  Danny wasn’t going to get into it with Lamar Parrish, of all people, about whether Tess was “his” girl or not.

  Tess poked Danny and said, “Thanks for making me famous.”

  Danny said, “So what’re you guys doing?”

  “Lamar wanted to take a look at my camera,” Tess said. “He’s interested in photography.”

  Danny wanted to say: Yeah, but only if somebody’s taking a picture of him.

  “Cool,” Danny said, though feeling decidedly uncool at the moment, just wanting to get Tess away from this guy.

  But Lamar seemed in no hurry to go anywhere.

  He said to Tess, “Sure is a fine piece of equipment you got here.”

  Now he turned and smiled at Danny, winked at him as he held Tess’s camera high in the air, as if wanting to study it from all angles. “Yeah, no doubt, a fine piece of picture-taking equipment. Probably takes pictures a lot better than my cell phone.”

  He was really playing with Danny now. They both knew it. Tess was too smart not to see it, too, hear it in his voice. Maybe that was why she put her hand out, like she wanted her camera back, and said, “Well, I’ve got to take off. I want to get some pictures of the other Middletown guys as long as I’m here.”

  “I hear that,” Lamar said, and started to hand the camera back to her. “I gotta bounce, too. Almost game time.”

  But as he started to hand over the camera, he fumbled it, like you did when you were playing Hot Potato, fumbled it like he was about to drop it.

  Danny lunged and got his hands underneath it, the way you did when you tried to keep a ball from hitting the ground.

  Lamar was just teasing them.

  “No worries, little man,” he said. “I got it.”

  He handed the camera back to Tess, gave her a small bow, said “nice talkin’ at you” to her, ignoring Danny again. Then he left, walked away from them in the slouchy way he had, bopping his head, swaying a little from side to side, as though he knew they were watching him, as though he was the most awesome person in this whole camp.

  “Well,” Tess said, “that certainly weirded me out.”

  “That,” Danny said, “was just Lamar being Lamar. Wanting me to know that he knows about us.”

  Tess smiled. “Us?”

  Danny could feel himself blushing, so he looked away, like he was still trying to track Lamar. “Us being friends,” he said. “You know what I meant.”

  “Always,” Tess said.

  “You ought to stay away from that guy,” Danny said. “Everything that just happened, probably even talking to you in the first place, was for my benefit. There’s something about me that makes him want to push my buttons. And I have a feeling it’s going to get worse now that he sees Rasheed hanging around with me.”

  “Don’t worry, big fella. I can take care of myself,” Tess said. She slung her camera bag over her shoulder and looked like a total pro to Danny as she did. Danny knew how much she loved that camera, a gift from her parents last Christmas, probably her prize possession. It was why he had lunged for it the way he had. “You just worry about playing ball.”

  Now, she said, she was going off to take some pictures, since this was her one afternoon to do that, and her uncle was picking her up at dinnertime. She asked Danny where his game was and he said Court 4, then asked where Ty was playing, and Danny told her that, too.

  “If you see Lamar, head in the other direction,” Danny said. “That’s my new policy.”

  “If I see him again, I’ll tell him not to mess with Tess,” she said, and laughed at her rhyme. Then she headed off across the lawn on those long legs, looking as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

  All these hotshot players at this camp, so many of them as stuck on themselves as Lamar was, and for this one day a girl was the most awesome person here.

  Maybe it was seeing Tess right before the game, Tess who wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody, that gave him the right kind of attitude adjustment. Whatever it was, he played his best game yet.

  By far.

  Even though Rasheed had said that Coach Powers would start him, Danny didn’t believe it until it happened, until he was told right before the game against the Nuggets that it was going to be him and Cole in the backcourt. “They’ve got a couple of guys in the backcourt almost as small as you,” Coach Powers said. “You and Cole should be able to handle them.”

  He told Cole to handle the ball. But in the first five minutes, Coach Powers could see what everybody else could, that the little guy guarding Cole was giving him fits, picking him up full-court, making him struggle just to advance the ball past half-court, much less get them into their offense.

  They were down twelve when Coach Ed called a time-out and told Danny to go to the point.

  “Your ball,” Rasheed whispered to Danny when they broke the huddle.

  Danny knew Coach was only turning the team over to him this way as some kind of last resort. He didn’t care. He wasn’t going to overanalyze everything this time, especially if this was going to be the one start he got in Maine. He was just going to let it rip, the way he had when it had been him and Rasheed together in the backcourt.

  That was exactly what he did.

  He started breaking down the dark-haired kid guarding him off the dribble, getting into the lane, feeding Ben Coltrane and David Upshaw for easy buckets, even though both Ben and David had bigger guys guarding them. The dark-haired kid tried to press him all over the court, and Danny made him pay, even after made baskets, making it seem as if the Celtics were constantly on the break. The Nuggets coach—Tarik said he was from Manhattan College—switched Cole’s guy over on him and that didn’t help, either. Danny would keep pounding it inside or kicking it out to Will, who on this day was making threes as if he were back at McFeeley Park.

  Today Danny played ball as if he still had the eye.

  He played as if it was travel team all over again.

  The Celtics got the lead by halftime. But the Nuggets hung in there in the second half, mostly because of their size advantage. Before long, the game was going back and forth, one lead change after another. Nobody had more than a three-point lead in the second half. One of those games. For once, even Coach Powers got out of the way and let them play. He still called out plays, just not every time down the court.

  Ben Coltrane fouled out. The Celtics hung in, even with Tarik playing center now. David Upshaw fouled out. Still they hung in.
Then Alex Westphal, their last real big guy, fouled out. They were going with four guards now, plus Tarik.

  They were down two points with twenty seconds left when Coach Powers called their last time-out.

  “Quick two and a stop,” he said.

  Quick two and a stop, Danny knew, meant overtime. Tarik had four fouls. When he was gone, it would look like the Nuggets were playing Zach’s team.

  Their best chance was to win now.

  “But Coach—”

  That was as far as Danny got. Coach Powers glared away the rest of the thought.

  “Cole, you set a back screen for Tarik,” he said. “Then go to a zone at the other end, pack it in, make them take the last shot from the outside. When they miss—and notice I said when—we’ll get ’em in overtime.”

  Danny nodded as if he agreed, as if this was the best idea anybody had ever had.

  Only he didn’t agree. Will was on fire, and Danny knew their best chance was to win the game right here.

  The five in the game joined hands before breaking the huddle. As they did, Danny made eye contact with Rasheed, who was behind Coach Powers, shaking his head no, holding up three fingers, as if he’d channeled himself right into Danny’s brain.

  Now Danny was sure he was right. This was Will’s day, too, his chance to show Coach he was wrong about him, same as it was Danny’s. Will’s chance to do something he hardly ever got to do in basketball:

  Make the hero shot and win the game.

  But he had to make the shot. If he didn’t, if Danny busted the play, and then Will missed, and the Celtics lost their third in a row, Coach Powers would banish Danny to the end of the bench once and for all.

  On the way out of the huddle, he said to Tarik, “Do me a favor?”

  “Whatever you need,” Tarik said. “You’ve been makin’ me look like a star today.”

  “Don’t get open,” Danny said. “Even if it means you don’t get to take the last shot.”

  Tarik smiled. “We gonna roll the dice with the funny man, right?”

  “You got it,” Danny said. Then quickly told him the play they were going to run after they didn’t run Coach Powers’s play, right before he went over and told Will.

  Cole set the back screen the way he’d been told, and it was a good one. Only Tarik cut the wrong way coming around it, giving his man a chance to pick him up.

  Everybody was still covered.

  There were still fifteen seconds left. All day. Danny looked over at Will and nodded. Telling him to make his move. The play was “Ohio.” A play they used to run all the time with the Warriors in travel. Will would run from the left corner to the right corner, Tarik screening for him right under the basket as Will blew past him.

  It worked the way it always had, and Danny, still with his dribble, saw Will break into the clear.

  He threw the pass before Will even got to his spot behind the three-point line, fired this high pass over the top of the defense that must have looked like it was headed for the next court over.

  Threw it to the spot the way quarterbacks did before the receiver even made his cut.

  The kind of pass you threw if you still had the eye.

  Will had to jump to catch the ball. But he caught it cleanly, came down with it as his man, this stocky kid with a buzz cut, came tearing at him. The buzz-cut kid was a step late as Will squared his shoulders and let the ball go, and the only reason he didn’t see that it was money all the way was because the buzz-cut kid was blocking his view.

  Celtics 51, Nuggets 50.

  “I am so wet,” Will said when Danny got to him, “my name should be Free Willie Stoddard.”

  All around them, the whole team was happy, like they were finally one team, even on a day when their best player had been sitting next to the coach. Rasheed, forgetting he was supposed to have a sore leg, hugged Will and lifted him off the ground the way he had Lamar that night, only in a good way this time. They were all high-fiving each other and then a few of them were in this pig pile on the court. Danny thought about diving on top, but then he just walked up to Tarik, jumped as high as he could, and chest-bumped him.

  “Needs work, dog,” Tarik said.

  It was then that Danny noticed Coach Powers sitting in the same folding chair he’d sat in during the game, calmly motioning for Danny to come over.

  Danny jogged to him.

  “You ran your own play, didn’t you?” Coach Powers said.

  Danny looked off, to where the happy part of the team still was.

  “Yes.”

  No more lies.

  Coach Powers didn’t say anything right away, just got slowly up out of his chair, stood there towering over Danny until he said in his quiet voice, “Next year tell your father to send you to a camp where the boys get to coach the teams.”

  Even when I win here, Danny thought, I lose.

  21

  THEY WERE ALL AT THE END OF ONE OF THE LONG PICNIC-BENCH TABLES, about two minutes into dinner, when Tess showed up.

  Danny, Will, Ty, Tarik, Rasheed, Zach Fox: They were all there, ready to consume a record amount of camp pizza, planning the game of Texas Hold ’Em they were going to play later using poker chips Will had brought.

  Then Tess was there, camera bag over her shoulder. She barely got out the words.

  “Someone broke my camera!”

  The girl who could handle herself in any situation was crying.

  Will jumped up right away, sensing everybody in the mess hall was watching them and probably wondering what a girl was doing there. “Let’s take this outside,” he said, and started walking Tess toward the door.

  The rest of them followed her, not worrying about pizza night anymore, just wanting to get Tess outside as fast as they could. Keeping her in the middle of them as they walked out the door and around the corner, past the main building and out onto the lawn, not too far from where Danny had seen Tess with Lamar.

  Lamar: Talking about what a fine piece of equipment Tess’s camera was, then giving Danny that look.

  “It was all my fault,” Tess said.

  “Somehow I doubt that,” Will said.

  Danny just kept staring at Tess, wanting to say or do something that would make her feel better. Her eyes were red, and there were those pink dots she got when she was upset, not just making her look sad, making her look younger. Tess Hewitt, who always looked, and acted, older than everybody else, certainly any guys she was hanging around with.

  Who never cried in front of Danny or anybody else.

  He stared at her and thought back now to how close she’d come that day at McFeeley. He felt more sure than ever that he was never going to be mean to her ever again if he could help it.

  “What happened?” Danny said to her. “From the beginning.”

  She took her bag off her shoulder and removed what was left of her prized camera, which looked as if it had been dropped out of a high window.

  Or run over.

  “This happened,” she said.

  “We know,” Danny said. “What we want to know is how.”

  She said that she’d shot some pictures of Danny’s game, then decided to wander around for a little while, taking random shots for fun, finally stopping at a pickup game some older kids were playing at the court in front of Staples.

  Her uncle had left her a text message on her cell phone saying he was going to be a little late picking her up in his boat, so when she heard the dinner horn sound, she figured she’d come find them and say good-bye before she walked down to the dock. So she headed up toward the mess hall. On her way, she ran into Mr. LeBow, who was going to dinner himself. She asked if there was a ladies’ room she could use. He showed her the one next to Sue’s office, on the other side of the main building, near the back door.

  “I dropped my bag outside,” Tess said. “You know, the way you drop your backpack at school.”

  She said she was in there for five minutes, tops, just washing up at the end of a day when she’d felt as sweaty as
the players.

  When she came back out, the camera was out of the bag, lying on the ground, looking the way it did now.

  “Who’d do something like this?” she said, eyes big again, starting to fill up.

  “Lamar, that’s who,” Danny said.

  “True that,” Will said. “Danny told us he was messing with the camera before.”

  Ty said, “Was he in that pickup game you talked about?”

  “No,” Tess said. “He was at the next court over, shooting around by himself.”

  “Figures,” Tarik said.

  “I need to go ask him something,” Danny said, and took one step before Will and Ty blocked his way. Both of them had their arms crossed.

  Shaking their heads no.

  “Bad idea,” Will said.

  “The worst,” Ty said.

  “But he did this. He’s got it in for me now, and you guys know it.”

  “We got no proof,” Rasheed said.

  “We only got what we think we got,” Tarik said.

  “You know,” Will said, “if this were TV, we could have them dust Tess’s camera for fingerprints.”

  “Dog,” Tarik said, “you watch way too much of that dang CSI.”

  Danny asked Tess if there was anyone else around when she discovered what had happened to her camera. She said no. Did she report it to anybody? No again. “I did the only thing I could think of,” she said. “I came looking for you guys.”

  “We gotta find Lamar and at least put it to him!” Danny said now. “Ask him why he’d do something to somebody who has nothing to do with any of this.”

  “Well, nothing ’cept you,” Tarik said.

  When Danny finally calmed down, it was decided they would go tell Mr. LeBow what happened. Only, when they got over to his office, it was locked up, probably for the night. So they got some paper out of the computer room, and Danny wrote a short note, trying to make his handwriting readable for once, telling Mr. LeBow what had happened, not putting anything in there about Lamar, just saying they’d tell him the rest of the story in the morning. Saying in the note that Tess was at camp for just this one day taking pictures and that whoever did this to her shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.