THEY WON AGAIN THE NEXT DAY AGAINST SEEKONK, THE TEAM THEY’D BEATEN for their first win, in a game that now seemed to have been played when they were all in the fifth grade.
They were ahead by so much at halftime that Danny went with both O’Brien twins—at the same time, a first—for the entire second half, even though both of them were complaining by the middle of the fourth quarter that they were more tired than they usually got after sleepovers.
Three wins now for the Warriors, who’d started out thinking they weren’t going to beat anybody.
One game to go, a rematch with Hanesboro, before the play-offs.
Maybe, Danny had started to think, they had finally turned into what they were supposed to be, what Richie Walker had talked about the very first time they were all together, the team nobody wanted to play.
Then Matt Fitzgerald’s bad cold somehow turned into full-blown pneumonia and he ended up in the hospital.
Will called with the news, saying he didn’t want Danny to read all about it in an IM box.
“Who do we call about ordering up some size?” Will said.
Danny told him he’d been asking himself that question his whole life.
Danny had three IM boxes going on his screen as he talked to Will: Will’s, Tess’s, Colby’s.
“I would like to make one other observation,” Will said.
“What?”
“Turns out it’s a small world after all,” Will said.
“You can’t help yourself, can you?” Danny said.
“Other people say I need help,” Will said, and then said he was getting off, if any other brilliant thoughts popped into his head, he’d send them along by e-mail. But not before adding, “Don’t worry, you’ll think of something.”
Danny took down Will’s box and Colby’s.
Just him and Tess now.
Just the way he liked it.
CROSSOVER2: Matt’s got pneumonia and I’m the one who feels sick.
Her response didn’t take long.
What did they used to say in the Superman cartoons? Tess Hewitt was faster than a speeding bullet.
CONTESSA44: You’ll come up with a plan.
CROSSOVER2: You sound like Will.
CONTESSA44: That is a cruel and heartless thing to say.
He looked out the window and saw a wet snow starting to fall, the worst kind; if he didn’t shovel it right away around the basket, it would be slippier than a hockey rink out there before he knew it.
CROSSOVER2: I need a secret weapon. When was the last time you played center?
CONTESSA44: We’re not that desperate yet.
CROSSOVER2: Getting there.
CONTESSA44: You don’t need me.
Sometimes you had to let your guard down, put yourself out there, not try to be so much of a guy.
Which meant telling somebody the truth.
CROSSOVER2: I always need you.
CONTESSA44: I know. And back at you, by the way.
Before he could think of something clever that would lighten up the mood, not let things stay too serious, she was back at him.
CONTESSA44: YOU’RE our secret weapon. ’Nite.
He left the computer on while he washed his face and brushed his teeth, then went down to say good night to his mom, who had propped up a bunch of pillows and had a blanket over her and was reading in her favorite spot in front of the fire.
When he came back up to his room, he heard the old doodlely-doo from the computer.
Incoming. Tess?
He walked over and stared at the message on the screen.
What?
He sat down in his swivel chair, closed his eyes, opened them, stared at the screen again, just to make sure it wasn’t some kind of weird figment of his imagination.
It wasn’t.
Then Danny Walker, knowing his mom would think he was a crazy person if she walked in on him, sat there and laughed his head off.
Will Stoddard was insane.
But he sure wasn’t alone.
The Warriors beat Hanesboro the next morning, even without Matt Fitzgerald, mostly because Colby Danes had the game of her life, scoring twenty points and, according to ace statistician Tess Hewitt, grabbing fourteen rebounds.
Tess also pointed out after the game that Danny’d had twelve assists.
“You don’t know how to keep assists,” he said.
“I’m going to forget I heard that,” she said. “First you act like I can’t keep track of time-outs, something my cat could do. Now this ugly charge.”
“You really know what an assist is?”
“When it all gets too complicated for me,” she said, “I find a big hunky boy and ask him to explain whether that was a pass I just saw, or some kind of unidentified flying object.”
Danny said, “I should drop this now, right?”
“I would.”
Danny and Tess stayed at St. Pat’s doing homework after the Hanesboro game, eating the lunches their moms had packed for them. When they were done with lunch they walked back to the gym to watch the Vikings play Piping Rock in the game that would determine which one of them finished first in the league.
He also wanted to see the new kid on the Vikings Ty had told him about. David Rodriguez, his name was, a five-eight kid from the Bronx who had been born in San Juan and whose family had moved to Middletown three days before. According to Ty, the dad was a policeman and had gotten tired of working for the New York police, and had up and taken a job on the small Middletown force.
“I only watched him at the end of one practice, when I went over to try shooting around a little bit,” Ty had said. “I think the Knicks could use this guy.”
David Rodriguez was even taller than Matt Fitzgerald and, without Ty in the lineup, the fastest kid on the Vikings as soon as he took his warm-ups off. Mr. Ross didn’t put him into the game until the start of the second quarter, but Danny only had to watch him for two minutes to know he was the best center in town now, better than Jack Harty, better than Matt.
Great, Danny thought, just what the Vikings needed:
More size.
They hadn’t just added a player, they had added a New York City player.
“Why couldn’t he go to St. Pat’s?” Danny said. “Then I could have recruited him.”
“He is pretty good,” Tess said.
“Only if you like a tall guy who plays like a little guy,” Danny said. “I hear they call him Da-Rod. As in A-Rod.”
“Who’s A-Rod?” Tess said.
“Only the best baseball player in the world.”
“One sport at a time, pal,” Tess said, “one sport at a time.”
They were sitting at the very top of the bleachers the janitors rolled out when there was enough of a crowd; the old-fashioned wood bleachers stretched from foul line to foul line. And as good as the game between the Vikings and Piping Rock turned out to be, Danny found himself watching Mr. Ross as much as he did the players. Figuring that if he studied him he could finally come up with an answer about why twelve-year-old travel basketball—winning at twelve-year-old travel basketball—seemed to mean so much to him.
And the more Danny watched him, and watched the dad coaching Piping Rock, the more he kept coming back to the same question:
Why were they even doing this?
It wasn’t that either one of them was a screamer once the game had started; neither one of them was shouting at the players very much, or the refs. Danny didn’t see either one of them really lose his temper one single time, even though they made plenty of faces every time somebody on the court did something wrong.
It was just that neither one of them seemed to be having any fun.
They looked like they were working.
Without ever getting near each other, or really looking at each other, Danny still got the idea that they were competing against each other. It was like watching a college game on ESPN sometimes, at least until he couldn’t take it anymore and had to turn the sound off. Even if it was a game he really, really wanted to see. Because the more he listened to the announcers, the more he started to get the idea that it was Coach Kryzyzewski of Duke competing against Coach Williams of North Carolina instead of the Blue Devils going against the Tar Heels.
He always came back to what his dad constantly drummed into his head:
It was a players’ game.
It just didn’t come across that way on television, at least not often enough.
It sure wasn’t that way here.
The two dads were coaching so fiercely, they were missing a great game.
And it was great, back and forth the whole second half, guys on both teams making plays, some of the plays so good Danny couldn’t believe his eyes sometimes. He couldn’t remember a single time in the game when either team was ahead by more than four points. The game was so great Danny understood now what Ty had been going through all season, sitting there watching while everybody else got to play.
Even though Danny had been dragging at the end of the Hanesboro game, he wanted to get back out there all over again, mix it up with these guys.
A game like this always made you want to get your sneaks back on.
The Vikings should have been having a ball playing in a game this good, the level of play this high, the top seed in the tournament riding on it. But they weren’t. Even when one of them, Jack Harty or Da-Rod or Daryll Mullins or the hated Moron Moran, would do something nice and get their team a basket, Mr. Ross would be up almost before the ball was through the net, like he’d been shot up out of a James Bond-type ejector seat, telling them where to go on defense, what to do next.
They all seemed like they were afraid to enjoy doing something right, because in the very next moment they might be doing something wrong.
The Vikings gave Piping Rock a run, all the way to when Jack Harty’s shot fell off the rim at the end of overtime and Piping Rock won, 49–48.
The Vikings, without Ty, without Andy Mayne still, had lost, but Danny knew they were the better team, especially with Da-Rod in the house now.
They just didn’t seem to be having much fun.
How did Will put it?
The Vikings were a no-mirth zone.
“I don’t want to be with them anymore,” he said to Tess when the game was over. “The Vikings, I mean.”
“I can see why,” she said.
It had taken almost the entire season, but he finally knew he was with the right team, after all.
The setup for the first round of the tournament was pretty basic, the number-one seed playing number eight, number two playing number seven, and so on. The teams with the better records got to play home games. Seekonk, for example, which had finished in eighth place, had to go to Piping Rock. The Vikings, at number two, also got a home game, at St. Pat’s, but home court didn’t matter very much to them, because it was going to be Middletown versus Middletown. They were playing the number-seven Warriors, one o’clock, the following Saturday afternoon.
The Warriors’ last practice before the play-offs, the Warriors minus Matt Fitzgerald, would be on Tuesday night. Their last full practice, anyway. Danny still planned to get the key guys together at his house the next night.
That included Colby Danes, who was officially one of the guys now, even if Will Stoddard certainly didn’t think of her quite that way.
Colby liked Will as much as he liked her, at least according to Tess. It didn’t change the fact that she was the only person Danny knew about who could cause Will’s mouth to malfunction on a fairly regular basis.
The fact that he was able to concentrate on basketball when the two of them were playing basketball together was a minor miracle.
Tess would be at the meeting, too. Danny couldn’t believe they had ever tried having a team without her.
And his mom, who had come up so big, the last few days, especially.
“Point Mom,” is what she’d started calling herself.
“Point Mom?” Danny said.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ve got the lingo down now.”
This was on Tuesday, Ali Walker driving Danny over to St. Pat’s before going over to the hospital to visit his dad. Mrs. Stoddard had volunteered to be the team mom for tonight while Danny ran practice.
“Truth or dare,” he said to his mom from the backseat.
“Truth.”
“Can we really do this?”
They were in front of the gym, the engine idling, the heat going full blast. Ali Walker turned to face him. “It’s like I’ve been telling you your whole life,” she said. “You can do just about anything you set your mind to.”
“I set my mind on making the Vikings,” Danny said. “How’d that work out for me?”
“I never said it was a one hundred percent foolproof plan,” she said. “But it’s still a darn good one. And you know it.”
She faced front, but he could see her smiling, her reflection in the windshield lit by the dashboard lights.
Danny vaguely remembered some old song she liked to sing along to that had “dashboard light” in it. Another one of her oldies but goodies.
“As far as I’m concerned,” she said, “this all worked out the way it was supposed to.”
Then she told him to scoot, his team was waiting for him.