Ewan’s last words were, “Act normal.” It was easier than I thought it was going to be. As soon as I was back inside Selden’s carved oak door, school was just school. The stairs going down to the gym smelled like disinfectant and Gatorade and echoed with the sound of sneakers squeaking on the wooden floor.
When I opened the gym door, there was my team—the eighth-grade team—but there were too many bodies, and with a sickening feeling, I remembered: there was some kind of coaches’ meeting downtown, and varsity, JV, and the eighth-grade team were practicing together.
It didn’t take me long to find Gus—the only eighth grader on varsity—shooting a layup, his ball hanging in the net for one perfect second. “Ugh,” I said out loud, and headed for the locker room, where I stared into the mirrors over the sinks, willing my eyes to turn into Grandpa’s.
Ewan had said not to do this, but I had to see—was Grandpa really there? It had been almost twenty-four hours since I’d last seen him, and as convincing as Ewan had been about the danger, I thought it was more likely Gus was right about all of this than that Ewan was. Gus was usually right about everything.
And anyway, I wasn’t afraid of mirrors. I wasn’t afraid of Grandpa. I was afraid of dropping the ball in front of Gus and all his basketball friends. I was afraid that I’d say “Sorry” every time I missed a shot or threw a pass over someone’s head.
“Get me out of here,” I said to the mirror. Nothing happened. “Grandpa?” I tried. “Please?” Nothing. Eventually, I had no choice but to step out into the cold of the gym.
Gus was running laps, and he jogged past me. He didn’t say hello, and I just stood there, watching his shorts swish back and forth—his special varsity shorts that brushed the tops of his knees. Because of my size, I still wear lower-school shorts, which are cut much higher than the new uniform. I hiked them down as far as they could go.
Mr. Ball blew his whistle the second I stepped into the gym. “Okay,” he shouted. “Bring it in.” We all jogged toward him, and he leaned against the wall with his clipboard.
“Today is all about threes,” he said. He blew the whistle three times in a row for emphasis. Mr. Ball is a big fan of the whistle. “Three-on-three half court, okay?” he said. “Playing to—?”
“Three,” the eighth graders groaned, but the kids from varsity and JV didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Winner stays on the court,” Mr. Ball went on. “Loser rotates out. At the end of practice, the top—how many?”
“Three,” the eighth graders mumbled.
“Three!”
“That’s right. The top three players get to sit on the bench while everyone else runs sprints. How many?”
“Three.” Now the older kids were groaning along in answer too.
“How many sets?”
“Three.”
“And that would be suicide sprints,” he said. “Oh, and by the way, all three players must touch the ball once before a shot goes off, or it doesn’t count. That’s three passes minimum.” He held up three fingers, as if even after his mentioning it three hundred times in the last three minutes, we might not understand what the number three meant.
It’s hard to make fun of a coach whose name does all the work for you. Once, last year, Gus asked him, totally straight-faced, “Do you think it was destiny, that your last name is Ball and your job is coaching sports?” Gus paused right after the word “destiny,” as if he were taking a moment of silence to honor some amazing spiritual force. For a long time, I couldn’t think about the way Gus had leaned on the word “destiny” without cracking up. I glanced over to where Gus was standing with Trip now. He was looking at Trip, who was holding the ball out in front of his chest.
“One?” Trip said, push passing the ball to Gus. “Two,” Gus answered. Trip was scanning the room for one of his buddies, PJ or Russ, to be their third, and I started to wonder if there was anyone else on the eighth-grade team I could play with, but just then the gym door opened and everyone turned to see who was there. Was someone late? Sometimes Mr. Ball made us run sprints when someone was late, like we were in a let’s-turn-these-bad-kids-on-the-basketball-team-around movies.
But it wasn’t a kid. It was a dad. My dad.
Other parents come to school all the time, especially to games and practices. Mr. Green, the headmaster, is always running down from his office to tousle kids’ hair in front of their parents, as if that’s what he does all day. But my dad rarely comes to anything. “You can’t come to the games and also pay for the games,” he says. “I have to be at work.”
So now, seeing him, my first thought was that something was wrong at home and he had come to get me. Our apartment had burned down. Or maybe Mom was in the hospital. But he only nodded a hello to me, made his way over to the bleachers, climbed up, and sat leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.
I wondered—how did he know how to look so much like the perfect dad who comes to all his kid’s games? Was it TV?
“Your dad’s here,” Gus said. I guess in his shock he’d forgotten he’d decided not to be friends with me anymore. “I know,” I said, and in the next second, the ball Gus had been spinning between his palms was coming toward me. I had enough time to lift a hand in front of my chest for protection, swatting at the ball and bending back my pinkie finger at the same time.
“Ow,” I said, holding my finger. I looked up at my dad. He was wincing.
Gus said, “Michael, you’re our three.”
“No,” I started to say, but Trip beat me to it.
“No way,” he said.
“Sorry, I already called it,” said Gus.
“But I want to win.” Trip was almost whining.
“He’s playing,” Gus said, and I was a little surprised at how much he could stand up to Trip. “Look,” Gus said. “His dad’s here.”
“You don’t have to be nice,” I said, but Gus was already pulling a red scrimmage vest over my head. I looked over at my dad. He hadn’t moved. The whole thing made me feel like I was going to throw up. First of all, I hated how phony it felt. Gus was acting like my friend, but he wasn’t my friend. He was making me feel like a charity case. Second of all, what Gus was trying wasn’t going to work. Playing with Gus and Trip was only going to make me look like a jerk in front of my dad. And third… Well, this is hard to explain, but I also hated how nice it felt too, to have my best friend sort of back, even though it was only because he felt sorry for me. I hated how nice it felt to have my very own dad in the bleachers—his shiny black hair, his tallness. I hated feeling nice, because I knew I was only going to end up feeling disappointed.
We were first to play—up against Trip’s friends PJ and Russ, and the best kid from eighth grade, Steven Kline. Trip and PJ checked the ball in, and Trip dribbled into the back of the court. Russ stood in front of me, poaching so that he and PJ could double-team Gus. Trip looked from Gus to me. I held out my hands for the ball, not because I wanted it, but because I knew you were supposed to look like you did.
“Get in there, Michael!” I heard. I hardly recognized my dad’s voice shouting out like that. I wondered if it felt weird to him too. I had to concentrate, I told myself, because Trip looked like he was about to pass to me. But then he didn’t. He sent the ball to Gus, who managed to catch it even though he was being double-teamed.
“You weren’t really open, Quasi,” Trip said quickly. “You were being poached on the basket side. And your eyes were closed.” While I was trying to figure out what he was even talking about, PJ started waving his arms up above his head to keep Gus from making a shot. Gus took a dribble to the left and one to the right. He finally shot the ball in my direction, just past PJ’s left hand.
“Please, please, please,” I prayed. “Don’t shut your eyes.” And I didn’t. I kept them focused right on the ball, the orange leathery rind, the black stripes. Without thinking too hard, I put out my hands, and then I felt my fingers gripping the outside of the ball in the same way Gus’s and Trip’s did. Easily.
When I looked up, my dad was pressing buttons on his cell phone, checking messages. I knew he was e-mailing the office, or whatever. I’m sure if I asked him, he’d point out what a huge sacrifice it was for him to even be there. But couldn’t he have been watching? Catching that ball was, like, the highlight of my season.
I looked back to the court. I knew what Mr. Ball would be shouting if we were in a game. Just get rid of it, I told myself.
But I didn’t get rid of it. I looked from left to right, and suddenly, I realized that with PJ and Russ double-teaming Gus, no one was covering me, and I was open to take a shot.
I took a second to make sure I was holding the ball the way I was supposed to, my fingertips lined up under the seams. I jumped, trying to spin the ball by pushing with my arm and flicking my fingers. Just as I knew that the most important thing in the world was getting that ball through the hoop, I was sure it wasn’t going to go in. But then it did go in. It went in with a swish.
I tried not to act like it was a big deal, but I felt as good as if the perfect swish had happened in my own body. It was like someone had thrown open a window in a musty room, and fresh air was blowing in. I was taller, I could feel it. I felt my shoulders lifting back and my chest rising.
I could hear my dad clapping. “Yeah, Michael!” he called out. I looked up at him, and he was looking at me, just looking, and it was really cool because I could tell I was being the kid he wanted. But it was also not cool. That basket was a fluke. I never made shots. I never even took shots. He wouldn’t have to watch much longer before he saw me fumble.
The next time we had the ball, Trip passed it to me. To my continuing shock, I caught it. I passed it off to Gus, who ran in for a layup.
“Go, Michael, yeah!” my dad shouted.
“One more,” Trip said. Then, to me: “Just because you don’t totally suck doesn’t mean that we have this in the bag. Focus.”
But it was Trip who lost his focus. Next time he had the ball, PJ d-blocked him. “Come on,” Trip said, groaning at himself in the way I’d thought he’d be groaning at me.
PJ dribbled into the back of the key, and Trip lunged for the ball, knocking it out of PJ’s hands, then chasing it down and smacking it with one hand so it bounced high into a dribble. “Kimmel,” he said, and I was surprised he even knew my last name. He faked a pass to me, before sending the ball hard over to Gus, who was ready, and sent it right back to me. Again, I held the ball high up over my head, got my fingers underneath it, and watched it swish right into the basket.
“That’s three!” said Trip, and he actually high-fived me. “Way to go, Quasimodo,” he said.
“Maybe you can call him Quasi-good-at-basketball-o,” said Gus, and Trip laughed, as if all along the nickname had been a joke.
Gus, Trip, and I held on to the court for three more games while my dad watched, his cell phone gripped between his hands like he was holding a pole on the subway. I never saw him check his messages again the rest of the time he was there. He was calling out in the same way as Trip, who seemed to see not just the ball but also the players moving inside his mind, the way I saw them on the screen when I was playing NBA Street. He was yelling to us when there were holes to fill and telling us when there were opportunities to pass.
After the fourth game, when Trip, Gus, and I were drinking water, my dad came over and patted me on the shoulder. “I’ve got to leave now—I’ve got to get back for a meeting.”
“Are you coming home for dinner again?” I meant it to sound like it wasn’t a big deal either way, but it came out pathetic.
“We’ll see,” my dad said. “We’ll see.”
“Wait, Dad,” I called after he’d already turned his back to go. I don’t know if I really wanted an answer to the question lurking in the back of my mind, or if I was just trying to come up with a way to make him stay a few minutes longer. “Do you know if Grandpa was any good at basketball?”
“Grandpa?” he said. I wondered if he was going to give me another lecture about how Grandpa didn’t love anyone, as he had the night before.
“He did play basketball,” my dad said. No lecture. “He played varsity at Roosevelt High School in the Bronx, and I think his team won some sort of championship the year he was captain. Maybe they were all-state?”
“Oh,” I said. My dad was giving me a look—like, why are you interested?—and I tried to make my face a blank.
“Michael,” my dad started. He seemed like he was going to say something, thought better of it, and then said it anyway. “You’re the one who is good at basketball now. I’m impressed.”
I almost said, “Don’t get used to it. I think it’s Grandpa playing, not me,” but I didn’t. Suddenly I wished I’d never seen Grandpa, never found out that he died, never talked to Ewan, never played basketball with Gus and Trip while my dad looked on. It felt unfair. Unfair to who? Or as my dad would say, unfair to whom? I guess it felt unfair that we had this perfect family all of a sudden, and Grandpa was left out in the cold. Or maybe “unfair” wasn’t the right word. I don’t know if this makes any sense, but it was like something on the back of a comic book. “Miracle family! Just add water!” Way too good to be true.
The thing about winning a lot of games is that you have to keep playing. Our water break was over. Trip, Gus, and I were tied with PJ, Russ, and Steven’s team for first place. The game to decide the winner has about to begin.
I started off with the ball and checked it in with Steven. He was so much taller than me, he had to look down to shoot it back to my chest. I passed it off to Trip, who faked into the basket, then ran to the back of the court. Gus was already running from the top of the key toward the basket, and Trip sent the ball bouncing hard in front of him. Gus scooped it up while using his shoulder to block PJ from making a defensive grab. Before anyone knew what was happening, Gus had taken a layup shot and the ball was hanging in the net, swinging slightly from side to side before dropping through.
Gus dribbled the ball to the top of the key. He passed it around the key to me, and I passed it back to him. Trip ran in under the basket and Gus shot the ball in so Trip could get a layup. He outran Russ to the ball, and got it in.
Trip pointed at Gus. “One,” he said. He pointed at his own chest. “Two.” He pointed at me. “Three?”
I nodded. It was my turn to score. I was starting to believe that I could actually do this.
But that was before I ran into the key to grab a pass from Trip, and felt a twinge in my leg—I must have twisted my knee. It was just enough pain that I couldn’t move to the left when Steven rushed at me. He swiped the ball out of my hand, getting off a quick shot to PJ, who shot to Russ, who shot back to Steven, who beat me into the key, shot, and scored.
With my next step after Steven’s basket, the twinge in my knee turned into searing pain. I stopped running and grabbed my thigh. Now it wasn’t just my knee that hurt, but my head, and strangely, my heart. It was beating so fast that it felt like it was throbbing. What was this? Why did I suddenly feel as scared as if the lights had gone out and a hand had grabbed my throat? I wondered for a second if other people could tell.
Woven into the pain so that I didn’t know if it came from my knee or my head, there was blood. Salty, bitter, and also kind of sweet. I could smell it and even taste it on the back of my tongue, as if I’d swallowed some. Behind the blood, I smelled mud and grass and body odor, kind of like a soccer game in the rain.
And then, with no warning, I felt myself pushing into a memory, one of Grandpa’s. I wasn’t with Grandpa. I wasn’t slipping. I was in the middle of the gym. I was at school.
But no doubt about it, I was also inside a place I’d never been before. This time the slip came like something you see in a flash of lightning, and then it was gone. But it still felt as real to me as the pulsing pain in my knee, which seemed to worsen with every passing second.
I saw a field of trampled long grass streaked with mud and ripped apart by craters left by what I knew were falling enemy shells. This was a war. The sky was a burning, brilliant blue, and hanging in it, frozen in motion, were hundreds of clumps of dirt raised into the air by a shell that had just landed. I saw dark red patches on the ground. They were bodies. Men. Some held hands up to protect their faces from the dirt and shrapnel falling from the air. Some were rolled into tight balls, and others lay twisted in ways that made me think they were dead, or at least broken. One man was half buried already, his face covered but for one eye.
“Get in there, Kimmel,” Trip was shouting. I looked to Gus. I felt like I was going to pass out.
“Are you all right?” Gus asked, and all I could come up with was, “My knee just started hurting.”
“Do you need to stop?”
“No!” I said, and Gus gave me a look because I had shouted. “No,” I said, more calmly, because I kind of thought that if I stopped, the memory was going to come back.
It came back anyway. There was another flash and I had to squeeze my eyes closed against the pain. I was back on the pockmarked field, but this time I wasn’t looking at the memory like it was a photograph, like before. This time I was inside it. The dirt that had been frozen in the air was pouring down like hail, and I felt something strike my knee. I was moving—on the ground, my face pressed up against a clump of grass, trying to push my body off the field. I was gasping for air. I saw the torn-up earth, pieces of shells, discarded canteens, packs, packed-down grass, a cloud of chaos. And then I managed to get my body to move forward. With each push, I felt my knee burn, and my insides heave.
How could this be happening? I opened my eyes again and saw the gym. I was back, right? So how come I was also slipping? I had no idea what was going on.
“Is this an injury?” Trip was asking, looking from Gus to me. I was standing on my good leg, and to someone watching me, it might have looked like I had squeezed my eyes closed to keep the sweat from stinging my eyes.
Yes! I thought. I’m injured. All I wanted was for someone to come get me and carry me to the bleachers so I could rest. But if I rested, would I slip further in? Ewan had said, “Act normal.” At this point, I wasn’t really sure I knew what that meant. “No,” I spat out, answering Trip. “It’s not an injury.”
“Okay.” He shrugged. Gus opened his mouth as if to say something, but when I glared at him, he closed it again. PJ passed Steven the ball, which Steven caught easily since I was supposed to be defending him. Steven passed it off to Russ, who took a jump shot from the outside, and scored again. “It’s two-two!” Trip shouted. “Let’s get it back.”
I tried not to think. About my knee, about the twisted bodies, about the feeling of gasping for air with dirt falling onto me like snow. The taste of blood was still on my tongue.
With PJ dribbling at the key, Trip poached off Russ, so that he could cover Steven. I said, “I’ve got him.”
“You don’t,” Trip growled, and he was right because I could barely move with the pain in my knee. Trip ran back to Russ just in time for Steven to pass Russ the ball. Trip raised his arms to his sides, shutting down every option Russ had to pass it. Finally, Trip swatted the ball away from him, in Gus’s direction. Gus picked it up and passed it off to me. I can’t believe I caught it—my hands and even my arms were trembling.
“Was that three passes?” Trip shouted.
“Just two,” Steven grunted back at him. So I passed off to Gus, who passed it quickly to Trip, who ran in to take the layup, and missed. I was right there, under the net, and I jumped up for the rebound. I was one step in front of Steven, and I knew I could get it.
That was when the bad knee twisted under me. The pain was like two pieces of metal rubbing together, and it sent me right back into the war. In this memory, I was taking a break from crawling across the battlefield to the medic tent, and my face was right next to a shiny piece of a metal—a canteen? In the metal’s reflection, I was watching something, and what I saw made my stomach contract.
It was the Selden gym. It was there, for just a second, and when I looked away and back, it was gone. And then it was there again—the yellow floorboards, the honey-colored bleachers, the boys in their jerseys, and in the front of the memory, me—my hair soaked with sweat, my face flushed, holding the ball, which I’d just caught. It was like time had stopped and then twisted back on itself. Before, when I had been looking in the mirror, I’d seen Grandpa. Now Grandpa was looking in a mirror, and he saw me.
Somehow, seeing the gym, seeing the boys, gave me strength. It was like a picture of home, or the face of a good friend cheering me on. I felt Grandpa lift himself onto his forearms and start to move forward again.
“Keep going,” I muttered, inside the memory. Was it me talking to Grandpa, or Grandpa talking to the boy in the gym? “The trick is not to feel,” I said. “You cannot feel the pain. Just keep going.”
And then I opened my eyes, and the war was gone. I was back inside the gym. PJ was rushing toward me with his arms up, and I started waving the ball in the air, as if I was going to throw it. I was trying to show Grandpa that I was still in the game. It might not make any sense, but I thought I was rescuing him by doing this.
But with my next step toward the basket, I fell, letting the ball roll out of my hands. PJ scooped it up. Trip started covering him, and Gus took on Steven and Russ all by himself, his arms extended, moving side to side. I half raised myself from the floor.
“Are you playing?” Trip said.
I nodded my head, because I couldn’t talk. I stood up, putting all my weight on the good leg. PJ was coming in for a shot, and I knew without having time to really think it through that I could block the shot only if I jumped onto the bad leg. Which I did, slapping the ball in Gus’s direction.
I had never known anything worse than that pain. It felt like a needle the size of a pencil boring into my knee. I choked on something. Had I bitten my tongue?
Gus grabbed the ball and lobbed a shot over Steven’s head to Trip, who ran in for a layup to win the game. I was up now, and limping. I knew I had to get away. I was heading for the locker room. Gus ran to join me. Mr. Ball was asking if I was okay, and I was saying, “I just need to pee.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Gus whispered.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” I said. “Help me.”
“Where do you want to go?” he asked. For that minute at least, it didn’t matter whether Gus was my best friend, or sort of my friend, or not my friend at all.
“Here,” I breathed, pushing open the locker room door.
“What are you doing?” Gus laughed nervously. “What’s going on? Is it a sprain?”
My hands were clenched into fists. “I want to look in the mirror,” I said.
“Huh?” said Gus, but I was already standing in front of the sinks. And then I was looking at the glass.
The habit of seeing your own self is so strong that in the first instant of seeing another person in your reflection, it doesn’t register. Then, there Grandpa was, his eyes wide with pain, like mine, his own fists clenched. His forehead was red and blotchy and he looked like he was about to cry. “I’m getting us out of here,” I said, and the reflection said the same thing right along with me.
The cold came on faster this time. I didn’t feel it spread, it just hit me like I’d walked into a wall of water. I heard the rushing sound of the river, and felt my feet slipping as the ground was replaced by cold all around. My heart shrank under the pressure. I couldn’t breathe.
I entered a memory. I was watching Stella again. She was unwrapping a cheese and margarine sandwich. We were sitting on the red vinyl seats of an old-fashioned train. I was hungry, and she was talking, telling a story about the bread. The train passed through a meadow, and as I remembered the meadow where the battle had taken place, I moved inside a new memory, as if my body had traveled through the window of the train. It was the day before the battle, and the grasses we would destroy stood tall. I was with another soldier and he said, “It’s hard to believe such a beautiful place is so dangerous.” I nodded my head, thinking, Don’t say things like that aloud. If you’re soft, you’ll die.
I slipped into another memory. I was leaning in a doorway watching a teenage boy work on math from a book lying open on his desk. The boy—my own dad, but in the memory he was my son—did not look up or act like he noticed I was there. I wanted to speak to him. I wanted him to notice me and look up. But “How’s the homework going?” or “What are you working on?”—it sounded trumped up. It sounded too little. And too late.
I floated up now, up, up into the cold of the river. My feet were kicking behind me as I almost swam. The rushing was deafening, and I felt the cold cracking in my elbows and my poor, sore knee.