SUMMER WENT ON while I waited on the toxicology analysis—the pituitary tumor had been ruled out, but more “exotic” possibilities hadn’t. I was still, potentially, a cancer grenade, pin pulled, waiting to blow. I wasn’t really celebrating.
But I was still growing.
I knew this because it had started to hurt a little. Not much, not excruciating, but it was there: this kind of pleasant ache, like I’d just run a mile. At night, though? My shin splints were exclamation points.
And I kept tripping over things. Things that weren’t the right distance away anymore. Stairs. Rock outcroppings at BoB. Kitchen chairs. I was a figure drawn to a slightly different scale every day, it seemed. The world was doing a terrible job of adjusting to me.
Dr. Helman had suggested, of all things, a weight lifting routine.
“Gentle,” she said. “Easy. Nothing NFL. The important thing isn’t the weight you’re lifting; it’s the routine. Living in your body every day. Building out what they call your proprioception, your body awareness. Like an invisible scaffold.”
I took Dr. Helman’s proprioception prescription and handed it to my physical therapist, Dr. Andrew Tannenger, B.o.B. And he gave me a weight lifting regimen.
We lifted together, actually. Well: not together. Drew was lifting a lot more, and for different reasons. He was getting ready for varsity, staying in shape, playing in the La Jolla Summerhoop League. I was getting ready for…well, I didn’t really know what. I just wanted to stop tripping over my own feet. To stop being quite so surprised every time I passed a mirror.
So I lifted. And I watched. I watched Drew burn through the Summerhoop League, where his team was a thinly veiled test run of the Harpoons’ varsity lineup. They were even called the Poca Resaca Mobys. (Not super subtle.) The Mobys had been unstoppable out of the gate, but in the last three games, Drew’d averaged fewer than eighteen points, which was considered shocking. Fans were chattering about “hype,” the way fans do. I didn’t think it had gotten to Drew.
I was wrong.
One night, against the Portola Warthogs, Drew was off from the jump, turning over the ball five times in the first half and shooting three for fifteen, crazy low for him.
“What’s going on?” I asked Monica. Laura was covering her eyes. (Laura didn’t like suspense.)
“No clue,” said Monica. Her typical game face, which I’d call Focused Detachment, had been replaced by Obvious Worry. Monica, in the previous incarnation of our trio, liked to affect not caring about the game of basketball overmuch. Basketball had been our thing, Drew’s and mine. I surfed with Monica, played hoops with Drew. Now Monica had to be a basketball superfan? Was that the New Plan? Or was that just…weird?
“He’s psyching himself out,” muttered Brian. “Trying to solve problems he doesn’t have.”
Grotesque and inelegant ball sprawled before us for the better part of forty minutes. Finally, mercifully, it was halftime.
“Will?”
And there was Sidney. Holding two giant sodas.
“Hey, Sid!” Yikes. It came out a little Disney World!
“I got two,” she explained, regarding the twin sodas, “but Ethan’s off sugar, something about his Adderall. You want this?”
“Sure!” This wasn’t bullshit. I craved sugar water all the time. “Please, hand me some sweet, sweet diabetes.”
Sid grinned, passed me a missile silo’s worth of high-fructose corn syrup, and sat down. Her hip touched mine, and to my surprise, the place it touched heated up to about nine thousand degrees Celsius.
“C’mon, Mobys, c’mon!” Brian said, standing, clapping. He was the only one standing and clapping, because it was halftime. Brian was melting down a little.
“Your dad’s had a long day,” Laura explained. “The chimpanzees started making spears.”
“What?” Monica raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, apparently it’s a big deal.”
“It is a big deal,” Brian editorialized. “It’s never happened in captivity before. Not just tool use, weapon use, in a zoo environment. C’MON, MOBYS!”
“Brian? It’s halftime.”
“I think I need popcorn,” said Brian. “Popcorn? I’m going for popcorn.”
He sidled out of the bleachers. Laura sighed. “I’m off to talk your father down from his tree.”
“Don’t give him a spear,” said Monica.
Laura turned to Sidney. “I’m Laura Tannenger, Will’s stepmom.”
They shook hands, as if something had just been transacted, and a small eruption of butterflies, for some reason, blew through my stomach. Laura scootched down the bleachers, caught up with my dad. Whispered something to him. I saw him turn, take in Sidney. Eek. My face, I imagined, cycled through six shades of red. I hoped nobody’d noticed.
Monica was looking at Sidney, too. Just…looking.
Sidney said, “Monica? Right?”
“Monica,” said Monica. “Right.” She said it in her flat assassin voice. Monica regarded all rich, popular kids with suspicion, but I was a little surprised at this. Open hostility (except in special cases of self- or friend defense) was not Monica’s jam.
“You tutored me in algebra? Seventh grade?” Sid attempted.
“Mmm,” said Monica. “Yes. Algebra. The killing fields. One sec, gotta drain the dragon.” Monica stood, began sidling out of our row.
Sid flipped back to me. “Crazy, huh?”
“What?”
“The game.”
“Oh. Yeah. Ugly ball.”
“Refs are kinda obviously anti-Drew.”
“Well,” I said, “to be fair, Drew is a little anti-Drew tonight.”
Monica, in the aisle now, shot me a look as she headed for the bathroom: Uh. Traitor? She had a point. Why had I said something even vaguely Drew-critical? To an “outsider”?
Maybe because Sid wasn’t quite an outsider these days. We’d been hanging out that summer, even without frogs to dissect.
I wasn’t really sure what it meant, this new attention from Sid. Was it height-related? Better question: was it only height-related?
“So if you’re serious about that anti-cruelty petition to ban dissections,” I said, flapping my lips on instinct, “we’d better file it now. Or else another generation’ll be subjected to Sulak’s mindless butchery. I mean…think of the fetal pigs….”
I rattled on about pigs and petitions, and Sid just looked at me like she was looking at me, but just looking, not really listening. Because, Jesus? Who would? I was talking about pig parts! Why was I talking about pig parts?
Sid stopped my hogalogue with: “What are you doing this weekend?”
Honest answer: Riding the bench of life. Waiting for test results. Dunking on Rafty’s low goal. Maybe some BoB time with two people who’d probably rather be having se—
“Uh, I dunno,” I yammered, “still in the planning stages…”
“ ’Cause there’s this thing at Jazzy’s. The volleyball squad’s going to scrimmage at sunset. On the beach.”
On the beach. This meant beach volleyball. This meant a lightly clothed event.
“Will loves volleyball!”
My father’s voice. My blood ran cold. Brian was back, with popcorn. Leaning over us. Some kernels spilled from the paper sleeve and fell on Sid’s blouse. I wanted to die. What the hell had Laura said to him?
“Will’s a big volleyball fan,” Brian told Sidney helpfully. “We used to play on the beach a lot. You play volleyball?”
“Yeah. Varsity. And intramural, just for fun.”
“In-tra-mu-ral!” said Brian, with the kind of overenunciated wonder normally reserved for alien first contact. In my mind, I was strangling him to death with a volleyball net. And he wasn’t finished! “Y’know, a while ago, we took a road trip to New England, and we visited the Volleyball Hall of Fame in Holyoke, Mass. It’s very near the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield. Remember that, Will? Our ‘Hall Crawl’?”
“Yeah, we didn’t call it that—”
“Two Halls of Fame! In one day! Have you ever been? To the Volleyball Hall of Fame?”
“No,” Sidney said, “but it sounds cool.” She got up. “See you this weekend, Will?”
“Um. Sure! Enjoy the rest of the, y’know…”
“Yeah,” said Sid. “Drew’ll bounce back, I’m sure.”
And then Sidney Lim took her soda and left, just as Monica was coming back from the dragon drain. She watched Sid go, sucking her teeth thoughtfully. “So. You and Sidney.”
“Huh? What? We were in AP bio together.”
“Indeed.” Monica grinned. But it wasn’t—how to explain this?—the nicest grin. It was just lips over teeth.
The team was filing back onto the court.
Monica spotted Drew and screamed: “C’mon, Harps! WOOOOO!”
Wooooo?
It felt less like a sincere fan hoot and more like a javelin thrown at my face. What the hell happened on the algebra killing fields? I wanted to ask Monica. But that might make things weird. So I just watched the game, sipped my free soda, and thought warm, happy thoughts, and some of them were about Sidney Lim, for a change.
The second half was even worse. Drew came out strong in the worst possible way: aggressive, but dumb about it. He got in foul trouble early and rode the bench for half the half. For the first time that Summerhoop season, the Mobys closed a lead without him. I watched him on the sidelines, tapping his foot, head down, eyes floorward.
With twelve seconds left and a chance to tie, they brought him back in.
He went for the three. From way out. For no good reason. CAROM! The ball hit the front of the hoop with stunning force, delivered itself into the hands of a Portola shooting guard, who ran out the last five seconds. The Portola bleachers went absolutely bug nuts.
And Drew cursed. Audibly. F-bomb-inably. It sounded like a gunshot.
That was…strange. Uncool. Un-Drew.
“Ah, jeez.” Brian shook his head. “Not good. So hard on himself.”
We watched the coach call Drew over, watched him lean in and give Spesh what I can only assume was a talking-to.
Monica and I went into triage mode.
“Let’s kidnap him. Take him Whailing.”
“That,” said Monica, “is precisely what I was thinking.”
On reflex, we still knew how to circle the herd.
So we waited for him in the parking lot, Monica and I, with Brian and Laura bringing up the rear.
“Refs, man,” said Monica when Drew finally appeared, rumpled, showered but uncombed, and slumping toward us.
Drew didn’t say anything. He was digging in his gym bag for something, or pretending to. He hadn’t met anyone’s eyes.
“Lotta ticky-tack fouls,” Monica went on. “I mean, what’s the accreditation for these high school refs anyway—”
“They did their job,” muttered Drew. “I didn’t do mine.”
Brian pursed his lips. “Sometimes you eat the bar…”
“Thanks, Brian.”
Laura was nodding. She’d seen this before in Drew. I saw her touch Brian’s elbow, a small warning. “We’ll see you at home,” she said to Drew. “Shake it off.”
“Okay, Mom.” Drew was back in his bag, still looking for the fake thing he pretended not to have found.
When they were gone, Monica said, “All right, Tannenger. Get your ass in the car. This is a Hot August Night night, methinks. We’ve got cetaceans to serenade.”
Drew just blinked at her.
I stepped up: “You heard the lady. Time for some Whailing.”
“It’s actually time for some practice,” Drew snapped. “So you two go sing to the whales. I’ve got to fix this.”
He walked off through the parking lot and onto the soccer field, and a small but dangerous crater opened in the parking lot. All our words fell into it.
“Oh. Kay?” I was running plays in my head, trying to figure out how to salvage this. How to unweird that which Drew had made weird. “Not a Neil Diamond fan, I see.”
Then I saw Monica. Her eyes. Wet. I saw them before she had a chance to turn away.
Not possible. I’d never seen her cry. Maybe once. Watching Fellowship, when Gandalf bites it on the bridge with the Balrog. That was the last time I’d seen the mist roll in. But never because of something real. Not even when she got rolled and ate shit at BoB and left a long scroll of skin on the cheese-grater cove bottom.
Not even when her dad had one of his weekends.
“He’s not mad at you,” I told her, and started to reach an arm around her shoulder, pure instinct, before thinking better of it (CAUTION: WEIRD!) and veering off.
“I know.” Neutral voice. Scary neutral. She was still turned away from me and was drifting toward the bike rack.
“Throw the bike on the Yacht. I got a bungee—”
“No, I’m good.” She stopped. “Tell Drew: I get it.”
She was already on the bike, swinging toward the mouth of the parking lot, the reflector on her busted-ass helmet catching the streetlight. Her face, in the half glow, was restored to its resting state: detached, room-temperature amusement.
“Just another crazy week, Daughtry,” Monica called as she wheeled by. “The chimps are making spears! Extraordinary times!”
“Mon says to tell you she ‘gets it.’ ”
The ride had been silent. I was just doing my best to fill a void.
Drew didn’t appreciate my best.
“Do me a favor,” he said, “and don’t talk to Monica about me behind my back?”
Ker-chunk. Sound of a spear sinking into a blood brother’s sternum.
“Um. Okaaaay. That’s a…rule? Bylaw? Part of the New Plan?”
“Maybe,” Drew said pissily, chewing a finger and staring out the window. “Maybe it should be. I know how new this is, it’s new to me, too, but…what happened to Don’t make it weird? Seriously, man: boundaries.”
Wow. WOW. Boundaries.
That was…that was…choice.
Yeah, Drew was a real font of dickery that night.
And part of me—out of nowhere—wanted to snap that font right off and feed it to him.
So Dr. Helman calling?
At that precise moment?
Was fortunate, I think, for all involved. The call Bluetoothed automatically onto the Fiat speaker and interrupted my Vesuvius-in-progress—
“I wanted to call right away, Will,” said Dr. Helman. “I just spoke with your dad, he said you were out….”
Oh, God. Here it was. The verdict that I supposedly wasn’t waiting for, that (I suddenly realized) I’d completely, totally, and panic-strickenly been waiting for.
“Count is normal. Scans are normal. Everything’s normal.”
THANK YOU. Thank you, all generic and nonspecific deities! Thank you, Science, thank you, Chance. Something bubbled up inside me, something I hadn’t even realized I’d been tamping down, something warm and grateful, and it didn’t matter to whom or for what exactly.
“What’s abnormal is how damned normal you are.” She made a sound that was half relief, half exasperation. I, on the other hand, just grinned like an idiot. “But we’re going to monitor you for the next six to nine months. At least. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Dr. Helman, having sentenced me to life, hung up, and I started involuntarily bouncing in my seat as I drove.
Drew was grinning, too. The icky, icy shitscape of six minutes ago? Gone. Forgotten. I realized that this little question of Will Will die? had been hanging over both of us. And now? The clouds were parting.
“Pull over,” Drew said.
We were passing a playground. I pulled in, next to the monkey bars, and Drew came over to my side, hauled me out of the car. Hugged the living hell out of me.
I remembered then: we were two people who’d lost people. We both knew what losing was like. Nothing else—not tonight’s stupid fail against Portola, not the New Plan or the new awkwardness, not even Monica—was as important as not losing someone.
“Goddamn, you’re heavy,” said Drew as he let me go. “So okay: can you officially start enjoying yourself now?”
“I…I think so? I think maybe I already started. Enjoying myself. Even before I stopped dying.”
Drew smiled, smacked my shoulder. “Brother of blood, you are the opposite of dying. You’re a goddamn tragedy in reverse.” His eye caught on something over my shoulder. “C’mon,” he said, and popped the hatch. Thump, thump. Ball on asphalt.
“C’mon where? What’s happening?”
“What’s happening,” said Drew, “is my jumper was a goddamn garbage fire tonight. And I can’t sleep until I work it out. You mind…helping? With a little defense?”
I cannot overstate how crazy this was.
Drew wanted me on D. He needed a sparring partner. A partner. If not an equal, then at least equal enough.
As you may have noticed: I like basketball.
I like the pick-and-roll, I like the give-and-go. As the poet says.
And I watched basketball. I studied basketball. But did I play basketball?
Sure. All the time. But only with Rafty, in his driveway, far from prying eyes.
I hadn’t played with anyone bigger than Rafty since…well, since basketball camp. With Drew. Eons ago. Back when we were players of roughly similar size and skill.
That night? The night I was sentenced to life? We were eight again.
Play was still pretty lopsided. I lost by six. But at one point…I led. By as many as five. For ninety whole seconds.
Against Drew, this was a phenomenon.
I mean, he was holding back. Obviously.
For sure. A thousand percent.
I think?
“Not bad, right?” I said, panting, after draining a lucky fadeaway over Drew’s block. “Pretty fly…for a five-ten guy!…”
“You’re not…five ten….” He was panting, too. Not quite as hard as I was, but still. “Guard who was all over me tonight, he was five ten. When was the last time you measured?”
“Uh. Weekend before last.”
Drew shook his head, flicked off some sweat. “You’re my height, I’d put money on it.”
We sat down on the blacktop, passed a Powerade.
“Can I, uh, admit something?” I panted.
“Anytime.”
I gulped at the bottle. “I…don’t think I’m in the right body.”
Drew squinted. “Explain.”
“It’s like…I’m six and wearing my dad’s shoes. And it’s hilarious.”
“Well,” said Drew, “if you play like this as a six-year-old in your dad’s shoes, then by fall, we’re starting you at center.”
We laughed. Because that was funny.
And the truth is, that night? Going one on one with Drew? Was the first night I started feeling at home in that new, possibly wrong body. Like my proprioception had finally started…propriocepting again.
Drew clapped a hand on my shoulder, and I noticed: my whole torso didn’t jerk forward when he did it. Sea change, right there. All of a sudden, I could absorb the normal impact of brotherhood. I could survive a backslapping.
“You’re gonna clear me, Will. You realize that, right?”
I just nodded, noncommittally. I’d been trying not to think of where this was heading.
“You know why I lost tonight?”
That snapped me out of my reverie. Drew was reflecting.
“I lost…for the same reason I was a dick to you and Monica in the parking lot. I wasn’t playing Portola. I was playing the next game, see. In my head, I’d already beaten Portola, I’d already moved on to the next game. Problem is…I didn’t beat them. And by the time I realized that…I was already back at practice, at least in my head. Instead of standing in a parking lot with my two best friends.” He smiled. “I am clearly in need of serious Whailage. And maybe a smack in the face.”
I loved Drew in those moments when he felt the need to explain himself. Because Drew was very bad at explaining himself, and he knew it. He only did it when he felt something important was at stake. So once again, not for the first time: I was flattered. I was grateful.
I was probably looking for my reflection, in his reflection.
Drew wanted to be known. So did I.
People worry so much about being known, don’t they? We think: Will anyone ever find out who I really am? As if we know.
You think you’re already someone: this fully formed, all-done organism, completely evolved and adapted.
Like you already are who you’ll end up being.
So sorry to break it to you, but you aren’t. You never will be. You’re a phase. Forever and always a phase.
Take it from a phase.