8

IN CASE IT’S NOT CLEAR already, the reason I asked to stay home for a second consecutive day had nothing to do with my knee.

It had nothing to do with pain or with going up or downstairs.

It didn’t have anything to do with skipping class, either. As I said, I like school. I like sitting down in my desk knowing that by the time I get up again I’ll have brand new information in my brain. If you think of it like that, school becomes kind of like the movie The Matrix. Not like the matrix itself—I’m not saying school is a conspiracy to cover up the fact that the world is actually run by aliens and computers—but like those chairs the characters sit in to learn how to do kung fu or fly a helicopter. In the movie, this information is literally injected into characters’ heads (like a flash drive into a computer), and I imagine the same sort of thing happening whenever I sit down at my desk.

So yeah: I liked school.

Just not as much as I liked Kirsten Howard.

As I sat on my floor in my room the day before, it occurred to me that her showing up to shoot on my driveway might not be a one-time deal. For one thing, Kirsten brought her backpack with her. If she had been home from school for some reason (sickness, family emergency, some religious holiday I wasn’t aware of, etc.), she would have left the backpack at her house, right? As far as I could remember, she’d never worn the backpack any of the previous times she’d dribbled to our house.

Plus, when I glimpsed out the window again I realized the basketball she was using wasn’t hers. The ball she usually brought was a rubber one. This one was leather. In other words, it was an indoor ball, not an outdoor one. And, when I looked closer, I was pretty sure I saw some letters scrawled on it with marker, which was true of all the equipment owned by either the junior high or high school.

All of this proved that she’d left from school, not home—even if it didn’t explain how or why.

So I thought there was a good chance she’d come the next day after (during?!) school, too, if only because of the way she was shooting. When people are just shooting for the hell of it, just messing around, they take shots from wherever the ball bounces before they grab it. They take their time. They might try some trick shots, or chuck up a few three-pointers, or pretend they’re going for the game-winning shot.

Kirsten hadn’t done any of that.

Instead of taking her time, she hustled after the ball and then to a specific spot on the court/driveway. And there was nothing random about her shot selection: she started close to the basket and moved out gradually. No trick shots. No threes. No leaning, off-balance, game-winning jumpers.

Her shooting was methodical. It was routine.

It was a routine.

Which meant she followed the same shot pattern over and over again. And that she would follow the same routine the next day, and the next day after that.

Probably.

Maybe.

Hopefully.  

Anyway, there was only one way to find out.

 At 2:30 in the afternoon, I was both disappointed and relieved that Kirsten hadn’t shown up.

At 2:36, I was both relieved and disappointed that Kirsten showed up. As always, she dribbled as she charged up the driveway.

I’d had all day to get ready for her appearance but I suddenly felt totally unprepared. I went over the plan again—what I had come up with to do and say—and it seemed both lame and poorly thought-out.

There was a hitch in my plans that somehow hadn’t occurred to me. Earlier, I’d imagined casually crutching my way to Kirsten and then casually asking, “Wanna rebounder?” Then, if and when she said yes, I’d casually offer the girls’ basketball I was holding. (Girls’ basketballs are slightly smaller than guys’ basketballs. We had one, I guess because my dad’s a girls’ basketball coach. But that doesn’t mean we ever used it. When I’d found it in a bin in our garage, I discovered it had gone flat, so I pumped it up.) Unlike the leather, indoor basketball Kirsten was using, this one was meant to be used outdoors. According to my plan, Kirsten would accept my casual offer and I’d casually pass her the ball.

But as I stood at the front door, I realized that being casual was going to be impossible. How do you do casual when you’ve got two crutches, one basketball, and only two arms? Was the ball supposed to just materialize—abracadabra! —when I needed it? I’d kicked the ball from the garage, through the entryway, down the hall, and to the couch in the living room, but had somehow managed not to consider that moving the ball would be just as difficult later on.

And now it was later on; later on was right now. I stood on the front steps, a crutch under each arm. I propped the front door open with my rear end as I used one of the crutches to drag the basketball through the door.

It was totally awkward, and my only thought was, “Please don’t let Kirsten see this. Please, please don’t let her see thi—”

“Mike?”

I swiveled my neck and found Kirsten staring at me.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey. Need some help?”

The basketball rested at my feet and she nodded at it.

“No,” I said. “Think I got it.” Then I said, “Thought maybe you could use this, so you don’t scuff up the indoor ball.”

In my head, when I imagined making the offer, it had sounded helpful—but out loud it sounded like I was scolding her: how dare you ruin a perfectly good basketball. The fact that I knew she was using an indoor basketball also meant I must have been watching her really closely. Which I had been. But still. I didn’t want her to know that.

“Thanks,” she said.

If she thought my comment sounded weird, she wasn’t acting like it.

“Ms. Mattson gave me this one,” she said. “She was in the middle of explaining the rules of some game to a bunch of seventh graders and I interrupted class to ask for a ball. She went into the equipment room and before she even came out this ball was rolling at me. From like thirty feet away. She must have had to hook her arm around the door frame to get the right angle. By the time I picked it up and saw it was the wrong kind of ball, she was already talking to the seventh graders again.”

Kirsten paused, breathing hard—either from all the shooting or from talking so fast. She gulped some air.

“I almost interrupted class again to tell her,” she said, “but I chickened out.”

“Oh,” I said. Because I didn’t know what else to say.

And then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t quite so nervous—mainly, I think, because Kirsten obviously was nervous. Or maybe she was embarrassed. The point of her story, I realized, the reason she started talking so fast, was that she wanted me to know that she knew the difference between an indoor and outdoor ball. She was in a hurry to prove to me that she would never intentionally use the wrong ball—which meant she cared what I thought about her, at least when it came to discussions regarding basketballs.

Which was pretty cool.

“The thing you have to remember about Ms. Mattson is that she’s quick as a cat,” I said.

Kirsten laughed. Ms. Mattson had to be at least sixty-five years old. “Oh, yeah?”

“Don’t let her ancient brittle bones fool you,” I said. “That woman’s stealthy.”

Kirsten laughed again.

Of all the ways I had pictured this conversation going, I had never imagined making her laugh. Not intentionally. Not with me instead of at me.

“Well,” I said, “here comes another basketball rolling your way.” Instead of kicking it, I hit it to her with one of my crutches. I even considered getting down on the ground and using my crutch like a pool cue. That’s how loose I suddenly felt.

Kirsten scooped the ball up with one hand and discarded the other one on the lawn next to the driveway. She had a baggier jersey on today, and when she twisted at the waist to watch the indoor ball come to a rest, I could see some of her sports bra under her arm. She looked back at me and took a couple of dribbles.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Don’t mention it,” I said.

When she didn’t say anything else, and I didn’t say anything else, and the two of us had been standing facing each other for what felt to me an awkward amount of time, I turned to go back inside. Better to quit while I was ahead, I decided.

But then Kirsten said, “I’m sorry about the knee.”

I pivoted on my good leg to face her again. “Yeah. Looks like I’m going to miss some of the basketball season.”

“That’s what Coach Duncan said.”

Coach Duncan equaled my dad. No matter how many times she said it, I still had to do the equation in my head.

“The team is saving a spot for me, though—for when I get back.”

“That’s cool,” she said.

She didn’t seem as impressed with the news as I was, and I wondered if that was because Dad already told her this, too, or because she’d never had to worry about a spot being reserved for her. If she got hurt, Dad would hold out hope until the last day of the season that she could come back. And for good reason. Without her, the season would be pretty much over. She was that good. 

“What are you doing here, anyway?” I asked. “I mean, why aren’t you at school?”

“Coach Duncan rigged it. I have study hall last period, and Coach and I were talking, and he offered to write a whole bunch of passes to get me out of school so I could get my shooting in.”

“Sounds like my dad,” I said.

He was always up to something. Sometimes it was like he didn’t think the rules and expectations of others applied to him. Usually, he ended up being right. In Dad’s first year as head coach, he and the girls did lots of fundraising and got new uniforms, and then he surprised everyone by giving away all the old ones to senior girls who weren’t on the team. For free. By that time, the varsity practice uniforms had already been passed down to the lower grades to be used as game jerseys, which meant Dad had to fundraise again for new practice uniforms. At first, this didn’t go over too well. People grumbled about it being a waste of money, and it wasn’t until the first home game that people started to come around. All the girls who’d been given the old uniforms came running onto the court with the actual team, and then, when the team sat down on the bench, the girls in the old uniforms sat in the rows right behind them. This meant that the JV and varsity squads sat in the first row, the sophomore team sat in the second, and the girls in the old uniforms sat in the third, fourth, and fifth rows. Back then, girls’ basketball wasn’t at all popular—Dad could barely get enough girls to fill a roster, let alone fill the stands. But to the opposing team, it looked as though Rapid River had five rows’ worth of screaming, cheering players. At the end of each season, he had the senior fans pass their jerseys on to junior girls in order to keep the tradition going.

Right from the beginning, Dad had explained his plan to me. I knew parents wouldn’t like paying for new jerseys because Dad told me they wouldn’t. I knew that he was going to give the jerseys to other players, and that he’d have them sit in the bleachers, and that their uniforms would give the girls on the bench a new sense of team pride. I knew that parents and fans would instantly forget about having to pay for more jerseys when Rapid River won the game (which they did). Everybody that day—players and fans alike—were on their feet cheering as the buzzer sounded. I can still remember Dad finding me in the bleachers and holding up his hands as if to say, “What’d I tell you?”

So, yeah—Dad was always pulling strings. To my knowledge, though, this was the first time he’d helped someone skip school.

“Why do you come here to do it?” I asked Kirsten. “I mean, isn’t your house closer to the school?”

Kirsten lived in town. We just lived just outside it.

“Yeah,” Kirsten said, “but our driveway isn’t as flat or wide as yours. And anyway, it’s a good excuse to work on my dribbling.”

I couldn’t help laughing. The location of our house did seem to Kirsten like a good excuse to practice her dribbling, even though for most people it probably seemed like a good excuse not to dribble, or run, or even walk. There was no bike path or trail of any kind—just a shoulder and a metal railing. It was hard to imagine anyone not named Kirsten Howard choosing to travel along the shoulder of a highway with or without a basketball. 

“What’s so funny?” Kirsten said.

“Forget it,” I said. Then I said, “Want someone to rebound your shots?”