Class Favorite Read online

  He wasn’t making fun of me. I could hear the sincerity in his voice. We continued down the hall together, slowly. Out in the open. For anyone in all of Bowie Junior High to see. I wondered where the yearbook photographer was when you needed her.

  “Thanks,” I answered, wishing he hadn’t brought up—or even remembered—the locker incident. I started to wonder if all that confidence and poise from my Class Favorite list that I’d been trying to exude even before spring break had actually come through. “But I’m pretty sure it’s all just a facade.”

  He laughed. “Well, this is my class.” We stopped in front of Mr. Rickles’s room. “I’ll see ya later, Sara.” He turned to walk inside his class.

  Sara. He called me Sara, not Thurman. In the space of a single junior high hallway, I had gone from classmate Thurman to girl Sara. He said my name like a breath—Saaara. Totally swoon-worthy.

  “’Kay,” I croaked. “Later.” But as I turned to go, I had a moment of bravery. “Oh, hey, Jason?”

  He stepped back outside the door, tossing his bangs out of his amber eyes.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “If you ever find yourself without something cool to wear, just call me. I know where Coach Eckels shops.”

  He smiled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Cool,” I said, all casual. “But don’t tell anyone, ’kay?”

  He nodded and said, “Secret’s safe.” He turned back toward his class and, looking over his shoulder at me, said, “See you later, Sara.”

  13

  Can You Tell a Friend from a Foe?

  You lost a note from your friend, Casey, that had some very private information on it regarding her—gulp!—“feminine freshness” problem. To make matters worse, most of the football team found out. She said she forgives you; now, you need to confide in her about the problems your parents are having. Is there a chance she’ll turn on you, just to get even?

  a) Slight chance—I’d be leery of telling her anything too big, too soon.

  b) No chance, no way, no how.

  c) Big chance—I can’t ever tell her another secret as long as I live.

  I was flying. After talking to Jason, I knew that nothing could get me down. Even though my life of late had become a series of ups and downs more stomach-dropping than the Superman Tower of Power ride, I felt that talking to Jason gave me the boost I needed to sail through the rest of the year—or the rest of the day, at least. When Coach Eckels had asked me that morning to do the stats, I had wanted to jump right out of my pleather boots. But after the humiliation in Mrs. Everly’s class, I was feeling a bit gun-shy. I wanted to talk to someone before stepping into the boys’ basketball stat world. I longed for encouragement from Arlene or attitude advice from Kirstie. I would have settled for a nice word from Dad.

  I hadn’t heard from him since he took me to dinner at Luby’s. I’d e-mailed him twice over spring break and called his office once but hadn’t heard back. I figured he must be back on the road, and there would be a postcard from Louisiana or Oklahoma waiting for me at home.

  I called Mom at work to let her know I’d be home late. She cheered me on, as if I’d actually made the team, but somehow it made me feel good. I headed to the gym, where the boys were warming up, shooting baskets from the free-throw line before doing some layup drills. The stands were filling up with parents and students. A bunch of Sam Houston Rebels were stretching and shooting easy baskets at the other end of the court.

  All the best guys were on the team, and so was Shiner. I stood for a moment inside the gym doors, watching them—the irregular pat-pat-pat of basketballs hitting the gym floor, echoing with each dribble; the squeaking of shoes on the shiny hardwood court. Guys shuffled around at each end, arms outstretched, waiting for the ball to be passed to them. I felt a rush just watching them.

  Jason was dribbling the ball low to the court. He did a fake right, then went left around Richie Adams before the ball tip . . . tip . . . tipped into the basket. As the ball fell through the net, he casually walked away, wiping his forehead with the palm of his hand, then wiping his hand on his baggy shorts.

  “Over here!” Shiner yelled. He was wide open, but no one passed the ball to him. He just stood to the left of the court, his hand held over his head like you’d ask a question in class. “Adams! Come on, I’m open!”

  Richie ignored him from the half-court line, looking for someone else to pass to. But then Shiner skated across the court, effortlessly stole the ball from Richie, did a spin-turn around Frankie Donnelly, and went in for an easy layup. The ball bounced listlessly when it came down, and Shiner turned to pick it back up.

  “I told you I was open,” he said to Richie, and then chucked the ball at him.

  I cracked a smile—that was the Shiner I remembered from when we were kids. He didn’t like being ignored, especially when he knew he was right.

  The stands were filling up with gawking girls and supportive parents. Kayla Cane sat in the stands at the end of the court where our guys were warming up. She wore a short denim skirt and flip-flopping heels, and her dark brown hair fell in soft curls over her tanned shoulders. Jessica sat beside her, staring at the court—apparently she and Richie had broken up over spring break and she was having a hard time getting over it. Kayla was talking to Rosemary, who had pulled her hair back in a studious ponytail. As Kayla yapped, she never took her eyes off the court—like she was suddenly interested in basketball. I couldn’t help but think, Maybe now I actually have something these girls are envious of.

  “Thurman!”

  I snapped out of my aren’t-you-jealous-of-me reverie and saw a red-faced Coach Eckels across the court.

  “Get over here, girl!” he yelled.

  I shuffled quickly across the court, heels clomping along the way, hoping Kayla, Jessica and Rosemary didn’t hear Coach yelling at me.

  I’d never run in heels before, naturally, and had a hard time keeping my balance. I noticed the guys looking at me as I stomped past, and I tried to look as confidently hot as I could.

  “Thurman, you on the team now?” Richie called out with a smile as I hobbled by. “You couldn’t be much worse than our point guard. He sucks.”

  I smiled as cute as I could as Shiner yelled, “Shut up, Adams!” Richie laughed as he shot the ball from the free-throw line, missing the basket entirely.

  “Camry, get over here!” Coach Eckels hollered at Shiner. Coach smelled like my dad’s deodorant. He was wearing baby blue shorts, the kind with a plastic zipper and two snap buttons on the wide elastic band that all the older coaches wore, a white golf shirt with a Bowie Bandit over the heart, a shiny silver whistle with a light blue rubber tip and a matching lanyard around his neck. With the clipboard in his hand, it was standard coach uniform.

  “Dern it, Camry! You watch that mouth of yours around the females, boy. You hear me?” As he yelled, spit gathered in the corner of this mouth. I watched nervously for some of it to fly in my direction.

  “Yes, sir,” he mumbled, clearly embarrassed.

  “Sit down here for the rest of warm-up.”

  Shiner slumped to the bench with a heavy sigh.

  “And no attitude!” Coach Eckels snapped at him.

  He turned to me, screwing his eyes up and down, inspecting my outfit.

  “What in heaven is this?” he asked, his eyebrows scrunched together.

  “I didn’t have anything to change into,” I explained.

  “And what in the gordon-jack-seed is that?” he asked, pointing behind me. There were several black scuffs on the basketball court tracking my path across the court like footsteps in the snow. I groaned and looked down at my discount culprits—betrayed, once again.

  “Take those things off,” Coach Eckels demanded. “You think this is a beauty pageant?”

  “No, sir.”

  He let out a heavy sigh. “You never wear black soles on a basketball court. Next time wear tennis shoes with white soles, jeans, and I’ll give you a shirt. And
get here a half hour before game time, Thurman, not five minutes. Got it?”

  He directed me to the end of the bench, where the benchwarmers waited, hoping to be called into battle. I took off my boots and tucked them under the bench, exposing my Rudolph socks, while Hector, the guy who filled in for the last stat girl while he sat out on grades probation, showed me what to do and how to keep score. Then he looked down at my socks; the googley-eyed Rudolph ogled up at him.

  “Nice,” he snickered. I curled my toes in and pulled my feet under my seat while tugging at the hem of my skirt. Insulted by a benchwarmer—not a good start. But then I reminded myself of No. 3 on my list: being nice. So I smiled as genuinely as possible and said, “Thanks, Hector.” He snickered in response.

  My job was pretty easy. Coach Eckels gave me a clipboard that had a little picture of the basketball court on a piece of paper. When one of the guys made a shot, I wrote his number on the court to mark where he shot from. If the basket went in, I circled his number. In the margins, I wrote down the numbers of the guys who fouled and a notch for each additional foul. I stared at the paper, wondering how many times I’d write down number 32—Jason’s number.

  “Huddle up!”

  All the players ran to the sidelines, where Coach Eckels stood with his hands on his hips. Once they were gathered around him, he looked around frantically.

  “Thurman!” he bellowed.

  I slid over to him on my socks.

  “Where’s the ball?”

  I stared up at him through unblinking eyes. “Sir?”

  “The ball! The ball!” His face turned bright pink, and spit gathered again at the corners of his mouth.

  I looked at all the practice balls rolling lazily around the court like lost papers in a breeze and wondered if he wanted me to go get one for him.

  “I’ll get it,” Jason called as he hustled over to the ball rack where one ball remained: The Ball.

  How stupid of me to forget. Knowing about The Ball was practically part of the Bowie curriculum, as important as knowing the details of Santa Anna’s defeat at San Jacinto. During the day, it sat in the display case at the front entrance to the school with all our trophies and pictures of semifamous people who had gone to our school, like city council members and a Channel 4 news anchor. I passed it every day without even noticing. The Ball was taken out of the case for every game. It was more important than wearing white-soled tennis shoes or knowing the words to our school anthem.

  The Ball was used in the 1989 state championship game in which we defeated the Judson Jets. We were crowned state champs for the first, last, and only time so far in Bowie history. Since then we hadn’t even made it to the semifinals. In the 1988–89 sports season, Bowie didn’t win a single football, baseball, or volleyball game, and our best placement in track was usually a distant third or fourth. But the basketball team exploded because they were led by Enzo Vincenzo, the tallest kid in the county and the best player we’d ever had. He was also one of the dumbest guys around—his bad grades were legendary, but this was before they made the no-pass, no-play rule in Texas schools, so nobody cared how awful his grades were as long as he kept winning games. Enzo scored an average of forty-two points per game, and the final score usually only went up to the sixties. For all practical purposes, he was the basketball team.

  Enzo led the team to the finals, but three days before the state championship game, he twisted his ankle running down the stairs at his house. They say that when Enzo showed up at school with a cane, teetering down the halls like an old man, teachers stopped and wept. The principal shook his head and said, “We almost made it . . . almost.” Coach Randolph, the basketball coach at the time, even considered forfeiting the game rather than sending the team in like soldiers with no weapons.

  But the team refused. In the three days they had before the game, they practiced before and after school. The principal even let them out of their sixth- and seventh-period classes so they could go to the gym and start working on new plays. The town was somber: Everyone knew they’d lose, but they loved the boys for their determination. The Bowie basketball team of 1989 was full of martyrs, and the town’s collective chest swelled with pride.

  The night of the game, all of Ladel traveled to the downtown convention center, including my parents—that was the night they met. My dad was a student at Ladel Senior High, and Mom had driven up from Weatherford High with some friends. They happened to be sitting near each other, my dad with his buddies and my mom with her girlfriends; none of them had ever cared about basketball before that night. The excitement of a championship win filled the hearts of every Ladel citizen. The whole town—even the smaller ones surrounding it—was exhilarated, cheering for these mere boys. By the third period, when the Bandits were leading the game by four points, the whole arena pulsated with the energy of an atom bomb. Mom said it’s a wonder she heard a word Dad said to her; it was so loud, you couldn’t hear yourself think.

  The game went back and forth. The Bandits held a two-point lead, then the Jets. Both teams struggled to pull ahead, and the guys got sloppy with fouls, violently checking one another below the basket. First one of our guys, then one of theirs. People screamed, voices went hoarse. Dad said Mom’s cheeks were so pink with excitement that she looked like she’d just met Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. With forty seconds left on the clock, he asked her out to a movie. Dad joked that she was so caught up in the excitement that she would have said yes to Jack the Ripper. At twenty seconds, Bowie scored a basket that gave us a two-point lead. All we had to do was hold on. But at ten seconds, the Jets threw a sloppy jump shot, which bounced undecidedly on the rim until finally sliding through the net. A great moan came from half the crowd. Hidden in the back of the bleachers was Enzo, a smile snaking onto his face—no way could they make it without him. The crowd slumped, frowns settled on their collective faces, their spirits melted. But the Bandits didn’t give up.

  The clock ticked down, and the crowd shouted the seconds like it was New Year’s Eve.

  “Five! Four!”

  A kid by the name of Kenny Camry made his way to the half-court line.

  “Three! Two!”

  He chucked the ball from mid-court just as the buzzer sounded, and the crowd held its breath. The ball sailed down the court, high in the air. Mom grabbed Dad’s hand and squeezed tight, hoping, waiting, until . . .

  Swish!

  The basket was good, and the crowd exploded into a seismic celebration. Popcorn flew into the air, and no Ladel-loving butt remained in its seat. Mom and Dad jumped and hugged and laughed as if they had just won the lottery, and fans swarmed the court to join the team in their ecstasy. Someone stole the net from the rim, but Coach Randolph scooped up the ball and held it tight, even as the guys dumped ice-cold water over his balding head. No one noticed Enzo Vincenzo slip quietly out the side door. No one ever heard from him again. Rumor is he home-schooled the rest of the year, then transferred to a high school in Angelica Springs. To this day, people debate what became of him. Sometimes you hear of Enzo “sightings,” kind of like Elvis, but no one knows for sure where he went or what he did after that night.

  Since then, before every basketball game the Bandits play, the head coach gets The Ball and gathers the guys around it in a circle. Everyone piles their hands on top and chants, “Never give up! Fight! Fight! Bandits win! Now!”

  Having shamefully forgotten about The Ball, I stood dumbly by as the team repeated the ritual.

  Just before the ref blew the whistle to start the game, Coach Eckels made me clear the stray practice balls off the court and put them in the storage room just off the court. Sounds like an easy job, but I felt ridiculous in my Rudolph-red socks, and bending over in my too-short skirt was not an easy task. I had to kneel straight down in a kind of squat position, pressing my knees together to keep anything from showing in the back or through the front. Ten balls later, my thighs were shaking with exhaustion. Apparently, the Toning for Teens I had done over the break hadn’t t
oned me enough.

  After wheeling the cart into the supply room, I took my seat at the end of the bench. With Shiner sitting beside me, I readied myself for a stat career I hoped would take me through senior year in high school.

  What did I find? Even though I had once tried out for the sport, I have absolutely no interest in basketball other than watching Jason Andersen dribble, do a layup, a free throw, a jump-shot, a pass. His calf muscles looked amazingly complex when he crouched in a low dribble. His hair was matted to his wonderfully pale forehead before the end of the first period, his eyes shined brightly beneath, and his lips looked fuller and rosier from the exertion. When he fouled, he guiltily raised his hand so the scorekeepers—and I—could easily identify him as the culprit of unnecessary roughness. I felt like he was raising his hand to wave, just to me, so I could write it in the little margin on my mini picture of the court.

  I also realized that Shiner could actually be sort of cool, in a Shiner kind of way. Since Coach never put him in, he sat at the end of the bench near me. He looked at my clipboard and asked what I was doing. I explained it to him, and when I got bored in the second period, he offered to do them for me.

  At half-time, Coach told me to air up the balls in the storeroom and had Shiner show me how to work the air-pumping machine. I guess since he hadn’t played, Coach Eckels didn’t think Shiner needed to be at the meeting. Of course, Hector got to go to the locker room, and he hadn’t played either, so I didn’t really understand.

  The storeroom was right off the court through a heavy double door, which Shiner held open for me. Metal racks held ceiling-high piles of volleyball knee pads, baseball and softball bats, deflated footballs and volleyballs, beat-up helmets, and buckets full of baseballs. It was a jock’s dream in there.

  It also stank. It smelled like sweat, dirt, grass, and dirty socks, all rolled into one. The fluorescent light in the back corner of the low ceiling buzzed and flickered anxiously, making the gray walls look like a prison.

  Shiner pulled a rusty metal contraption with a long rubber hose down from the shelf and plugged the cord into a socket behind the door.