Tournaments, Cocoa & One Wrong Move Page 2

  I didn’t answer. I had come to accept that the raw material that made up me came from my father. He was six foot five and played basketball in high school and college, and until I started playing when I was ten, his idea of a good time was shooting hoops at the gym with his other I-could-have-played-pro-ball buddies. That I could see myself doing someday. What I couldn’t do was give it up to live through my kid and watch her play my game for the rest of my life. I would still get out there and dribble and pass and shoot. And I wouldn’t use the car as a moving interrogation room she couldn’t just jump out of to get away from me.

  I’d considered that more than once.

  *

  We could barely see Pike’s Peak for the snow that was turning the cars in the driveway into hulking white mounds when we pulled up to the house, but I could tell that one of them was my mother’s Jeep Liberty. It was nine thirty. She should have been at the studio, gearing up for the ten o’clock news, especially with a storm blowing through. Although, come to think of it, snow in February in Colorado Springs wasn’t exactly a breaking story. Still, the head meteorologist never missed a broadcast. I could prove that by the number of my games she’d missed. Like every one that wasn’t played on a Saturday, which was most of them. We were sort of even, though. I rarely saw her gigs at six and ten, either.

  She greeted us in the garage when Dad drove in. She was still in her television clothes and on-camera makeup, and her long-in-front, short-in-back hair was sprayed into a helmet. None of it hid the “Trent, what the Sam Hill” in her bluer-than-blue eyes.

  “Imagine my surprise when the entire athletic department showed up at the front door,” she said as Dad lowered his window. “A little something you forgot to mention on the phone?”

  “I didn’t know you were coming home.”

  “You didn’t think I would?” Her eyes shifted to me in the backseat. “Cass, are you okay?”

  Kara squeaked out a signature squeal. “She rocked, Mrs. B! You totally missed it—she scored the winning point with, like, zero seconds to go.”

  Mom had already opened my door and was now peering in. “How bad is it?”

  “It’s not,” Dad said. His glare in the mirror was probably meant for both of us. “You didn’t need to come home, Lisa.”

  “Evidently I did.” She directed those blue eyes—the only thing I inherited from her except our blonde hair painted with honey, which I personally thought looked better on her—toward the headlights that beamed up the driveway. “Is this the opposing team arriving now?”

  “It’s probably the food,” Kara said, and scrambled out of the car to go pretend she needed to help Selena and M.J. and Hilary with the pizza. There was only so much family tension even a best friend was willing to put up with.

  I’d have split too, if I could have done it without my knee collapsing under me. I’d stretched my sweatpants over it, but as far as I could tell it still wasn’t swelling. It just felt weird, like I might be able to bend my leg in the wrong direction if I tried.

  “Get some ice, Lisa,” Dad said.

  The quills immediately rose along the back of my neck. I usually found an excuse to be gone by the time one of their conversations got to the him-ordering-her-around stage, so I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next. Like I said, under any other circumstances the Frenemy would have me out of there.

  The Frenemy had been my constant companion since I was about seven—that prickly sense of anxiety that sickened me when I was learning fractions or square roots or irregular Spanish verbs, or following my friends into the bathroom to gossip, or anything that didn’t involve a layup or a free throw. I knew exactly when I started calling it the Frenemy. Until then it was just The Prickly Thing or The Prickly Thing with Quills the Size of Knitting Needles. But the summer before eighth grade I heard somebody on a tell-everything-about-celebrities show— one of those women with eyebrows like perfect apostrophes and voices that go up at the end of every word—referring to some of the loser-girl stars as Frenemies. They’re pretty much always together but can’t stand each other. And I thought, “That’s The Prickly Thing. It’s constantly there and I hate it, but I think it’s what keeps me from showing everybody how terrified I am.” That’s why I fell in love with basketball—because the Frenemy didn’t play with me. She sat on the sidelines and, unlike my father, she didn’t scream instructions. She didn’t know anything about the game.

  But she was fully operational now as I watched my parents exchange glares over the front seat. My mother broke the evil spell first.

  “Which knee is it, Cass?” she said.

  Before I could even point to it, Dad gave a hissy sigh and said, “If you would just get some ice …”

  Mom disappeared and I somehow climbed out of the car and hopped toward the door to the house with my father at my elbow. He put his hand on the doorknob, but he didn’t turn it.

  “I’m not saying it doesn’t hurt, Cass,” he said. “But you can’t play any game unless you can take a little pain.”

  “It really doesn’t hurt that much,” I said—for about the twentieth time.

  He got a smile in his eyes. “That’s my girl. So, we won’t let this turn into a bigger issue than it is.”

  “Right,” I said.

  He used the word “issue” a lot. Actually, at the moment my only “issue” was him.

  But that disappeared the minute I got inside the door and the team started chanting “Cassi-DEE, Cassi-DEE.” I was on the big leather sectional sofa in the family room with my knee encased in ice and my foot propped up on pillows like the Princess and the Pea before I could get them to stop.

  “We’re a team,” I said. “We all rock.”

  “Okay,” M.J. said from her perch behind me on the back of the couch. “We do.”

  Kara put a slice of pizza with pineapple and Canadian bacon—my favorite—on a paper plate on my lap, but I looked instead at the second team, lined up on the stone hearth across from me with longing in their faces.

  “All of us,” I said. “Emily, you’re totally the free throw queen.”

  “True,” Hilary said. “You just need to get fouled more often.”

  Emily’s face blanked. “Really?”

  “No, doofus!” M.J. bonked her on the head with an empty water bottle.

  Emily grinned and ducked and turned the color of a pepperoni. She was a sophomore and still pretty much all arms and legs, but I was working with her. We were losing M.J. and Hilary after this year, and Emily could maybe fill one gap. At least on the court. I didn’t like to think about them graduating and breaking up the UN.

  “It didn’t matter how much I got fouled, it never got called.” Selena was sitting on the floor, legs folded in their usual perfect girly-girl bow. “I think every one of those refs needed glasses.”

  “It’s not like they’re not watching you,” I said. “Everybody watches you.”

  Beside me, Kara gave a variation on her squeal.

  “What?” M.J. said, tapping her with the bottle again.

  “Will Mathers was watching you.”

  “How would you know that?” Hilary said. “You were supposed to be focused on the game.”

  “I was!”

  Yeah. While we were actually in play. But during time-outs it was nothing for Kara to be checking out the stands to see who was with whom. If it hadn’t been for me dragging her into basketball when we were in sixth grade, she’d probably be a cheerleader right now. Nothing wrong with the rah-rahs, but what a waste of her athletic ability that would have been. It was a good thing I had some serious influence on Kara.

  “Okay, speaking of hot guys,” said Jennifer, one of the second-team girls. She was craning her neck forward, head lowered like a great white heron. We, of course, all leaned in.

  “Were we talking about hot guys?” Kara whispered.

  Jennifer slanted her eyes toward the kitchen. When I followed with mine, I let out an industrial strength guffaw.

  “That’s Cassidy
’s brother,” M.J. informed her.

  “So? He’s still a hottie.”

  “An engaged hottie.”

  “Still…”

  Still nothing. My twenty-three-year-old brother might look like dating material—we’re talking Brewster-blue eyes, chiseled-out features, and Dad’s once-dark hair, which probably meant he was someday destined to be “striking.” But in my opinion, he had all the charm of a parking meter. What his fiancée, Gretchen, saw in him was totally beyond me.

  “Hi, Aaron!” Kara called to him—because she would have thought Saddam Hussein was wonderful if you just got to know his heart.

  I suppressed an eye roll when he actually stepped down into the family room and surveyed the group. They were rewarded for their attention with a half smile. Big throw-up.

  “Close game,” he said. “You pulled it out.”

  “Were you there?” Jennifer said.

  That was my question. Aaron in a gym was like me at a fashion show.

  “Yes, he was there.” Gretchen, my future sister-in-law, looped a long, graceful arm through his and gave him an I-won-this-round smile. I guess. Actually, Gretchen smiled the way models on the front of Cosmo do, lips parted like something smelled funny. Of course, she was standing next to Aaron.

  “I told him he needed to support his sister.”

  Everybody looked at me, so I tried not to let my lips fall open. Most of the time, Gretchen acted like she had too much to do to notice that Aaron even had a sister. Aaron himself was always saying she never even took the time to delete her text messages or throw away moldy leftovers. Interesting how she could get away with being “messy.”

  “Congratulations, by the way.” She gathered her thick, pale brown hair into her hand and let it drop to her shoulders. “I have a question, though. Are you, like, actually having fun out there? I mean, you all just look so serious.”

  Ohmygosh. She was like Aaron’s clone. Of course we were serious. Some of us had scholarships riding on games like that. A recruiter from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville had already been to see me play. The Lady Vols although obviously the significance of that would be lost on both of them.

  “So I heard you messed yourself up,” Aaron said to me. “Gretch wants to see it.”

  “Ick!” Jennifer said

  “She’s a doctor, Einstein,” M.J. said. She was apparently in charge of dispensing all my family details to the uninformed. It occurred to me that Jennifer had never been to my house before. I was going to have to fix that. If you didn’t play together off the court, you weren’t going to play that well together on it.

  “I’m not a doctor yet,” Gretchen said as she picked her way among the bodies to get to me. “I’m only a third-year med student.”

  There was an impressed silence as Kara scooted over and Gretchen sank onto the couch beside me. I handed somebody else the ice and proceeded to roll up my pant leg.

  “It’s no big deal,” I said. “It doesn’t even hurt that much. I felt worse when I had that concussion last season—”

  A unanimous gasp cut me off. That and the Spanish profanity that slipped out of M.J. Every eye was on my knee, and mouths were gaping in horror—because it was swollen to three times its normal size.

  “I think you’ve blown your ACL,” Gretchen said.

  “Is that bad?” I said.

  The way she looked at me, she didn’t even have to answer.

  CHAPTER TWO

  They don’t know for sure it’s my ACL,” I said to Coach. “I get the results of the MRI back this afternoon.”

  Coach Deetz glared out onto the practice court like he hadn’t heard me, like he was totally focused on the team doing suicide sprints—or not doing them. But even when he yelled, “You’re slackin’ off, Kara. Irish—what are you, backing up? Any faster and you might actually start moving!” I knew he was chewing on what I said right along with his Trident gum.

  “What exactly did the doc tell you?” he said between chomps. “And no editing, Brewster.”

  I resituated the crutches, which had been rubbing my armpits raw all day. “He said my knee is too swollen and the muscles in the back of my upper leg are too tightened up for him to do, like, the usual movement tests to tell if my ‘anterior cruciate ligament’ is messed up.” I slanted him a look to see if he was impressed. He wasn’t, so I went on. “That’s why they had to do the MRI yesterday, which is like being in a coffin, by the way. Dude—did you see the way M.J. just made that cut? Awesome!”

  Coach gave a grunt. “Did you hear a pop when you fell?”

  “Kind of. Mostly all I could hear was everybody screaming.” I nudged him with my crutch. “We won the title—or did you miss that?”

  He finally pulled his little beady browns away from the team and let me see one of his “that’s very cute, Brewster” looks. The shaved head, the bullet eyes, the allergic-to-smiling lips were never that intimidating to me. Not when I considered all the little things he did with his face. I’d caught onto that freshman year, and I kept seeing new ones all the time.

  “You’ve had jelly for a knee ever since,” he said.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t have that much pain until it started to swell, and that didn’t even start until like an hour later.”

  I didn’t add that the doctor had said that was typical for a torn ACL. For once I agreed with my father. We shouldn’t make a bigger “issue” out of it than it was.

  “Anyway, I’m a fast healer,” I said. “I should be able to at least play in the state tournament, even if I have to miss district.”

  “Look, Cass —”

  “Whoa—did you see Emily pull away from Hilary? She is gonna be killer next year. Wait—are you thinking of putting her on first team while I’m out? That’s what I was thinking—”

  Coach put his whistle in his mouth and blew. “All right— layup drill.”

  I watched them form two lines, and for the first time since sixth period started, I ached to be out there. Suicide sprints I could live without, but this was team stuff. I should be in the middle of it, with my practice shorts bagging around my knees like theirs were, wiping my face on my shirt the way they were doing, with my hair, too, all sticking out of its bun like scarecrow parts.

  “Sit, Brewster,” Coach said. “Get that thing elevated.”

  “I can’t see that way, Coach,” I said. “I’m fine—I’ve been sitting all day.”

  “Sit.”

  I did. It was harder to tell if Kara was making her shots now—

  “Look,” Coach said. To his hands. In a very un-Coach-like way that yanked my eyes off the court. “You play this game like it’s been pre-programmed into you. It’s like you could play basketball before you ever set foot on a court.”

  The Frenemy was suddenly there, which was weird, since she almost never followed me into the gym. It was also weird that Coach was laying all these compliments on me.

  “You get every skill the first time I show it to you. I can charge you, hurl a ball at you, guard you like a gorilla, and you handle it without batting an eye.”

  “Um, thanks,” I said.

  “You’re a gifted athlete, Cass, and I’m not gonna let you throw that away.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  “Good.”

  He blasted the whistle and shot up from the bottom bleacher. “All right, let’s step it up!” Sneakers squealed—and so did Kara, out there in her pink high-tops. Coach pulled a folded newspaper from under his clipboard and tossed it at me. “Did you read the article?”

  “Yes.”

  “Read it again.”

  He took off with a sneaker squeal of his own. The Frenemy scraped her quills down my backbone like fingernails on Styro-foam. Okay—what was going on?

  The Colorado Springs Gazette, which had landed lopsided in my lap, was folded to the story Mom had read to me the morning before in the doctor’s office waiting room. BREWSTER LEADS AUSTIN BLUFFS TO COUNTY TITLE, the headline read. Next to it was a picture of
me in midair, swishing the ball into the net. Ten seconds before I crashed and burned. Right now that same picture was hanging from magnets on our refrigerator door—right where my father could point out the errors in form I was displaying. I really didn’t want to read this again.

  But the difference between Dad pointing something out and Coach doing it was like the gap between T-ball and the Colorado Rockies, so I blew out a big puff of air and started in. I was only a sentence into it when I realized Coach had highlighted several things in yellow: “There is a precocious sophistication to Cassidy Brewster’s game. She knows how it’s supposed to be played—with poise, balance, and elegance …”

  Dude, they made me sound like a ballerina. At least it didn’t say for a player so young. I was glad when the sports reporters stopped doing that, although I still didn’t see myself as “poised”—at least not off the court. In every picture I ever saw of myself when I wasn’t playing basketball, my lips were big and out of control, my smile was stupid-sloppy, and I had enough eyebrows for my entire team. Unlike my mother’s, my cheekbones were not chiseled. In the mushiness of my face, I couldn’t even find them. It was a good thing you didn’t have to be Seventeen magazine material like Selena to be an athlete.

  The article continued. “Brewster is an excellent shooter, a precise passer, and a willing team player with an aggressive, attacking style. With natural leadership, she inspires the Austin Bluffs players to well-orchestrated offensive patterns.”

  I turned the paper over on my thighs. The Frenemy parked herself squarely in the middle of my chest. So, what was with Coach loading all this praise on me? He always expected more from me than he did from the rest of the team, but as for pumping me up—usually all he did was tell me not to get a head so big he couldn’t close it in a locker if he had to. I should have basked in this. Instead, it was freaking me out. At the moment, Kara had nothing on me.

  Out on the court, Selena stood outside the paint and netted a nice shot that didn’t even hit the backboard and barely swung her ponytail. Except that she could just as easily have missed it. She should have passed it to Kara, who was in prime position for an easy layup and who needed the practice in faking out a defender—although there wasn’t one, because Emily wasn’t where she was supposed to be. I’d have directed her if I’d been out there. Coach blasted the whistle. Now he was going to, and it wouldn’t be pretty.