Tournaments, Cocoa & One Wrong Move Page 3

  I hiked myself up and ignored the throb in my knee as I crutched myself out onto the court.

  “All right, look here,” he was already saying to the tops of their heads as they all bent over at the waist, breathing like locomotives. “We’re gettin’ higher in the competition, and the skills are gonna even out. It’s not about who can shoot now—” He pointed a look at Selena until her face came up. “It’s about pride, courage, and a willingness to put your body in harm’s way. I’m talkin’ character—and toughness. I want to see some Cassidy Brewster aggression out here—because she isn’t gonna be there to bridge the gap.”

  Backs straightened and gazes shook themselves out to land on me. Kara looked like somebody had just slapped her.

  “Is she out for the rest of the games?” Hilary said.

  Coach didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself. I shook my head, but everybody suddenly seemed to be staring at my knee in horror, as if a possible torn ACL were a contagious disease.

  “We don’t know that yet!” I said.

  “The point is, you have to be able to do this with her or without her, you get me?” Coach stared them all down until heads bobbed. “All right, I want to see some primal aggression out there. Emily—stop guarding like you’re tending a house plant. Selena—this is not a one-woman show.”

  He attacked the whistle again and they jolted into action—all except Kara, who was patting her pockets like she was looking for her cell phone so she could text me. I wanted to mouth to her that it was okay, but Coach was nodding me toward the bleachers, a place my crutches didn’t want to take me.

  “The state tournament’s not for two weeks,” I said to him as the tennis shoes squealed behind us. “I’ll be ready to play by then—right?”

  He planted one hand on the waistband of his baggy sweats and rubbed his nose fiercely with the other. It was his “why are you arguing with me right now?” look, but I didn’t care.

  “I’ll do whatever it takes—”

  “You said you weren’t planning to throw your career away.”

  “Right, so —”

  “To me that means that if being out for the rest of the season means you can play for the rest of your life, you’ll make the right choice.”

  The Frenemy started a full-out attack. “So that means missing all the postseason games? Even All-State—if I made it?”

  “There was no ‘if’ about that—”

  “Was?” I said.

  Coach jerked his chin at the newspaper I’d left on the bottom bleacher. “I’m not the only one who sees what you’re capable of. And I’m not going to let you risk a shot at the WNBA for a high school tournament.”

  “But it’s not just about me!” I said. “What about the team?”

  “You don’t think they can pull it off without you, Brewster?”

  No, I didn’t. And from the way he sent his gaze out over the court, he didn’t either. We five knew where each player was supposed to be without having to look. We had our own private hand signals. We even knew who was due for PMS when.

  “We’re a team,” I said. “We’re the freakin’ UN—”

  “See what the doctor says.” He put up his hand, and then he turned again to the court. I knew that look. He was done.

  But I wasn’t. I so wasn’t.

  *

  Sixth period was called Basketball Conditioning, and it satisfied our PE requirement. The real practice was after school, and I had to miss it that day because Dad was picking me up to go to the doctor. I watched for him through the snow-flecked glass from inside the front door of the school so he wouldn’t come into the gym. There was always something about seeing him with Coach that made Dad seem like even more of a Doberman pinscher than usual.

  Don’t get me wrong, Coach was intense too. He could yell until his veins popped up like blue tubes under his neck skin. I guess he tended more toward a rottweiler. But for him it was like, “Here’s what you’re not doing. Now go do it and later we’ll have a pizza.” Dad never yelled—or offered rewards of food. With him it was like—

  It was like me getting into the car that afternoon and him starting in.

  “How’s the pain level?” he said.

  “Maybe four,” I said.

  “So, better than this morning.”

  No, but I didn’t feel like hearing a lecture on what I must have done wrong to drive it up to its current six. I had run out of Motrin before lunch.

  He switched on the wipers to slap away the flakes from yet another snowstorm that had blown in just to annoy him—or so you would have thought from the trench between his eyebrows.

  “I looked it up online, Cass,” he said. “If this is a torn ligament, you can beat it with physical therapy. I’ve already researched a couple of people to interview. One guy’s in Denver, but if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes.”

  He reached over and squeezed my good knee, and I felt a lump come up in my throat. He really could be decent at times—

  “But here’s the thing—it’s like I was trying to tell you Tuesday night. Being a great athlete, not just a good one, is about going beyond exhaustion. It’s about being the intimidator—not the intimidated. You can’t let this thing beat you. You’re going to have to get in there and fight it—and that means not shrinking from the pain.”

  As usual, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say. But if I didn’t say something—

  “Are you hearing me at all? Because I’m not saying this for my own benefit.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He fired up the defroster with an impatient flick of his wrist. “That’s it? Just ‘yes’?”

  “I’ll do whatever it takes,” I said. Just to get you off my back.

  And yet that wasn’t entirely true. I would do it because I couldn’t not do it. I didn’t just play basketball for my father, although he was the one who got me started when he put the hoop and backboard up on the front of the garage for my brother. Aaron never touched it, and my mother thought it was an eyesore, but the first time I dribbled up to it and dropped a ball through that hole, I was hooked.

  I was ten years old.

  There wasn’t a team for my age in Colorado Springs at the time. Dad practically had to go to the mayor to get me on the one for eleven-year-olds, and by then I was dribbling backwards, forwards, sideways—making seventy percent of my free throws, scoring from eight feet out—and guarding my six-foot-five father.

  I was five foot four then, and I hadn’t even hit my growth spurt yet. But I wasn’t all arms and legs like those stick figures you draw when you’re three, with the limbs coming straight out of the head. That was kind of how the other players looked.

  I played center my first year on the club team. It was, literally, a whole different ball game playing with an entire team, as opposed to scoring against my dad and anybody else he could drag onto our driveway. But I picked it up fast, and any thought I ever had about any other sport faded in the face of my love affair with that orange leather ball.

  The team only practiced three days a week and had one game a week, but I was out there under my own net every morning before school, every night after, and most weekends. I heard my mother tell my father I needed more balance in my life. My father told her I was basically an athletic prodigy. Aaron said I was messed up in the head. All I knew was that when I was going for a rebound or faking out a defender, the Frenemy didn’t exist. That had to mean it was what I was meant to do—which was what they were always talking about in church. Finding God’s purpose for your life. I had mine.

  So, no, my dad didn’t make me play basketball, and he wasn’t going to have to force me to do physical therapy. No— what he did was squeeze the joy out of it.

  *

  Of course, there wasn’t much joy to be squeezed out of an orthopedic surgeon’s office. Not when the doctor looked you right in the face and said, “The news isn’t good, Cassidy. You’ve definitely torn your ACL.”

  I blinked at him, took in his
perfectly round glasses and his fuzzy red-blond hair that thinned over the top of his head, and wondered if he’d ever loved a sport. I couldn’t imagine it, or he wouldn’t have said it, like, “Your season’s over. Your teams doomed. Tough break.”

  “How long will it take to heal?” I said.

  “It won’t.” Dr. Horton folded his arms and leaned against the counter. “Once it tears it has to be reconstructed.”

  “Physical therapy can do that?”

  “No—surgery does that. Physical therapy teaches you how to walk again afterward.”

  He unfolded one arm to point to a wall poster of a bunch of muscles crisscrossing each other and went into a long explanation of how the anterior cruciate ligament works and what it controls—while I fought to keep the Frenemy from hurling me to the floor in a fetal position.

  Surgery? Somebody might have mentioned that in the last two days, but I hadn’t heard it. All I heard was how hard I was going to have to work to get back in the game, how I was going to have to intimidate the pain and not let it beat me. How had I missed the part about being cut open on an operating table?

  “I have to have surgery?” I said into the babble that was still going on over the poster I didn’t care about.

  “It can be treated non-operatively,” Dad said.

  “Sure,” Dr. Horton said. “But you’d never be able to participate in sports again like you do now. Even with intensive physical therapy, if you play with an unstable knee, the damage to the meniscus and the articular cartilage could lead to severe arthritis and destroy your knee joint at a young age. You’d be looking at several knee replacements in your adult life.”

  He didn’t need to tell me all that. He had me back at “you’d never be able to participate in sports again like you do now.” I was already nodding, though with a lump the size of a softball in my throat.

  “It’s not going to be a big issue, Cass,” Dad said. “So don’t start stressing.”

  Dr. Horton shook his head. “Actually, it is a big surgery. We’re talking about completely rebuilding a ligament with—”

  “Okay,” I said. “When can we do it?”

  He nodded toward my exposed knee, whose cap was still buried under puffiness. “Not until the swelling is resolved, which could be two to four weeks, maybe longer.”

  “Weeks?” I said. That would put us right in the middle of the state tournament. If I couldn’t play, I at least had to be there to help on the sidelines. No way I could wait that long.

  “You’re going to have to have better range of motion before we go in,” the doctor was saying, “and those thigh muscles have to be firing well. That’s not going to happen with this swelling.”

  The trench between Dad’s eyebrows had turned into a canyon. “Can you explain to me how this happened to an athlete in peak condition?”

  “Perturbation.”

  Oh. That cleared it up.

  Dr. Horton turned to me. “Somehow you were thrown off balance the instant just before the rupture.”

  “So you’re saying she landed wrong,” Dad said.

  Naturally it would be my fault.

  “It’s like stepping off a curb awkwardly because you’ve been jostled,” the doctor said, demonstrating with his hands, “only at full speed and force. Your foot didn’t hit the floor the way you planned, did it?”

  “It didn’t hit the way it usually does,” I said. I would rather have talked about cutting into my kneecap with a scalpel. This conversation was going to give my father endless stuff to lecture me about before we even got to the car.

  “If, for instance, you had your plant leg in front with your knee locked, the way you guarded it kept you from flexing it, and more than likely you came down flat-footed. It’s a classic situation—happens to girls in basketball and soccer all the time, no matter what kind of shape they’re in.”

  Dr. Horton looked at Dad, but my father was calculating my leg with his eyes. Maybe I could catch a bus home.

  *

  As it turned out, the Frenemy kept me from hearing most of what Dad said on the ride to our house. The snowstorm also kept him from saying everything he wanted to, I was sure. So while he scowled at the windshield and crawled us through traffic, I tried to breathe through the anxiety without sounding like I was hyperventilating. It was already my own careless fault that I’d gotten hurt—to paraphrase my father. I didn’t want to add to that by “starting to stress” over this surgery that just wasn’t a “big issue,” no matter what that specialist with the medical degree said.

  Besides, Aaron’s Saturn was parked in the driveway when we got there. Dad was the least of my worries when my brother was around. Maybe they’d get into it about the wedding or something and I could escape to my room.

  I thought I was in luck. Gretchen was setting the table in our kitchen, and Aaron was opening containers of takeout Chinese, and there was a candle burning on the counter. They obviously wanted something badly from Dad, and they were more likely to get it with me out of the way.

  I put the crutches into high gear and was swinging through the kitchen when Gretchen said, “Where are you going, Cassidy? We thought we’d have a family dinner.”

  “Mom’s not here,” I said, stupidly. Mom was never there for dinner. She was getting ready to tell all of Colorado Springs that it was snowing again.

  “Eat with us, okay?” she said. “And then you can go do whatever.”

  She had her hair all bunched up in her hand, ready to let it drop to her shoulders in that thing she did, and her very round, very liquid gray eyes did look sincere. This was the second time she’d acted like I might actually count. I didn’t feel that much like eating, but I nodded and parked my crutches and sat at the table.

  “We picked up brown rice, white rice, and fried rice because we didn’t know what everybody would want,” Gretchen said.

  I forced myself not to roll my eyes. “You’ll want the brown, of course,” I said to Aaron. “And could you pass the fried to Dad?”

  I smiled sweetly.

  Gretchen stared at Aaron. “Why didn’t you know that?”

  I didn’t tell her that it was signature Aaron not to know what anybody in his family liked except himself. She’d figure that out soon enough.

  “You were right, Gretch,” Dad said.

  “About?”

  “Cass’s knee.”

  “ACL?”

  He nodded, his mouth as grim as Oscar the Grouch. “We’re looking at surgery and physical therapy. But she’s never been one to back away from a challenge, so …”

  He nodded hard enough to give himself whiplash and reached for the moo goo gai pan. I hated it when he talked about me like I wasn’t even in the room. And when he referred to “we” when it was actually “me” he was dissecting. And when he—

  “So you really messed it up,” Aaron said. To me. “How much physical therapy are we talking about?”

  Gretchen pondered a piece of cashew chicken poised between her chopsticks. “Probably six to nine months. Depends on how extensive the surgery is.”

  “I don’t know about ‘extensive’—but I can tell you right now it’s going to be ‘expensive.’ Great.” Aaron tossed his own chopsticks on the plate.

  “What’s ‘great’?” I said.

  Gretchen put her hand on his arm.

  “What?” I said.

  “This is probably going to mess up you getting a scholarship too.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “How much more do you think you can squeeze out of Mom and Dad before you’re done?”

  “Yeah, that was my plan—to hurt myself so I could take my parents down financially. Are you serious?”

  Gretchen was wringing Aaron’s arm by now, but I could have told her it wasn’t going to stop him. He and I had been fighting practically since the day I came into the world and challenged his role as the anointed one. Even in photographs of us together when I was an infant, it looks like he’s thinking, “I don’t want my picture taken with her. She�
��s messing it up.” In his view, I had been messing it up ever since.

  Gretchen raised her hand. “Can I say something?”

  “Absolutely,” Dad said.

  She put her fingers around my arm this time. “Athletes come back from ACL injuries all the time. And just to keep it in perspective, there’s no reason why you couldn’t get an academic scholarship. Aaron says you’re bright.”

  Aaron stopped in mid-bite. “Just for the record, I never said that. I said she takes honors and AP classes, and in this family it’s not like she has a choice. No offense, Dad.”

  “None taken. You’re absolutely right.”

  “Yeah, well, you can’t get a scholarship for physical therapy. And insurance only covers, what, eighty percent? Over a nine-month period, that’s got to run you into the tens of thousands—”

  “It’s not like it’s coming out of your pocket.” I had long since abandoned my chopsticks, my plate, and my appetite and was pushing myself away from the table.

  “Yeah, Cassidy, it is.” Aaron’s eyes snapped over to Dad. “You want to tell her or you want me to?”

  “I don’t want anybody to tell me,” I said. “I’d rather go do AP Geometry than hear it, actually.” I seized my crutches and then glanced at my father. “May I be excused from the table?”

  Dad waved me off while Aaron squinted at me. Gretchen seemed to be looking around for an arm she hadn’t squeezed yet.

  “I want her focused,” I heard my father say as I hurled myself through the family room. “I’ll deal with this other thing with you privately.”

  “This ‘other thing’?” Aaron said.

  Gretchen must have wrung the lifeblood out of his wrist because I didn’t hear anything else, except my almost-slam of the door to my room. It was the closest I was allowed to get to a door-related expression of anger in our house. The fact that my knee wouldn’t even let me flop into my green fake-leather beanbag chair just made me madder.