Eliza went straight upstairs and in less than a minute, Billy could hear her talking away on her cell phone, probably getting ready to instant-message all her other friends.
“Feel like watching a game with me?” Billy said to Ben.
But Ben shook his head and said he was going to finish watching a movie on his computer, then went upstairs to his own room and shut the door, the way he had pretty much every single night since their dad had left.
Billy poked his head into the dining room, where his mom was working away at her computer, papers spread out all around her on the dining room table.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey, pal, how’d it go?”
“Fine.”
“Did your brother eat?”
“Half his burger.”
His mom said, “Better than nothing.” Then she said, “I’m almost done here.” Billy said it was all good, there was a game he wanted to watch.
“When isn’t there?” she said, and went back to work.
Billy went into the den, turned on the TV, found the Suns-Cavaliers. It had just started, which meant he could probably watch the whole first half before bed. The first commercial, he snuck into the kitchen and grabbed a bag of Doritos and a small bottle of Gatorade, even though it was way past what his mom called “the junk-food deadline.” Then he came back and watched Lenny’s man, LeBron, do things with the basketball the announcers said only Michael Jordan had ever done at the same age.
That always annoyed Billy’s dad, every time they did that during a Cavs game, because he’d point out that kids like Billy had never even seen Michael Jordan
play.
This had always been the time of night, the last hour before bed, when Billy and his dad would sit on the couch together in this room and watch games together. His dad would do a better job announcing the game than the real announcers did.
But not tonight.
His dad wasn’t there.
Billy had started playing in the Rec League when he was seven. So this was his fourth year playing for his dad, who was the only coach he’d ever had.
Lenny’s dad was the assistant coach this year, but he’d only signed on so that Billy and Lenny could play on the same team. Under the rules of the Y, you could play on the team that your dad coached, and each team could have two coaches.
Some dads only coached together so they could put two star players together—it didn’t matter to them whether the kids were friends or not. But Joe Raynor and Pete DiNardo had known each other since
they
were kids, and Billy and Lenny were best buds, so the whole thing worked out great for everybody, especially Mr. DiNardo, who only had to come to the games and watch from the bench.
The Magic was Joe Raynor’s team, the best one he’d had since he’d started coaching Billy, the best one by far. And he’d made it clear since their very first practice, from the first Wednesday night in the gym at West School, that they were all supposed to have one goal: Win the league championship.
It was something he and Billy had never done together.
They had lost twice in the semifinals, twice in the finals. Last year they were down one point with five seconds left when Billy had gotten fouled and sent to the free throw line to shoot two free throws.
If Billy had made both, his team—known as the Blue Devils last year—would have been ahead by a point and probably would have won the game and the championship of the eight- and nine-year-old division.
He missed them both.
The first one he shot way too hard, even as he heard his dad yelling at him to relax from the bench. It bounced off the backboard and didn’t even hit the rim.
He still had one to tie.
Billy bounced the ball five times like he always did, because his dad had taught him to always follow a routine when you shot free throws. He took a deep breath and shot the second one much better, got that good feeling you get when you think you’ve put just the right spin on the ball.
But it was a little too long. The ball caught the back of the rim and then hit the front of the rim and hung there, like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted the game to be tied or not, like it was deciding whether the Blue Devils or the Huskies should win the championship.
It decided on the Huskies.
Billy stared at the rim afterward and felt worse than he ever had about sports, felt the kind of sad that you felt on the last day of summer vacation.
Billy had never forgotten that day, not just because he missed both free throws, but because of the way his dad took the loss, even though he told Billy and everybody else on the Blue Devils how proud he was of them afterward.
He’d told Billy the same thing all the way home, how proud he was of him, how the Blue Devils wouldn’t even have been in a position to win the game if Billy hadn’t shot the lights out of the basket all day.
But when they did get home, his father had gone into his study, what he called his trophy room—“We’re going to add one more to the collection today,” he’d said before they left to play the Huskies—and closed the door. He spent the rest of the day behind that closed door, alone.
Now this season, as the Magic had won their first six games, he kept talking to Billy about “unfinished business.”
Billy wanted to win the championship this year as much as anybody. More than anything, he wanted to somehow get the chance to make the two free throws he’d missed last year.
It was just that he’d never thought of basketball as any kind of business.
After the Magic won their next game, making it 7-0 for the season, Billy’s dad still said he was shooting too much, told him on the way home—Billy’s home, not his dad’s anymore—that the Magic should have won more easily than they did.
Billy just kept agreeing with him, nodding sometimes, saying “yes, dad” sometimes, saying he would keep working on his passing, that he’d do better next week.
Not because he believed what he was saying or actually did think he’d shot too much today. Just because he didn’t want this to be another day when he got out of the car feeling like they’d lost instead of won.
“I know I ask a lot of you,” his dad said.
You’re not kidding, Billy thought.
“I’m asking you to be a big guy in basketball the same way I want you to do that with your brother,” his dad said.
“Ben’s fine,” Billy said. “I think he’s just getting himself ready for his big recital.”
Billy didn’t know when Ben’s recital was exactly, just that it was around the time the basketball season ended. Ben had said something one time about how they were both going to be in the play-offs at the same time, just in different things.
“You two ever talk about your mom and me?”
“No.”
“I don’t talk with him the way I talk with you,” his dad said. “But he’s good?”
“Dad, he’s Ben, okay? You know what Mom thinks about him playing the piano. He lets the piano talk for him.”
“I wish sometimes you worked as hard at basketball as Ben does at piano.”
They were in front of the house now, the car shut off. That wasn’t good.
It meant they weren’t done.
“I do work,” Billy said. “You see me . . . or used to see me . . . in the driveway.”
“I’m talking about working at being a team player.” The car wasn’t going anywhere, but Billy saw him still gripping the wheel with both hands, hard. “There were a bunch of times today when it should have been pass first with you. But it’s always pass last. As in last resort.”
Billy felt himself biting his lower lip to keep himself from getting mad. It seemed like it hardly took anything these days for that to happen. Or for his dad to get mad at him.
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is,” his dad said. “And I can’t let you get away with it. If the coach’s son is playing by his own rules, the other guys don’t respect him, and they don’t respect the coach.”
Billy said, “The guys on the team like playing with me.”
“You sure about that?”
“You sure they like playing for you?” Billy said.
Sometimes keeping things inside was harder than saying them.
“This isn’t about me!” his dad said, his voice sounding so loud in the front seat it was like he’d turned on the radio all of a sudden. Turned it on and turned it up. “This is about being a team, which means everybody being a team player. Starting with you.”
“How bad can we be at being team players if we haven’t lost a game yet?” Billy said.
“Trust me,” his dad said, “we’re going to if you don’t get with the program.”
Billy opened the door on his side now. “I didn’t know it was a program,” Billy said. “I thought it was just a game.”
He ran for the house, ran as fast as he could, like he was in a game of tag and the house was safe.
SIX
When the weather was warm enough, even in the winter, recess at West School was outside, in the period right before lunch. They were outside now on Tuesday morning because it felt like a spring day, even though spring was still more than a few weeks away.
Everybody wanted to go outside even when it was colder than
Ice Age
. When you were in school, you were always looking to get outside, even if it was just for a fire drill.
Billy was in fifth grade at West, Ben was in fourth. Lenny was in sixth, his last year at West before middle school at Hayground. That’s the way it worked in their town, you moved up in seventh grade.
They all had the same recess. Billy and Lenny and their friends had been playing four-square for a while, with lots of stops and starts, mostly because Lenny had rules for four-square that only he could understand.
When they finished, Billy said to Lenny, “Do you think I shoot too much?”
Lenny grinned. “It’s pretty much the object of the game in four-square, dude. Keep serving it up.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Hey,” Lenny said. “Everybody in basketball shoots too much sometimes.”
“Do you think I shoot a
lot
too much?”
“Nah,” he said. “You only do that when you’re feelin’ it. And when you’re feelin’ it in hoops, it’s like a rule that you gotta keep puttin’ it up.”
He should have known better than to ask Lenny DiNardo. Lenny was always going to take his side, no matter what. “I’ve got your back even when you’re facing me” was the way Lenny liked to put it.
At least somebody still had his back these days.
It was when they started cutting across the yard to the basketball court after four-square that they saw Zeke Mills, the worst guy in the whole school, pulling Ben Raynor’s hoodie over his head and spinning Ben around like they were playing blindman’s bluff.
He was known in fifth grade as Zeke the Geek, though never to his face.
His real first name was Zechariah. And he was the biggest bully at West.
Zeke the Geek didn’t just terrorize kids in the fifth grade, he did it to kids in
all
the grades.
“C’mon,” Billy said to Lenny now, pulling him along, toward where Zeke and Ben were near the playground monkey bars.
“Aw, dude,” Lenny said, making “dude” sound like the saddest word in the world, the way he could sometimes. “I want to make it to seventh grade alive.”
Billy didn’t say anything back because he didn’t have time, because he was already running ahead of Lenny. He knew Zeke never needed a good reason to pick on someone. Sometimes all you had to do was make eye contact with him. Or just be one spot ahead of him in the lunch line in the cafeteria.
Billy didn’t care why it was happening now, just that it was happening to his brother.
Ben was on the ground when Billy got to him, having fallen over when Zeke spun him around. He was trying in vain to get his head out from under his sweatshirt so he could see.
Billy gave a quick look around, hoping a teacher might be somewhere in the area. But the closest one was Mrs. Ray, back over by the four-square court.
Zeke and the only two friends he had, the Ratner twins, were laughing at Ben as he kept getting more and more tangled in his sweatshirt.
“When you can dress yourself,” Zeke said to Ben, “then you can sing us a song.”
The Ratner twins started laughing all over again, as if a dumb remark like that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
“Ben, it’s me,” Billy said as he reached down and untangled Ben’s hood. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Ben said.
“Why don’t you go find your buds?” Billy said, grabbing him by his arm and pulling him up, the way you did when a guy got knocked down in basketball.
“Hold on, Raynor,” Zeke said to Billy. “Not till he sings me a song.” Zeke turned to the Ratner twins, whose faces always reminded Billy of pug dogs, and said, “A rap-type song maybe. So’s I don’t have to rap him again.”
All three of them laughed again. Billy had always thought the Ratner twins were dumber than dirt, anyway.
“He doesn’t sing, Zeke,” Billy said. “He plays the piano. Even you know that.”
“Was I talking to you?” Zeke said.
Zeke was looking at Billy like a fly he was about to swat.
“I thought you were,” Billy said. “My mistake.”
Lenny said, “C’mon, Zeke. This is no biggie. Why don’t you just drop it?”
Zeke said to Lenny, “Was I talking to
you
DiNerdo?”
“Good one, Zeke, no kidding,” Billy said. “You’ve got a real way with words.”
It was a miracle, Billy thought, though probably not the kind you heard about in church, that he’d managed to be at West School as long as he had and never officially had a beef with this jerk.
But Billy knew he had one now.
Behind Zeke and the Ratner twins he could see a small crowd forming, though it didn’t seem to have attracted the attention of Mrs. Ray or the other teachers in the yard.
The one time he needed a teacher, and he couldn’t find one.