I don’t have to wait,
Pedro thought,
I’m finding out already.
It was halftime of the Suns game by now, and Pedro’s bedtime. He pointed the remote at the set, shutting it off, and picked up the bowl of popcorn that the two of them had emptied as they talked.
“You know your dad,” his mom said. “He won’t complain, he’ll just work harder.”
They both headed up the stairs, Pedro thinking that even when his dad wasn’t in the room, he was still there for him. The way his mom had been there for him tonight, more than she even knew.
Because she was right. His dad never whined or complained about anything. And even if Mr. Miller, his old boss, had hurt him, he knew his dad wasn’t going to waste any time feeling sorry for himself.
From now on,
Pedro thought,
neither am I.
By the time he got up to his room, he’d made up his mind about something: His season hadn’t started today.
It was starting tomorrow night when he got to practice.
He was going to make sure one thing hadn’t changed, no matter how much his basketball team had. He was going to make sure that he was still his father’s son.
ELEVEN
If you watched Ned Hancock at school, even watched him closely, you would have thought nothing had changed between him and Pedro.
Pedro didn’t buy it for a second, because everything had changed in the gym, whether anybody else noticed it or not. They weren’t even close to being the one-two punch they used to be, the two players out there who really seemed to read each other’s minds, Pedro being the one kid who was able to see the same things Ned did on a basketball court.
Yet in school, things looked exactly as they always had. Maybe it was because there were more people watching. Pedro was starting to think that Ned was as good at being a phony as he was at sports and everything else.
“You know what’s cool about this election?” Ned asked him in math class on Monday morning.
Mrs. Mahoney had paired them up in the kind of competition she’d sometimes have to keep things interesting. Today she just wanted to see which two-person team could solve a page of problems the fastest.
What’s cool?
Pedro thought.
How about nothing?
“You tell me,” he said.
“It’s like we’re running this long race,” Ned said, “except nobody knows who’s ahead.”
Pedro saw his opening and decided to take it. “Just so long as things are still cool between us, no matter who wins the race.”
Ned looked at Pedro as if he had turned into a problem that needed to be solved. “Why wouldn’t they be? Cool between us, I mean.”
Before Pedro could say anything, Mrs. Mahoney asked if everybody was ready. She was about to start the clock, and the winners got to skip their homework assignments tonight.
“C’mon, let’s do this,” Ned said. “The way we do it on the court.”
What a guy.
That night, Pedro was wearing his new attitude like it was his practice jersey, hustling all over the court, hustling more than he usually did. Like he was trying to make the team all over again.
Getting after it the way Luis Morales’ son was supposed to.
If he was going to come off the bench, he was going to come off it as hard as he could. Once he was out there, he was going to play
his
game—his usual game, his old game—even if that meant having to work around the great Ned Hancock.
Pedro hadn’t meant anything personal when he’d decided to challenge Ned in the election. It was really more of a way for Pedro to challenge himself. And an opportunity to show his mom and dad—his dad, especially—that he believed in all the ideals about America that his dad had been preaching to him his whole life: that America was the capital of possibilities.
The problem wasn’t his ego.
It was Ned’s.
It was Ned who had made the whole thing personal. And Pedro knew it was time to fight back. Big-time.
It was probably why even Joe was looking at him funny that night, as if he didn’t recognize the Pedro who was trying to be everywhere at once, diving for loose balls, even flying in from the outside to crash the boards sometimes.
During a water break, Coach Cory came over and said he couldn’t decide whether this was the old Pedro or a new Pedro.
“The old one,” Pedro said to him quietly. “Maybe just with a new attitude.”
He wanted the ball in his hands on offense again, whether he was playing with Ned or not. He pushed the ball up the court every chance he got, and if his teammates didn’t want to run with him, well, they just got left behind.
A couple of times he threaded the needle on passes—one to Bobby, one to Clarence—when he would have been better off holding the ball and not taking the chance.
Right before the end of their scrimmage, first unit against the second unit, the game tied at nine baskets all, Ned’s team had the ball and a chance to win.
Like last ups in baseball.
Ned had the ball in the right corner and was starting to back in toward the basket. It never mattered whether Ned had his back to the basket or not, because he had his own eyes in the back of his head, same as Steve Nash. All the great passers did.
I have them too,
Pedro thought,
even though I haven’t been using them much lately.
When Ned turned his head this time, Pedro knew exactly what was going to happen next. Just knew.
He could still read the guy’s mind, read him like a book. He knew Ned was going to turn and whip a pass all the way over to the other wing where Jeff Harmon was set up for a wide-open three.
Like Nash the other night.
Pedro was guarding Dave, who’d run down into the opposite corner as a decoy. But Pedro wasn’t worried about Dave now, and left him where he was in the corner as he ran the baseline toward Ned, ran it like a streak of light before anybody realized he was coming up behind Ned Hancock.
Pedro came in behind as Ned took one more dribble, and he slapped the ball away, picked him clean. Then he gathered the ball up before it went out of bounds, took off down the sideline before anybody on the first unit was quick enough to make the transition to defense, and made the easy layup that won the scrimmage for the second unit.
Before the ball was through the net and to the floor, Coach Cory blew his whistle and started clapping his hands, saying, “
That’s
the way you play defense. Uh-
huh
!”
Then he turned to Ned, shrugged and said, “Even
you
got to protect the rock, Mr. Hancock.”
Nobody said a word.
Pedro wasn’t sure everybody was even
breathing.
Even in a nice way, Coach Cory had never called out Ned Hancock.
For anything.
The moment didn’t last, because Coach was never quiet for very long. He told them to shoot around for the last fifteen minutes until pick-up time, and to start thinking about the Sherrill game on Saturday.
Only then did the gym sound like a gym again: balls bouncing, players scattering to find open baskets, the real ones at both ends or the ones on the side.
Everybody seemed to be in motion except Ned.
He was still standing where he’d been when Pedro stole the ball from him, with his arms at his sides, staring at Pedro.
He was supposed to be the most unselfish, un-cocky player in town, but now he was looking at Pedro the same way he had the day he found out Pedro was running for president against him.
Like nobody else was even supposed to be breathing his air.
Like he was showing Pedro the real Ned Hancock again.
This time Pedro stared right back at him, held Ned’s look and held his ground at the same time, let him know that he wasn’t going anywhere.
Pedro looked down the court at Ned Hancock as if to say,
I’m here.
TWELVE
The Knights won again on Saturday, on the road against Sherrill, a town about fifteen minutes away. They had taken the lead in the first quarter and never lost it, though the second unit did let Sherrill come back and tie them up a minute before halftime. But then Bobby hit two shots from the outside, one of them a three-pointer, and everybody on the second unit walked off the court feeling as if they’d done their jobs, pretty much held their place.
Pedro wasn’t great, despite all the good intentions he’d brought with him to Sherrill. A few times, in his determination to start making things happen again, he forced passes and caused turnovers.
He didn’t care. His attitude was that when he saw an opening, he wasn’t going to let it go. He was through playing scared.
In the end, he wound up with more assists than turnovers, including assists on both of Bobby’s baskets. And even though outside shooting remained the weakest part of his game, Pedro had even managed to sink a three-pointer of his own.
For the first time this season, he felt as if he’d helped the team more than he’d hurt it.
Ned, of course, was playing like a total star, at both ends of the court, dominating the game in almost every possible way when he was out there. He wasn’t just making Dave look better today, he was making everybody around him look better, maybe even making the
Knights
look better than they really were. And as soon as he got back out to start the third quarter, the Knights’ lead went from five points to ten in what seemed like a blink.
With five minutes to go in the quarter, Coach Cory took out Dave and put Pedro in at the point. So this was different than the second half of the Camden game, when Pedro and Ned had only played together during what the announcers loved to call “garbage time” at the end of blowout NBA games.
This was real ball now. Even though they still had a nice cushion, Coach Cory told them during a time-out to “put these suckers away.”
For a few minutes, the five on the court were last year’s starting lineup from the fifth-grade team: Pedro, Ned, Joe, Jamal, and Bobby. Maybe things were getting back to normal after all. That’s what Pedro thought, mostly because that’s what he wanted to believe.
Badly.
And for those last few minutes of the third quarter, it was like they were all in sync again, sharing the ball, keeping their lead even though Sherrill’s best player, a kid named Dwan, who was built like a football tight end but had a sweet shooting touch from the outside, was doing his best to keep his team in the game.
The Knights were in charge, though, and had been in charge for most of the game. Everybody in Sherrill’s tiny, old-fashioned middle school gym knew it.
They only had a few set plays, with a couple of options for each one. And while most of them technically started with the point guard making the first pass, the plays
really
started with the point forward.
Ned.
So even with Dwan staying hot, the Sherrill Sonics never pulled closer than eight points. And everyone on the court knew that Ned would never let them pull closer than that.
Maybe that was why he decided it was safe to start playing puppet master again with a minute to go in the quarter.
Sherrill had gone into a zone by then. Pedro had the ball up on top, Ned over on the right wing and Bobby on the left. When the Knights went to a 3-2 offense like this, Joe and Jamal would take turns coming out from under the basket, setting up at the foul line.
They were working a little clock now, passing the ball around, all five of them getting touches, all five knowing that Coach Cory was loving life as they did, especially because they hadn’t practiced much against a zone.
The ball was a blur now, moving that fast, from Pedro to Ned and then back to Pedro and into the post and back out and over to Bobby and then back around the horn.
Finally, when Ned was alone on the right side, everybody else having cleared out, he clapped his hands.
Pedro knew what that meant from last season. It wasn’t a designed play, just one he and Ned Hancock used to run all the time. Just the two of them. Usually when you clapped your hands on offense, it meant you wanted the ball. Only Pedro knew Ned didn’t want it on the wing. Pedro was supposed to fake a two-hand pass, and as soon as he did, Ned would cut for the basket. Even against a zone it would work like a charm. Most times the defense on Ned’s side—having watched them pass the ball around on the outside—would get caught flat-footed and Ned would get an easy two.
Pedro faked the pass, like he always had in the past.
Ned took a step toward the basket.
As soon as he did, Pedro threw the ball where he knew Ned was going to be, because he had always been there in the past.
Only Ned stopped, like a car jamming on the brakes.
It was too late for Pedro to stop. He was fully committed by then, so he threw the ball over the defense, over everybody, out of bounds, feeling as if he’d thrown it all the way out of the gym.
Pedro looked over to the bench and saw Coach Cory shake his head. Then he looked at the clock right next to Coach at the scorers’ table and saw there were only twenty-five seconds left in the quarter.
So Pedro tried to set a new world’s record for hustling back on defense. As he did, he heard Sherrill’s coach call for one last shot.
Pedro had only one game plan then: Get up on his guy, get one stop, and get to the bench.
Sherrill worked the ball on the outside now until there were fifteen seconds left.
Then Pedro heard their coach yell, “
Go!
”
They had set up their own two-man game on the right side: Pedro’s guy and Ned’s guy, Dwan.
Pedro’s guy dribbled over to the wing. Pedro gave a quick look over his shoulder, saw that Dwan had stayed home for now. The Sonics had run this play a few times already. Dwan would make a move out of the corner as if coming out for a pick-and-roll. But then he’d plant and take off for the basket, like a classic back-door cut. If he wasn’t open for a layup, he’d come all the way around to the other side and somebody would pick for him over there, and he’d put up another one from the outside.