Rapture Practice (10 page)

“I’ll be there right after I get the lead in the play.”

“Break a leg,” she says.

This
is why I love Daphne. She’s never been in a play, but
she knows you don’t say “good luck” before a theater performance. She
gets it
. I smile all the way down the hall to the drama room door.

“How’d your audition go?”

Daphne and I are sitting in the bleachers watching Tri-City’s basketball team and cheerleaders warm up.

“It went well,” I say, but Daphne’s not buying it.

“
Well
?” she asks. “It went ‘
well
’?”

I can’t contain my smile. “I nailed it,” I whisper.

“That’s more like it. Which role do you want?”

“It’s the supporting male lead,” I say. “He’s got all of the funny lines. Miss Tyler was laughing out loud every time I read.”

“Of course she was.” Daphne smiles. “When does the cast list go up?”

“Monday morning.”

A stray basketball flies toward where we’re sitting. I catch it on a bounce and toss it back to a Tri-City player who has bounded over to fetch it. He is tall and muscular, with curly brown hair.

“Nice pass,” says Daphne. “You know, you really could’ve been a basketball star. How tall are you now?”

“Six two,” I say. “And no, I could not have been a basketball star. You remember why I quit.”

“Oh, right.” She laughs. “Didn’t you make a layup for the wrong team?”

“Worse. I
missed
a layup for the wrong team.” I am laughing, too. “And that was
after
I went to basketball camp that summer and won the Hustle Award.”

Daphne can barely talk, gasping with her special brand of quiet laughter. “Wait. The
Hustle Award
? Is that like Most Improved Player or something?”

“No, Daphne. It is
not
like Most Improved Player. Most Improved Player is a separate award, an entirely different thing. The handsome plaque
I
received was for the player who tried the hardest
without
improving.”

It feels good to laugh with Daphne about this. Two years ago it was no laughing matter. I hated basketball because I wasn’t good at it. Dad started for his college team and has coached at the college off an on. I certainly inherited his genes, but his knack for and love of the game are sorely missing from my makeup. We’ve always had a hoop in the driveway, and Josh and Miriam are naturals.

They
love
it.

They
get it
.

I don’t.

I have never liked the game enough to practice. I like playing the piano in the family room more than I do one-on-one in the driveway, and after I didn’t make the junior high team that fall in eighth grade, I was relegated to the intramural B team. In our first intramural game someone passed me the
ball, and I went for a layup at the A team’s basket. Luckily—or embarrassingly—I missed. I was mortified.

That night I told my dad, “I don’t understand why millions of people do this for fun.”

He laughed and said, “You know I don’t care if you play basketball.”

“Really?” I asked. “Because I’d so much rather play the piano.”

“Aaron,” he said, “I’m so proud of you. You have so many talents. If you don’t want to play basketball, you don’t have to. Besides, music is the only thing that the Bible says for sure will be in heaven. Spend your time practicing the piano. You’ll be good at that for all eternity.”

I watch the guy from Tri-City with the curly hair go up for a three-point jump shot. His form is perfect.
Swish.
Nothin’ but net.

“
That’s
what a star basketball player looks like,” I tell Daphne, but she is watching the Tri-City cheerleaders rehearse their halftime routine and pyramid.

“Their skirts are so
long
….” her voice trails off.

“Nearly tea-length,” I say.

Tri-City Christian is run by a big independent Baptist church and is well known for superconservative rules and a strict dress code. The mascot is the Crusader, a knight with plumes coming out of his helmet. Even when the Tri-City cheerleaders jump, their knees stay covered. It fits somehow, these long skirts on the Crusader women. It seems almost chivalrous, as if when they leave the basketball court, they’ll
return to a royal court waiting for them somewhere in Blue Springs, a suburb to the east of the Kingdom of Kansas City.

“How can they even jump in those things?” Daphne asks. “I’d get my foot hung in the hem and break my neck.”

“It’s baffling,” I agree. “Like they’re cheerleaders from
Little House on the Prairie
.”

“Whatever. It’s nice that they have a couple of black guys on their basketball team. At least it adds some color to the contest.”

“Red and gold isn’t enough for you?” I ask, nodding at the Native American warrior painted on the floor of our gym.

“No, Aaron, it’s not,” she says with a smile. “And frankly, I think our mascot may be a little bit racist.”

“It could be worse,” I say. “At least we’re not the Redskins.”

“I suppose you’re right.” She checks her watch. “Well, I should go greet the Tri-City squad.”

“Don’t you mean ‘Tri-
Pity
’?” I ask with a smirk. Everyone has been referring to our rivals with this nickname all week in anticipation of the game.

Daphne rolls her eyes. “Be nice,” she says. Then she winks at me and walks toward the corner of the gym to say hello to the girls whose knees are covered by purple and gold.

Every so often a family from Tri-City will migrate to Blue Ridge. They come bearing horror stories: Girls have to wear culottes during PE class, and bring their junior/senior
banquet dresses in to have them approved by a female teacher for “modesty” before the big night. The guys tell stories about getting into serious trouble for going to see movies or listening to the wrong music, benched from their sports games, kicked out of the musical groups and other extracurricular activities.

I only know a couple of people who go to school there, acquaintances from a church camp I’ve attended; but because Dad trains lots of Christian schoolteachers at the Bible college, he knows a lot of people on staff at Tri-City. He’s friends with the principal and even speaks in their chapel services every now and then. Dad tends to defend the rules and the administration at Tri-City.

“They are a little strict about some things,” he says, “but their kids sure have an excellent testimony for Christ. They know how to train students who have a sweet spirit about the things of the Lord.”

Maybe they do, but the students who immigrate to Blue Ridge all have a special bond: the camaraderie of people who have survived something together. You never hear about a family pulling their kids out of Blue Ridge and sending them to Tri-City. It’s always the other way around, and we’re proud to keep it that way.

A game against Tri-City sets everyone here at Blue Ridge on edge—even a lot of the parents who attend. None of the adults say it out loud, but it feels like there’s this attitude in the air—that because Tri-City has stricter rules and longer skirts, they must think they’re better than we are somehow.
It’s almost as if they’re the Crusaders of old, storming Jerusalem to bring truth to the infidels by force.

The rivalry is fierce, and tonight is no exception. The metal bleachers lining both sides of the gymnasium seem to hum with an electric current, and the fans on both sides are on their feet most of the time.

Tri-City has twin guards, and the guy I tossed the ball to before the game is their starting center. I find myself watching him as he sinks shot after shot. He never seems to lose his cool, no matter how physical the fouls get. He nails a final jumper at halftime to tie the game, and as I play “Louie Louie” on my clarinet with the pep band, he looks over at us on the stage that stretches across one end of the gymnasium.

A slow smirk spreads across his face. He shakes his head, then turns and jogs into the visitors’ locker room with the rest of his team. He is so calm and collected it’s almost unnerving—like he has prior knowledge of a secret weapon that will ensure their success. In that moment, I know somehow that we will lose, and I am correct. At the final buzzer, Blue Ridge is down by two.

While I am putting away my clarinet and Dan Krantz is packing up his trumpet, Dan sees the tall, curly-haired center zipping his warm-up jacket and heading toward the door and their team’s bus in the parking lot. As the player passes us, Dan slams his trumpet case and speaks loudly enough so the guy will hear him.

“These Tri-
Pity
kids,” he says in disgust. “They think they’re so much better than us.”

The guy from the other team stops, and slowly turns around. He looks at Dan, then at me.

I glance up at the scoreboard. “Tonight, they
were
better than us.”

Dan huffs and jumps off the stage into the throng in the gym, as the Tri-City center catches my eye, and nods. It’s a simple
thank you
, a nod of respect. A silent understanding passes between us. This is the camaraderie of acknowledgment—of surviving an awkward moment, of bearing witness.

I didn’t get to choose the school I attend. My parents prayed for guidance, then announced God had given them peace about where to enroll all of us the fall of my seventh-grade year. I’ll bet this guy from Tri-City didn’t choose his school, either. He turns to leave, and I watch him push through the door into the parking lot. As he slips out of sight, I feel genuinely sorry for him and very fortunate, all at once.

Monday morning, during second period, Miss Tyler posts the cast list on her classroom door. There’s a crowd of upperclassmen in front of us by the time Daphne and I get all the way down the hall. Luckily, I’m tall enough to peer over the heads of everyone in front of me, and I see my name: It’s fourth on the list, right next to the character I want to play.

“Congratulations.” Daphne’s a head shorter than I am. There’s no way she can see the paper hanging on Miss Tyler’s door.

“How did you know?” I ask her.

“The subtlety of your gigantic smile.” Daphne has mastered the art of the perfectly timed, comically droll understatement.

“That big, huh?”

“From space, Aaron. You could see it from space.”

“Well, darlin’ that’s just
wonderful
.”

Nanny is the first person I call when I get home from school. It’s a slow night in the cardiology department in Memphis, so she has time to talk. “I was telling the nurses up in the unit about you the other day: ‘That Aaron has it all. He’s the most talented kid I got.’ ”

I smile when she says this. I know she shouldn’t have favorites, but I’m secretly glad she does.

“Now, when do y’all practice?” she asks.

“Mostly during drama class and after school,” I say. “Sometimes we rehearse during study hall.”

“Well, you be careful. All sorts of things can happen in study hall. Just ask your mama.”

I don’t have to ask, but I love hearing the story the way Nanny tells it.

When Mom was a junior in high school, Papa was transferred from his job in Memphis to Kansas City. Mom enrolled at the school where my dad had recently started teaching junior high classes part-time while he worked on his master’s degree. It was a small school, and the junior and senior high students attended class in the same buildings. One day, Dad poked his head into the door of Mom’s senior high study hall and asked the teacher if a couple of the girls could help him grade history papers. When a friend of Mom’s volunteered, Mom came along to help, and apparently Dad was hooked.