Airball (6 page)

“Oh. No reason,” I said. “I was just wondering what he was like. As a person. You know, since I'll be meeting him and all when the team goes to KU.”

Mrs. Snodgrass nodded. “I can understand that.” She picked up another saltshaker. “But I don't think you have anything to worry about. Brett was always a nice kid. That kind of talent would've turned most people arrogant, I guess, but not Brett. He didn't get rowdy in here like some of the kids, putting mustard in the ketchup bottles and loosening the sugar lids. He was polite. Haven't seen him in years, though. Not since he started making all that money and built his parents that big house out in Arizona.” She screwed the lid back on the saltshaker. “Hope the NBA didn't ruin him.”

Yeah. Me, too.

I finished my Coke, counted out the money to pay for it, and left it on the counter. I grabbed my backpack and tromped outside, into the wind and the growing darkness. I pulled my spiral notebook from my backpack. It wasn't quite as crisp and new, now that it was flecked with goulash stains. I scraped a dried chunk off the cover, flipped past my list of
Places to Look for Pictures,
and set the notebook on top of the big, square
Full Court Press
vending machine that stood outside the cafe.

Wind whipped at the pages. I weighted them down with my algebra book and wrote
What I Know about Brett McGrew
at the top of the page. Then I listed everything Mrs. Snodgrass had told me:

Not arrogant

Not rowdy

Good manners

Likes biscuits and gravy

I looked at my list. It didn't help much. I'd know what to fix if he ever dropped by for breakfast, but I wasn't any closer to knowing how he felt about kids.

Especially his own.

Eleven

Bragger wrenched his tail loose, and the heavy metal door banged shut. We stood there for a stunned second, huddled inside our musty prairie dog costume, waiting to be tossed out of the high school—again—but nobody looked our way. The music was thudding so loud, nobody'd heard us when we clanked in the side entrance.

“Try to blend in,” Bragger hissed in my ear. “Walk like you're in high school.”

We had tried to get in the legal way. We'd sacrificed our Coke at the Double Dribble and raced over to the high school as soon as practice was over. Bragger had secretly borrowed his dad's no-flash camera and brand-new, auto-crisp zoom lens. We figured we'd casually snap a few shots of the Brett McGrew photos in the high school trophy case and hope one of those photos showed a piece of Brett McGrew that looked like me.

As usual, we figured wrong. The assistant principal had been stationed inside the front doors, his suit jacket pushed back behind the bony fists he'd planted on his hips. Bragger and I had barely gotten the front door open before he turned us around again and headed us back outside. Punky little middle school kids had no business on high school property. We were up to no good. He could tell just by looking at us.

Fortunately, Bragger had noticed a flyer for the Halloween dance taped to the door. He snatched it down and tucked it under his coat as the vice principal shoved us out of his school.

Which is how we ended up inside the prairie dog.

The costume was Grandma's. She'd been the back half of the mascot at all the football and basketball games when she was in high school. The costume had been stored in the attic, wrapped in old sheets, for longer than I could remember, and when Bragger and I suddenly found ourselves in need of a Halloween costume that would cover us up so completely nobody would guess who we were, I immediately thought of the prairie dog.

We hauled it down from the attic and cleaned it up as best we could with a lint brush and a can of air freshener. Grandma muttered something about us getting a little too old for trick-or-treating, and we didn't argue with her. Better to let her think we were immature babies looking to score free chocolate than to admit we'd turned to a life of crime.

The worst part, the part that almost made me confess our crimes even before we'd committed any, was that even though Grandma thought we were immature, she seemed proud that we wanted to be immature wearing her prairie dog. She dragged the vacuum cleaner out of the hall closet and helped us suck the cobwebs off with her drapery attachment.

“Sure has been a good old prairie dog.” She ran her hand over its mangy ears. “He needs a little cleaning up, but he's still in good shape. Solid.” She rapped the prairie dog's head with her knuckles. “He's served three generations of our family well.”

I looked up from the lint I was removing. “Three?”

Grandma nodded. “You, me, and your mother. She wore it a time or two when she was in school.”

“She did?” I looked down at the fuzz accumulated on my lint brush. I'd been throwing that fuzz away. Right in the trash can. Not realizing that it might have come off one of my mother's sweaters or something.

And then I had another thought. This was a costume built for two.

“Who'd she wear it with?” I said.

Grandma shrugged. “Oh, I don't know. Different ones.” She dragged the vacuum around so she could suction decades of dust from the prairie dog's back end. “Friends of hers. They were all taller than her, of course, and she ended up in back, just like I always did.”

“Taller?” I said. “Like how tall?”

Grandma frowned at me and dropped the tail. “I don't know, Kirby. Tall enough to be the front end of a prairie dog.”

She powered the vacuum cleaner off, wound the cord around the handle, and lugged it back to the hall closet.

I thunked Bragger in the arm. “Did you hear that? My mother wore this with somebody who was
taller than her.
”

Bragger nodded. “Yeah.”

“Yeah? Think about it. Who do we know who went to school with my mom who was taller than her?”

“Everyone.”

“But who in particular?”

“Everyone.”

“Okay. But who was
really
taller than her?”

Bragger rolled his eyes. “Brett McGrew. Brett McGrew was really taller than your mother. Brett McGrew must've worn this costume with her. In fact, Brett McGrew probably asked her to the Sweetheart Dance right here in this flea-bitten mound of fur. Is that what you want to hear?”

Yes, actually, it was.

And now here we were, hunkered down inside that same flea-bitten mound of fur, breathing three generations of dust and mildew as we waddled toward the high school trophy case.

And possibly toward our doom.

Music blasted from the cafeteria. Cowboys, fortunetellers, and somebody dressed like a giant zit flocked toward it. But the trophy case was on the other side of the building, down the hallway, around the corner by the home ec room, past the office, and into the front lobby.

We circled a gang of belly dancers clustered outside the girls' bathroom and headed toward the darkness. Casually. Not running. Not panicking. Not attracting the attention of suspicious vice principals. Just your ordinary, everyday prairie dog, shuffling away from a party.

We rounded the corner by the home ec room. Except for a far-off glow coming from around the corner at the other end, the hall was pitch-black. An ax murderer could've been waving a big shiny ax in my face, and I wouldn't have seen him. I gripped the camera and set off through the darkness. Bragger shuffled along behind. We reached the far end. I veered to the side and hugged the wall.

I slid one side of my big prairie dog head around the corner and peered through the eyehole. The glow I'd seen was coming from the lobby, from the display lights in the trophy case.

And in front of the trophy case—

—stood Coach.

“Ulgp!”
I strangled a yelp and pulled my prairie dog head back. Fast.

And almost dropped the camera. I grabbed for it. My finger hit the button, taking a picture of who knew what. I gave a silent prayer of gratitude that it was a no-flash camera. And waited for a horrified minute to see if Coach had heard the click.

“What?” Bragger whispered. “The vice principal?”

“Worse,” I hissed. “Coach.”

“Coach? What's
he
doing here?”

“I don't know, Bragger. I didn't have my head poked out there long enough to find out.”

“Well, stick it out again and see.”

I took a deep breath and inched my prairie dog head past the corner. I felt like some kind of spy: Kirby Nickel, alias James Bond. Cleverly disguised as a giant rodent. I aimed my eyehole at Coach.

He stood perfectly still, his back to me, staring into the trophy case. His arms were splayed out on the case above him, his forehead pressed against it. His breath huffed out in a foggy circle on the glass.

At first I thought he was staring at the Brett McGrew stuff. The trophies and medals. The retired number 5 jersey. The poster-size cutout photo of McNet tipping in the winning basket at the state championship his senior year.

That's what most people stare at. You can't help yourself, everything's so big and shiny.

But Coach was off to one side, where the team photos were a little smaller. And a lot dustier. The medals were tarnished, the ribbons faded, and the trophies weren't polished to a blinding sheen. One of the display lights was burnt out, and that whole section of the trophy case fell under the shadow of the giant Brett McGrew cutout.

Coach snorted and pushed back from the glass, and I could finally see what he'd been staring at: an old team picture. Fluffy-haired players in skin-tight shorts.

Coach stood there rubbing his bristly chin. Finally he tapped his finger on the glass, almost like he was saying good-bye, and started to walk away. He stopped at the Brett McGrew cutout. Stared at it for a long moment.

He shook his head, gave another little snort, and clanked through the double doors on the other side of the lobby.

“He's gone,” I said.

We trundled around the corner, to the big, shiny Brett McGrew display. I wedged the camera into my eyehole and snapped pictures of the trophies, the medals, the jersey, the team photos, the newspaper clippings. I took three pictures of the giant cutout from various directions, just in case looking at it from a different angle made it look more like me.

I backed Bragger up so I could snap a picture of the entire display. The camera clicked and made a little whirring noise.

“Out of film,” I said. “Let's go.”

We started to turn around and trundle back the way we had come. But then we heard voices. And keys jingling. A door creaked open, and lights flashed on around the corner. Voices again; then somebody laughed.

“The vice principal,” Bragger hissed.

“In the office,” I whispered back.

For a second, we just stood there. We couldn't go back. And we sure couldn't stay where we were. The only way out was the door Coach had disappeared through. I dragged Bragger across the lobby and eased the door open. I squeezed through, Bragger fishtailed around behind me, and I eased the door shut.

And there was Coach. Again. This time dribbling a basketball in the nearly dark gymnasium. I pressed Bragger and me and the prairie dog into the little space at the end of the bleachers. And peered out through my eyeholes. A shaft of moonlight shone through the windows above the bleachers, spotlighting the basket at the far end of the court. Coach dribbled in place, then drove toward the basket. When he reached it, he took one last step, pushed off, and leaped. Up and around and around again.

Th-bumpf.

The ball hit the backboard and swished through the net.

Brett McGrew's famous spinning layup.

Executed perfectly.

Twelve

“A spinning layup?” Bragger splatted through a puddle. “Kinda like Brett McGrew?”

“No,” I said. “
Exactly
like Brett McGrew. He never missed. Not once.”

We'd stayed there in the gym, squashed against the bleachers, until Coach finally got tired and left. Then we scrambled across the court, still stuffed into the costume, and out the side door at the other end.

Now we were headed home, Bragger's dad's no-flash auto-crisp camera stuffed up under the prairie dog for protection. It was drizzling, like it did every Halloween, with the wind spitting rain at us, and I couldn't risk getting the camera wet. My whole future rested on that one roll of film.

I veered off the sidewalk. Bragger slogged along behind, splashing mud up the back of my legs. We cut through the side yard and crunched down my driveway.

“You know,” said Bragger, “Coach must be taking this whole retiring-the-jersey thing more seriously than he's letting on. I mean, he acts like meeting Brett McGrew is no big deal, but then there he is, practicing McNet's moves in the gym.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Iron Man Mike Armstrong: secret Brett McGrew fan. Who knew?”

We clomped up the back steps, through the porch, and into the house. The kitchen was empty. I could hear Grandma in the front room, handing out bite-size Snickers and pretending to be scared of a three-foot-tall vampire.

Bragger wriggled out of the back end of the costume. I lifted the prairie dog head off my own head. Or at least, I tried to lift it. I got the shoulder part about as high as my throat before it caught on something and snapped back. About strangled me.

I reached up under the prairie dog head and found the problem: a piece of wire that had gotten hooked on the little zipper-pull thingy on the front of my sweatshirt. I poked it out and pulled off the mangy prairie dog head.

A small metal disk clanked to the floor.

“Hey.” I picked it up and held it up to the light. “Look at this.”

Bragger squinted. “Looks like a medal. Like from a letter jacket or something.”

“Yeah.” I scrubbed it across my jeans to get the dust off. “Whoa.”

“What?” Bragger leaned closer to get a better look.