Ball Don't Lie (3 page)

What are you talkin about, girl?

Anh-thu lowers her head. A heavy tear starts down her right cheek and she wipes it with the napkin.

Oh, my God, Annie
. Laura shoves her bowl from in front of her. Walks around the table and sits next to Anh-thu.

It’s just somethin I gotta deal with.

You don’t wanna talk?

Anh-thu shakes her head.

Laura reaches into her purse and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. Slips one out, puts it between her lips and flicks on a lighter. She pulls in the smoke. Exhales.
You don’t wanna
talk, all right,
she says.
But maybe I could help
.

They both sit quiet. Anh-thu balls her napkin up and tosses it in her bowl. Laura stares at the table and smokes.

Anh-thu looks down at her watch.
Oh, my God,
she says,
it’s already past eleven-thirty
.

Laura stabs her cigarette into her bowl and grabs her bag strap.
Sergio’s gonna kill us,
she says.

Anh-thu fumbles with her backpack zipper, opens up and pulls out her Millers name tag. Pins it on her shirt. She dabs at her eyes one last time with another napkin as they push away from their chairs and throw their bowls in the trash.

Laura stops Anh-thu before they leave, holds her by the shoulders.
I’m serious, Annie, you wanna talk, I’m here
.

I know,
Anh-thu says.
I appreciate it.

Ain’t nobody supposed to be sad on they birthday,
Laura says.
For real
.

They both take off running through the food court, in the same direction the Mexican guys had gone, dodging packs of people on their way back to Millers.

Nobody Knew Anything

about Sticky turning seventeen. Except his foster lady, Georgia, who put three candles in a Hostess Cup Cake that morning before going to work.

This was back on the day of the big play-off game, four months ago. Anh-thu didn’t know. Sticky’s foster siblings didn’t know. Coach Reynolds, who finally subbed him into the game with only seven minutes remaining in the third quarter, he didn’t have a clue.

Georgia set the Cup Cake on the edge of the coffee table next to where Sticky sleeps, out on the green and brown couch in the living room. Pieces of dull orange foam bulging through thin rips in the worn fabric, swelling up between his arms and legs.

And Sticky didn’t exactly offer up any info himself. Almost made it through the entire day without saying a word. The only time it was even mentioned was when Sticky, Dave, and Sin were spread-eagled against a cop car, getting searched for weapons. Hands on the roof, feet wide, as a pissed-off, out-of-breath cop patted them down one at a time.

Three sets of eyes on the jagged pavement.

The cop with the radio came walking around the front of the car with a grin on his face, shaking his head.
Hey, listen to
this one,
he said, tapping his partner on the shoulder with the radio antenna.

Dave and Sin looked at Sticky all confused after the cop said what he said.

It’s your birthday today?
Dave said.

Sticky shrugged.

For real?
Sin said.

But that’s as far as it went. Nobody felt like singing happy birthday to you, cuffed in the back of some cop car on the way to the station.

Sticky Swipes Gear

like he shoots hoops. Shuts off his mind and rolls instinct. Every move in a department store is a SportsCenter highlight:

You go in with an empty Double Gulp cup and walk out drinking your favorite new shirt through a straw.

You try on those new Nikes with a hat pulled low, walk around Fragrances three, four times to check the feel, and cruise right out of the store. Get your sprint on if the high-pitched alarm starts screaming.

You walk past the register and out the front doors with three new shirts draped over the shoulder. In front of everyone. Bar codes dangling like fish in a cotton waterfall. If the blue-hair behind the counter says,
Excuse me, sir, have you
paid for that?
(which they never do, because they don’t really give a damn either) you say,
No, I’m OK, ma’am. I’m OK, sir.
Maybe add a quick
It’s all taken care of,
like you know exactly what you’re doing. And you do. Then you cruise out calm like some suit guy with a heavy wallet.

It’s the same high that’s floating around a hoop court. Lift a product and don’t give up a dime.

Makes you feel alive.

Take, for example, the day Sticky met Anh-thu in Millers Outpost last summer. He dropped in thinking layer scam (go in wearing your baggiest jeans, pull six or seven pants off the rack and hop into an empty dressing room. Leave the two best pair on under jeans, dump the rest in the saleschick’s arms and roll out cool). But when Sticky was busy sifting through the overstocked rack, beats jumping through Walkman headphones, pulling a pair of khakis off the rack and putting them back, pulling off and putting back, pulling and putting, Anh-thu came up on his blind side.

Can I help you find something?
she said, tapping him on the shoulder.

Sticky jumped two feet.

Even when you shoplift with a slow heart, somebody’s voice behind you can sound like a pair of heavy handcuffs rattling. Sticky turned around thinking undercover security, but what he found was Anh-thu.

Something clicked.

He knew the face, dark-type skin in the center of long black hair. Straight. Yeah, he’d seen her before, coming in or out of the caf, standing with her girls outside econ class, but never up close like this. Where he could see the green in her eyes. To be straight up, his stomach dropped. All he could do was stare. It was like the time his cart strained up to the highest peak on Space Mountain during some big foster outing to Disneyland. He could feel it in his stomach: Something crazy was about to go down.

Um, hel-lo,
Anh-thu said, waving a hand in front of his daydream face.
Can I help you?

Sticky hadn’t been with too many ladies up to that point. You have to understand that. Some of the sluttier chicks at school, like Angelica and Chloe. A rich white girl everybody called Grand Slam (cause one, her dad owned a local Denny’s, and two, if you paid her a little attention, three, four days in a row, you were bound to take a trip around the bases) who used to buy Sticky lunch at school every Friday when the caf came through with pizza. There were a couple episodes with girls he lived with in previous foster homes. Sneak in each other’s room after lights-out. But he never felt anything special with any of them. It was just something you were supposed to do, like cheating on tests and drinking forties with the boys.

Yeah,
Sticky said, shaking out of it.
I need some new pants.

You have to realize, Sticky was a baller first and foremost. There wasn’t any time for chicks. He was too busy working on the Iverson crossover, or trying to sneak the rock over the rim with two hands-behind-the-back and call it a reverse.

Fire one off before a big game and legs go to rubber by halftime.

Come on,
Anh-thu said.
We just got this cool new line of
Bugle Boys. I’ll show you.

Anh-thu, on the other hand, she’s always had a pack of dudes on her heels. Blacks, whites, Mexicans, Asians—even grown men who come in shopping for their kids scribble down digits on a business card, try and slip it to her while she rings them up at the register. It’s been this way since she moved to L.A. from Modesto. Her pops, who refuses to speak English in their house, has tried everything: ten o’clock curfews, big brother chaperoning her Saturday nights, checking skirt length with a ruler before letting her leave the house for school. But it’s all hopeless. The more he tries, the more they blow up her cell phone.

American boys,
he always mumbles in disgust.

Here, how do you like these?
Anh-thu said, holding up a pair of khakis with white stitching. What size are we looking
for? Yeah, these will look way cool on you
.

In the dressing room Sticky experienced his first episode of shoplifting jitters. He stared at the pants like they were a pile of undercover cop bait.

He took off his baggy jeans and slipped the first Bugle Boy khakis over his boxers. Snapped, unsnapped, and snapped again. Perfect fit in the mirror. Kinda smooth, too. Unsnapped and snapped. Unsnapped and snapped. Unsnapped and snapped. He spun around to check the sag. Belt loops hung just below the boxer label, like they’re supposed to. Unsnapped and snapped. Unsnapped and snapped. Slipped on the second pair, a little lighter shade with deeper pockets. But they were cool too.

How we doing in there?
Anh-thu said through the door. You need a different size or anything?

Nah,
Sticky said.

He sat down on the bench and spent a few seconds looking at his face in the mirror. The scars. The dark brown eyes and long eyelashes. The closely cut brown hair. He had a pretty face, according to his old foster friend, Maria.
You’re a
boy with a pretty face,
she’d always tease him. He looked away from the mirror.

He could still see Anh-thu in his head, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He could still smell her smell through the door. Something wasn’t right in his stomach.

The kid was shook.

He went to slip his jeans over the khakis but stopped himself cold. Tried again but couldn’t come through. It wasn’t fear so much, that maybe this girl was secretly keeping a head count of all his items. Nothing like that. And he dug the pants all right. Needed some khakis for school and everything. But he couldn’t finish the play. There’d be no stealing this time. Do the right thing out of respect to this super-pretty Vietnamese girl. The one that had his mind doing some crazy jig.

He stripped and zipped up his jeans alone. He even folded the Bugle Boys up super nice to give back.

When he broke out of the dressing room, holding a pile of pants in his arms, he found Anh-thu helping some other buster. A black kid from the varsity football squad, one of the starting defensive backs. He watched the guy’s mouth move as he walked up on them. Anh-thu bent over to let out a laugh.

I smacked the crap outta my puppy,
the guy said, working the scene.
He’s gotta learn about that. I shoved his nose right
in my ripped-up shirt and told him, No, little Pepper! You can’t
be messin up my gear like that
.

Anh-thu seemed all jazzed by what the guy was saying so Sticky hung back. On the sly he spied the defensive back lightly touching Anh-thu on the shoulder, Anh-thu looking up into the guy’s face with her full attention.

Sticky decided to say screw it and turned to take off.

But just as he was about to set the pile down and flee the scene, Anh-thu dropped the hammer on the defensive back.
You know,
she said,
it sounds fun and everything, but I have
a boyfriend
.

The guy smiled big, pushed out a laugh.
For real?
he said. He put the flashy shirt back up on the rack.

But thanks for asking.

Who’s the lucky Jack?

Anh-thu turned around and pointed at Sticky.
Him!

Sticky did a double take on Anh-thu’s finger pointing at him. He looked over his shoulder. Nobody.

Well, man,
the guy said, putting his hand up on a shelf of folded white T-shirts, then taking it off and slipping it into his pocket.
My moms probably has the pot roast all ready. I
should probably, you know . . . I’ll most likely just come in
sometime next week to pick up that shirt
.

Sounds good,
Anh-thu said.
Oh, and try to keep your
puppy away from your clothes
.

The guy worked up another laugh.
Yeah, we’ll see,
he said, and made his move for the exit.

Anh-thu walked over to Sticky with a big embarrassed smile on her face.
I’m sorry I did that,
she said, taking the pile of pants out of Sticky’s hands.
I didn’t know what else to say.
It just totally popped in my head
.

Sticky stuck hands in his pockets, real cool-like, and looked to the floor. He brought his head up to check those green eyes again but quickly cut away. He leaned against a shelf of white cotton V-necks and said: Them pants wasn’t
really my thing
.

Anh-thu laughed a little and fingered one of the price tags.
It’s OK,
she said.
They make us try to sell these. Maybe
some other pants, though? You might like our Anchor Blue
stuff, they’re super-baggy and comfortable
.

Sticky pulled his hands from his pockets. He locked them up behind his back for a sec, linked fingers, then stuck both hands back in his pockets.
Nah,
he said.

Yeah, forget it.
Anh-thu put the pants on a pile of T-shirts and pulled her long black hair behind her ears.
You know, I
go on break in like ten minutes, you wanna get some hot chocolate or something? Down in the food court?
She smoothed loose hair behind both her ears.

Sticky tapped his right foot against the bottom of the shelf a couple times and looked up at her.
Nah, I can’t,
he said.

Then he walked out of the store.

Current Foster Lady,

Georgia, pulled up to Sticky’s foster care pad in almost the same meat-and-potato minivan as his previous lady, Mrs. Smith. Same dull white paint job and sloping hood. Same snail-like movement across the crumbling road.

Could have been a déjà vu situation if it wasn’t for Georgia’s bumper-to-bumper sports stripe. Red.

Sticky was sixteen, and he promised the old Mexican director he’d try harder this time.

He spied her through the game room window: creeping along the curb out front, double-checking a scribbled-down address. She was in the middle of the road and two or three cars had to swing into the other lane to make the pass. He spied her screwing up a simple parallel park, shutting off that familiar minivan-engine hum, stepping out (fat arms and fat legs poking out of a two-man-tent-like summer dress), and slamming the door shut behind her.

She stood there duck-footed and stared up at his run-down foster care pad, the place where she’d agreed to take on another kid only two weeks previous.

Add a fifth to her pack of strays. Three hundred and sixty dollars a month per stray from the state.

Do the math.

Sticky spied all this through the game room window while at the same time kicking Counselor Julius’s ass in foosball again.

Earlier that morning, Julius had laid down the challenge.
Let’s run a quick game, Stick,
he said, his dark blue Duke cap pulled cool-like crooked over his smooth black face. All the residents shoveled spoonfuls of cereal into their mouths. Warehouse-size sacks lying between them, generic flakes spilling onto the table.
For old times’ sake
.

Sticky took one last bite before he set the spoon in his bowl. He pulled the spoon out and set it back in. Pulled out and set back in. Pulled out and set back in. Julius knew the routine and rolled his eyes.

Pulled out and set back in.

Pulled out and set back in.

When the dull tap of metal on plastic sounded like Sticky thought it should, he hustled over to the foosball table and grabbed two of the worn-out handles.

Back in those days, Sticky spent all his free time playing foosball. Couldn’t get enough. The other residents said he took it way too far. Always spinning the handles around. Always pulling and pushing the rusting arms, stopping the ball on a dime and firing it into the box. Aerial shots, crank shots, simple bank shots off either wall, snake shots where a heavy spin shoots the colorful ball out like a rainbow across the blue face of the game. All this even if there was nobody on the other side to play to eleven.

You’re obsessed with a stupid game,
Maria always said, on nights she’d sneak into his room after lights-out. She’d look him right in the eyes after they messed around in his bed for a while, tell him:
I don’t get it, why play a game when you can
talk to a real person?

Sticky would pick at the calluses on the insides of his fingers. Shrug her off. Sometimes he’d peel a callus off completely and toss it in her lap.

But if anybody needed to find Sticky in his foster care pad, all they had to do was follow these simple directions: move straight through the living room, past the always shouting TV, hang a sharp left before the long dark hall, swing on through the kitchen, past the locked-up counselors’ office and into the tight-quarter game room. That was where he’d be. After chores. After lunch. Before lights-out. Sometimes even in the middle of the night, when he’d sneak out of his room to duct-tape a defenseman he dreamed was starting to crack.

And maybe Maria had it right, maybe he was obsessed with playing a dumb game, but when he beat somebody good, got them all flustered and defeated, the blood ran through his veins all smooth like melted butter. Warm and fast. The rush of heat moving along his skin giving him a reason to spring out of bed in the morning.

It wasn’t so much the foosball he was addicted to anyway, it was the beating people.

He’d beat the old Mexican director, who rolled in with boxes full of frozen foods twice a week. The director, who’d already sent him off with a packed bag three separate times, only to eventually have him returned like a shirt that didn’t fit. A pair of pants. He’d beat all the residents at least twice a day, including Maria, who he’d play with one hand behind his back. He’d beat any new buster that got dropped off before they had time to unpack their bag. He’d beat the night watch. He’d beat the college girls who showed up to give presentations about sexually transmitted diseases. But the sweetest wins of all came against Counselor Julius. With all his hooting and hollering whenever he scored a goal. His intense facial expressions, all eyebrows and teeth. Sticky knew once he got Julius to the table, he’d have somebody to beat for hours.

Julius would get so pissed at all the losing, he’d end up dragging Sticky down to a local park with the scuffed-up house basketball. This was back before Sticky could even dribble with his left hand. Julius strutting out onto the blacktop in his Scottie Pippen jersey and new Air Jordans. His fake diamond earrings. Sticky with his standard white T-shirt issued by the state. Standard old blue jeans, ripped in the knees by the resident who’d handed them down. Sorry-looking white Wilson low-tops.

Julius would kick Sticky’s butt in one-on-one, game after game. Back him up in the post. Block his shots. Swipe the ball when he dribbled. The whole time talking trash. The whole time giving Sticky this new game to fixate on. To obsess about. To do over and over and over until he got good. A reason to dribble back down on solo missions. Every day.

Return to the scene of the crime, where Julius had kept in on him until foosball frustration faded from his mind.

With all those jumpers Sticky shot by himself, sometimes long after the moon replaced the sun above the backboard, it wasn’t long before he was getting Julius in hoops, too.

Then Counselor Julius had nowhere to turn.

All right, Stick
, Julius said, cupping the white ball in his hands and blowing on it.
One more foosball game before this
lady shows up, and I swear to God I’m gonna get you this time
.
We’ll see.

But you know the routine, how one game turns into ten and before you know it, Sticky’s two points away from taking thirteen straight.

He ran off the first seven or eight in a flash, mixed in a couple shutouts. And then a frustrated Counselor Julius came up with the idea of switching sides. Sticky went from whipping Julius with his back to the window, to whipping him facing it. Like that. And to top it all off, Sticky didn’t even give his full attention to that thirteenth game. He had one eye on the action and the other spying this new foster lady making her way up the driveway.

Georgia finally got to the door and knocked three times hard. Julius, playing the part of responsible counselor, abandoned foosball.
That’s her, Stick,
he said, pulling his hands from the handles and straightening his cap. He reached back and took one last whack, but Sticky blocked the shot with a quick shift of his goalie.

You lucky, too,
Julius said,
I was about to catch my rhythm
. He hustled to the front door.

Julius pulled the heavy door open and painted on his best smile.
Hello, ma’am,
he said, shaking her hand.
I’m
Julius. If you’ll just follow me into the office, I’ll have you sign a
few things. It won’t take long
.

That’s him, right?
the woman said, pointing through the game room door at Sticky.

Yes, ma’am, Travis Reichard. That’s his given name. But he
goes by Sticky around here.

Oh, that name,
the lady said in a voice so Sticky couldn’t hear. She moved under the game room door frame.
We’ll
have to do something about that awful name.

Like I said, ma’am, real name is Travis. I’m not even sure
how he got the name Sticky.

She watched Sticky slap the ball around a couple more times and then piped up:
Hello, Travis
. She spoke in a long and drawn-out voice, as if Sticky was retarded. How are you today?

There were a few awkward seconds of dead air.

Tell the lady hi,
Julius said.
Where’s your manners, big guy?

Sticky put his head up, then his hand up.
But my name’s
Sticky,
he said, and went back to hitting the ball around.

Counselor Julius smiled.

Georgia smiled.

We’re gonna give you a fine place to live,
she said.
Me and
my husband. I think you’ll be very happy in our home
.

Minivans and this same opening line,
Our happy
home
. . . There must be a book these ladies check out from the county library.

She stood watching Sticky a couple more seconds, then turned and followed Julius into the office, to get the details worked out.