Long Shot (9 page)

Plenty of time to do that now.

Pedro stayed focused on his guy, locked on him, ready to swarm him as soon as he gave up his dribble.

Only the kid kept his dribble, put the ball hard on the floor and started to drive, making it look as if he was going to try to blow past Pedro and get around the corner.

So Pedro thought, anyway.

He thought wrong.

This time they
were
running a pick-and-roll, Dwan coming at full speed out of the corner like a runaway truck. At least that’s the way Joe would describe the play for Pedro much later.

Pedro ran into Dwan’s pick, got blindsided, as if he’d run into the side of a house. No one had called it out in time to warn him. It was always the responsibility of whoever’s guy was setting the pick to warn his teammate. Ned had been on Dwan the whole game. He had to have seen it coming. Ned saw
everything
coming on the basketball court.

But Pedro saw none of this until it was too late, running hard in Dwan and getting absolutely smoked, his head hitting the floor as the buzzer sounded to end the quarter.

And, for Pedro, ending the game.

 

 

 

“I get it now,” Joe said.

Pedro took the ice pack away from his head. “What was your first clue?” Pedro said. “When I went down like a bowling pin?”

They were in the basement at Pedro’s house, Joe sitting on the floor playing video games, Pedro lying on the couch watching him.

Pedro put the ice pack back on his forehead.

“I’m just saying that I see what Ned’s been doing, is all,” Joe said.

“So let me get this straight,” Pedro said, smiling. “Me getting bonked on the head knocked some sense into you?”

Joe smiled back. “I hadn’t thought of it that way but, well, yeah.”

Bobby Murray’s mom was a doctor, and had been sitting with a lot of the other moms in the stands when Pedro’s head made a sound on the floor like a wood bat hitting a baseball in the big leagues. As soon as Pedro went down, she was on the court so fast it was as if Coach Cory had subbed her into the game.

They brought him into a locker room, and Dr. Murray got her medical bag out of her car. She checked his eyes with a little flashlight, asked him to do some counting—by then Pedro was feeling good enough to say, “Uh-oh, math problems”—and finally told him that while he had taken a big knock, he didn’t have a concussion. She told him to keep ice on the side of his forehead for the rest of the afternoon so he wouldn’t look as if he’d lost a fight.

Pedro insisted on going back into the gym, so they let him. When he got to the bench during a time-out, he told Coach Cory he wanted to stay around and watch the end of the game. He checked the clock and saw that they were three minutes into the fourth quarter by then. Coach Cory put his hand on Pedro’s shoulder, told him he’d already taken one for the team, to take the rest of the day off and he’d call to check in on him later.

When Pedro started to walk away, Ned walked with him. Pedro knew it was more for show than anything else, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. So he just let it happen, let Ned look like a team leader walking him to the door.

“Sorry, dude,” Ned said. “I should have called it out.”

Pedro stopped, looked at him, said in a quiet voice, “You
think
?”

“Hey,” Ned said, keeping his own voice down. “I made a mistake and I’m saying I’m sorry.”

Acting like he was the injured party.

“No,” Pedro said. “You’re not.”

Ned said, “You’re saying I did it on purpose?”

“Everything you do on a basketball court has a purpose,” Pedro said. “And one other thing: I’m not your dude anymore,
dude
.”

He walked toward where his mom was waiting for him.

 

Now he was in the basement with Joe, his head starting to feel better, Anna Morales not coming down every ten minutes to ask how he was doing.

“How’s the head really?” Joe said, not turning around, his eyes focused on
FIFA Soccer 08.

“Great,” Pedro said. “My mom stops asking and you start.”

On the big screen, one of the players from Tottenham Hotspur—Joe always wanted to be Tottenham Hotspur, for no other reason than the cool name—scored a goal and Joe pumped his fist.

Even now, only half watching from the couch, Pedro couldn’t believe how real the players on the screen looked, how real the action seemed. It was actually one of the things that Pedro liked best about playing video games: If you were smart enough and quick enough and good enough with the controller, you could make sports come out the way you wanted them to.

It was the way real sports were supposed to work, too.

Just not lately.

“What finally changed your mind?” Pedro said. “About Ned, I mean.”

“When he clapped and then didn’t move. He always cuts to the basket on that play.
Always.
And what happened later, that was just plain cold, dude. He always sees picks coming even before the other guy decides he wants to set one.”

“Tell me about it,” Pedro said.

“So the question is, what are we gonna do about it?”

“There’s nothing for either one of us to do except play through this,” Pedro said.

“What if we both go to Coach?”

“You know Coach,” Pedro said. “He sees what he wants with Ned, and what he sees is Peter Perfect. The player who’s gonna lead us to a perfect season. Hey, you saw it the other day when I stole the ball from Ned at practice. He says one little thing to Ned about protecting the ball and the other guys on the team act like he’s grounded him for life or something.”

“Word,” Joe said.

Pedro sat down on the floor next to Joe now and grabbed the other controller.

Joe said, “Your mom said you had to keep the ice on until she told you to take it off.”

Pedro said, “I can beat you one-handed
and
with a headache.”

“Okay, I’m calling your mom,” Joe said. “You’re delirious.”

“I did say something to him today,” Pedro said.

Joe looked at him. “Ned?”

Pedro told him about their exchange right before he left the gym.

“You think you got through to him?” Joe said.

Pedro nodded. Slowly. “He knew what I was saying. And he’s smart enough on hoops to know that
I
know what’s been going on.”

“Maybe the next time something happens you should get in his grill and just air him out in front of the whole team.”

Pedro said he was going to air him out, just not in the gym, and then told Joe when he was going to do it.

And where.

“Word,” Joe said again, and put out his fist for a little pound.

“
Lots
of words,” Pedro Morales said. “And the best kind.”

“What kind is that?”

“The truth,” Pedro said.

 

When he got home from school Monday afternoon he was surprised to find both his parents there.

His mom had taken the afternoon off from True Blue and his dad said he had just come from the restaurant to pick up some paperwork he had left in the tiny office he kept on the second floor of their house.

Usually Pedro liked to chill for a couple of hours between the end of school and the start of practice. Not today. As soon as he got home today he knew he just should have stayed at school, because he decided when he went upstairs to play video games that he wanted to be in the gym working on his shooting. But when he asked his mom to drive him to practice early, his dad said he’d take him instead.

“Let me go get my sneakers and we can go right now if you want,” Luis Morales said.

“Why do you need your sneakers to drive me to school?”

“I could use a little exercise,” his dad said, “that does not involve rearranging tables and opening boxes.”

Then he ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, the way Pedro did when he was impatient to go outside and play. When he came back down, Pedro said to him, “You don’t have to do this, Papa.”

“I want to,” he said, then clapped his hands. “And who knows, maybe the old soccer dad can help you out with your basketball.”

He put his arm around his son’s shoulders and they walked through the front door together, like they were walking into one of their Saturday mornings.

But even having his dad on the court with him didn’t help with his shot.

His dad kept rebounding the ball for him, telling him to trust it, boy, telling him just get a good look at the basket and then let it go.

Pedro still couldn’t get nearly enough shots to fall.

“In soccer,” Luis Morales said, “if you think too much, it is as if somebody keeps moving the goal.”

He was right, as usual.

It was as if somebody kept moving the basket on Pedro, no matter how much his dad tried to keep him positive. And nobody he knew had a more positive attitude—about everything—than his dad did.

Pedro kept moving around the court, as if playing a game of Around the World against himself, trying to find a spot where he felt comfortable. But he couldn’t. It seemed to be something different on every shot. He had too much air under the ball. Or not enough. He didn’t put enough spin on the ball. Sometimes he felt as if he were chucking the ball from the side instead of taking his shooting hand right past his nose, the way Coach Cory had taught them on their very first day of fifth-grade practice.

The worse it got, the more frustrated Pedro became.

As good as his dad’s attitude was, Pedro’s was the opposite, at least today. This was something he couldn’t blame on Ned Hancock or anybody else. His dad always liked to say that you couldn’t fool sports, and so there was no point in trying to fool yourself.

Sports, Luis Morales said, always let you know exactly where you stood.

Today Pedro knew exactly where he stood with his shooting. No matter where he happened to be standing on the court.

“If I can’t make these shots here, with nobody guarding me,” he said to his dad, “how am I ever going to make a big shot in a game?”

“You will before the season goes much further, wait and see,” his dad said, then snapped off an amazing bounce pass from all the way across the court, making Pedro wonder again what kind of player his dad could have been if he had had the chance to play basketball instead of soccer.

Pedro caught the ball chest-high just left of the free throw line, thought he had actually released one perfectly for a change, then saw that this was another one that was too hard and offline, hitting high off the backboard without catching any iron.

“I quit!” Pedro shouted, his words seeming to bounce off every wall in the gym the way his shots had been bouncing around for the past hour.

He waved his dad off now, chased the ball down himself, placed it on the floor and soccer-kicked it as hard as he could toward the opposite end of the gym. Pedro was trying to kick it in the direction of the other basket, but hooked it badly so that it bounced off a tall stack of chairs.

Right to where Ned Hancock was standing.

Pedro had no idea how long Ned had been there or how much of his pathetic shooting display he’d seen. Just saw Ned calmly walk over, grab the ball, then throw a perfect football pass the length of the court.

Pedro didn’t even have to move.

“Wow, dude,” Ned called out, like they were best basketball buds still, Pedro thinking it was more for his dad’s benefit than his own. “Now you can’t even boot it straight.”

 

 

 

Their next opponent was the Wilton Warriors, one of their big rivals.

No matter what sport you played in Vernon and no matter what your record was, your season wasn’t a total loss if you could beat Wilton.

Now the Knights were getting the first of their two chances, the first game of a home-and-home series against the Warriors, the second game to be played in a week in Wilton.