The Cruisers (8 page)

It’s one thing to rock the power of your pen; it’s another to crack a code. In the second book of the Cruisers series, the term “Gifted and Talented” takes on a whole new meaning for Zander and his friends.

Here’s the beginning of how they roll in
King’s Gambit.

Y
o, Kambui, I was thinking about Sidney,” I said. “I just can’t imagine him with a drug problem.”

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to figure out Sidney Aronofsky’s problem,” I said.

“No, I mean right now. You sitting at the table? You eating a sandwich? What are you doing?”

“I’m lying on the floor right next to my dumbbells thinking maybe I’ll get to some exercises,” I said. “What you doing?”

“I’m texting Zhade Hopkins,” Kambui said. “I’m thinking about asking her to go out with me.”

“Zhade is too fine for you,” I said.

“No, I think she digs me,” Kambui said. “I think you and I should go out with her and her sister. On a double date.”

“Where do you want to take them?”

“Never mind, she just texted me back and called me a frog,” Kambui said. “Why did she have to go there?”

“Maybe she’s hoping to kiss you and turn you into a handsome prince,” I said.

“I didn’t like her anyway.”

Lie.

“So, getting back to Sidney,” I went on. “I think he knows drugs are bad but he hasn’t really seen how bad so he’s, like, into some kind of movie version.”

“What movie?”

“I don’t know, man,
some
movie,” I said. “It’s like you see guys get shot in pictures and then the next day you see them on television talking about how good the film was. It makes the killing part not too bad.”

“So you think we should get him some heavy drugs and let him OD or something?” Kambui asked.

“This afternoon I told him that we wanted to publish a picture of a crackhead in
The Cruiser,
” I said. “I asked him if he could get us one.”

“Look, Zander, I know you and Sidney are friends,” Kambui said. “But as far as I’m concerned he’s just weirding out. Maybe all that chess he plays has got his head twisted. You know—mad genius stuff.”

“The guy’s a chess wizard,” I said. “Plus he’s a good guy and he goes to our school. I was shocked when he got arrested for buying marijuana. If he does come up with a picture I’m going to put it in
The Cruiser.
”

“I don’t see how it’s going to help,” Kambui said. “But it doesn’t cost anything, so why not?”

“I have to do
something
,” I said.

“I got to get to my homework,” Kambui said. “I have fifteen thousand more pages to read.”

“You think if I texted Zhade and asked her about us double-dating with her and her sister she might say yes?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t even go out with her now,” Kambui said. “Where did she get that frog bit?”

“That was kind of cold,” I said.

Kambui said he had to finish his homework and would see me in school. When I had hung up it was easy to see that Kambui was more into Zhade then he was into Sidney’s problems. But Kambui was my main man and I knew he would be thinking about it. That’s the way he is. You say something to him and you think he’s forgotten about it and then two or three weeks later—
bam!
—he’s right back on the case.

I was still lying on the floor when Mom came to the door and pointed to the cell phone she was holding. Somebody was calling for me and she wanted to know if I wanted to answer it. She put the phone behind her back and said it was a lady.

For a wild moment I thought it was going to be Zhade. Zhade is so hot she can melt a Hershey bar from across the room by just looking at it. It wasn’t Zhade, it was Bobbi.

“Hey, Zander, I’ve got the game with Powell all figured out.” She was chirping again. She does that when she’s happy. “I have four numbers. If we manage to get three of them we’ll win.”

“The first number is one,” I said. “If we get one more point than the other team we’ll win.”

“The first number is nine,” Bobbi continued, ignoring me. “One player has to get nine rebounds. The second number—”

“Why nine?” I asked.

“The second number is seventy. That has to be our free throw percentage.”

“Where are you getting these numbers?”

“Each number represents a phase of the game that we have to dominate,” she said.

“You’re not playing, Bobbi,” I said. “We’re playing.”

“I’m giving you the tools to win the game,” Bobbi said. “So it’s nine rebounds by one player, seventy percent of our free throws, the third is team assists—we need nine—and the last number is thirty-five. We need to hit thirty-five percent of our three-point tries. That’s it. What do you think?”

“Bobbi, you don’t know diddly-squat about basketball,” I said.

“Yeah, I do,” Bobbi said. “Because it’s really about numbers and percentages.”

“So what do you think about Sidney’s problem?”

“What do you think about my math solution?”

“We’ll check it out when we play Powell Thursday,” I said. “And if we get those numbers and lose we’ll burn you at the stake.”

“And if you win you can put a photo of me in the trophy case,” Bobbi said.

“Can we get back to Sidney and chess?” I asked. “He’s the best chess player on our team,” Bobbi said. “I’m second board, John Brendel is third, and Todd Balf is fourth.”

“I could probably beat all of you with my eyes closed,” I said.

“In your dreams, baby,” Bobbi said. “In your dreams!”

Okay, the basketball team, Bobbi, LaShonda, Kambui, and Ashley Schmidt from the school newspaper,
The Palette,
went to 128th Street and Amsterdam Avenue to play against Adam Clayton Powell. On the way, Bobbi kept passing around her numbers.

“Zander, you have to get the nine rebounds,” she said. “You’re the tallest.”

“The secret to basketball,” Coach Law said, “is having the will to win. Without that will you’re going to lose.”

“Numbers don’t lie,” Bobbi said. “Numbers are a way of God slipping the truth to us on the QT.”

“Spoken like a true young lady,” Coach Law said.

“Spoken like a sexist basketball coach,” LaShonda said.

Coach Law grinned.

Adam Clayton Powell Academy’s basketball team was okay but I didn’t like them because the whole school thought they were hot stuff. They had had Mae Jamison come up to the school once, and President Clinton and some author from New Jersey, so they thought they were special.

“Can you get nine boards?” Cody asked me.

“Yeah.”

“If you keep crashing the boards you’ll get fouled,” Cody said. “I’ll drive more down the lane so I should pick up a couple of fouls, and the whole team will work on assists.”

Coach Law kept talking about the will to win and Cody kept looking at Bobbi’s numbers. I was wondering if Cody was going soft on Bobbi. Ashley had a copy of Bobbi’s numbers, too, and she wanted to write them up in
The Palette.

The game started and I gave up everything to work on the boards. The dude I was up against, a West Indian brother I knew, was strong and did a lot of pushing but he couldn’t really sky. I was snatching bounds pretty easy.

The whole thing was that all of us went into the game with Bobbi’s numbers in our heads. It was a little freaky at first, but I didn’t want to fall down on my count.

In the end we beat them. No, we crushed them. Okay, we left them bleeding and whimpering on the court! Cody scored thirty points and was getting so mean I had to help Powell defend him. I only scored sixteen points because I’m a merciful kind of guy.

I felt great about the game and especially about beating Powell. But the way that Ashley wrote it up in
The Palette
you would have thought that Bobbi beat Powell all by herself.

I saw Kambui in the media center and he asked me if Bobbi was going to replace me on the team.

“I just hope the coach doesn’t fall in love with those numbers,” I said.

“Did Sidney show up with a picture of a crackhead?”

“No, he gave me a picture of a chess board with numbers on it,” I said. “Very strange.”

M
y cousin says that sometimes people keep hanging on to a symbol that comforts them,” LaShonda said. “So maybe Sidney showed up with that picture of a chess board because he’s only comfortable around chess.”

“No,” Bobbi answered. “It’s not just a picture, it’s a coded message.”

Can you crack it?

Copyright © 2010 by Walter Dean Myers
Cover Art Copyright © 2010 By Leo Espinosa
Cover Design By Elizabeth B. Parisi

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First edition, August 2010

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eISBN 978-0-545-34755-6