A Game Worth Watching (9 page)

A
high-pitched shriek erupted from Ashley as she threw herself at Emma and
wrapped her scrawny arms around Emma’s waist. “Thank you, thank you, thank
you!”

“Okay,
okay.” Emma tried to wriggle free, noticing there was more strength in this
tiny figure than she’d originally thought. “Get off me.”

Ashley
laughed but released Emma and stumbled backward. She shoved her hand into her
bag and pulled out her wallet.

Emma
grabbed Ashley’s wrist. Not hard enough to leave bruises, but hard enough to
relay to the freshman the seriousness of her next statement. “Rule number one,
I don’t take your money. Rule number two, you do what I say when I say it. Rule
number three, you tell no one about this. Got it?” No way would Emma allow this
kid to humiliate her in any way, shape, or form.

“Yes,
anything,” Ashley said, not threatened at all. “When do we start?”

Emma
sighed, wondering how much she’d regret this arrangement later. “When do you
want to start?”

“Now?”

Emma
laughed, knowing Ashley was completely serious. As tempting as the immediate
start time didn’t sound, she needed a break from girls and prep time to figure
out how to deal with one on an individualized basis for any length of time.
“How about tomorrow after practice?”

***

Emma
didn’t know anything about coaching. Everything she’d learned about basketball
she’d learned from Riley and his dad. The Ledgers had moved in down the street
when Emma was nine. The day after they arrived, Riley appeared in his driveway
next to a portable basketball hoop, dribbling a basketball and putting up shots
like nothing else in the world mattered. She rode her bike, or rather one of
her brother’s bikes, back and forth in front of his house, checking out the new
kid before her brothers got to him and turned him against her. Her brothers had
never been keen on sharing their friends with their little sister, so the only
way Emma had a shot at befriending the boy was to reach him first.

As
soon as he saw her, Riley gave her the head-to-toe look-over, assessing her
assessing him. She could only imagine what he must have seen: a girl with holey
jeans, hair askew, and dirt smeared across her face and caked under her chipped
fingernails. She expected him to insult her and shoo her away like a stray cat,
but he surprised her.

He
looked at the basketball in his hands and then squinted back at her. “You
play?”

Did
watching her brothers count? Rather than answer verbally, she shrugged.

“Well,
do you wanna play?” he asked tentatively.

She
shrugged again, not wanting to appear desperate for his friendship. “Sure.”

Emma
hopped off her bike and joined him in his driveway.

He
passed her the ball. “I’m Riley, by the way.”

“I’m
Emma.”

They
took turns shooting—Riley making all of his shots and Emma missing all of
hers. A few minutes later they heard a deep chuckle behind them.

“I’m
gone for five minutes, and you’ve already found yourself a girlfriend?”

“Dad,”
Riley groaned. “Emma’s not my girlfriend. She’s a basketball player.”

“Emma,
is it?” Mr. Ledger looked into her eyes, like she was a real person, and
extended his hand to shake hers. “Nice to meet you.”

Riley
could have told his dad she was
Superman
, and it would have had the same effect
on her. It made her stand a little taller, raise her chin a little higher, and
feel like she could take on the world. For the first time in her life, she
wasn’t a stupid girl or a little sister or a brat. She was a basketball player;
she had a purpose. She liked the way it sounded. Right then and there, Emma
decided she would do whatever it took to be a basketball player. It didn’t hurt
that Riley’s dad wanted Riley to be the best, and for him to be the best, he
had to play against the best. So that’s what Riley and his dad did—they
made Emma into the best basketball player they could.

Whether
it was their shared love of basketball, an only child’s desire for a sibling,
or a lonely girl’s need for a friend, Riley and Emma had been inseparable ever
since.

Now,
trying to figure out how to teach the game she only knew how to play, she tried
to remember how Mr. Ledger had taught her. Patience, humor, and the loving
touch of a father. He’d shown her how to hold the ball for a shot, how to
absorb the ball into her hands to dribble rather than slap at it, how to face
an opponent without fear. Mr. Ledger showed her all the things her dad never
had time to teach her.

Somehow,
during those basketball lessons, Emma learned to trust the Ledgers more than
her own family. Maybe it was because the Ledgers gave her cherry popsicles and
warm-baked cookies; reassuring smiles and high-fives. Maybe it was because
Riley made her laugh, and his parents always seemed happy to see her. Sometimes
it felt wrong to go to Mr. and Mrs. Ledger when she had a question or problem
only a parent could answer rather than to her own dad; sometimes it felt wrong
that she felt safer with Riley than her own brothers. After all, families were
supposed to stick together. Maybe her parents saw how she sometimes wished she
were a Ledger rather than a Wrangton; maybe that’s why her mom left and her dad
pushed her away.

Emma
shook her head. The past was the past. What she needed to do now was figure out
a way to teach the freshman how to play basketball.

The
school day passed and she still hadn’t formulated a plan. Ashley, attaching
herself to Emma’s side throughout their entire team practice, as if fearing
Emma would forget about their deal, didn’t help. Talk about suffocation. If the
kid could actually dribble without tripping and taking everyone else down with
her, it may not have been so bad, but as it was, Emma had tripped over her
twice already.

Practice
finally ended, but Emma didn’t start her individualized instruction with Ashley
until everyone left the gym. Ashley was entirely focused. On Emma. Like Emma
was a professional basketball player or something. Completely annoyed, Emma
hoped she’d survive their one-on-one practice without strangling the kid.

Ashley
was small for her age in size and shape, and she was limited in experience. She
hadn’t figured out how to use her boney elbows to gain respect on the court, so
everyone jostled her. It didn’t help that Ashley always managed to put her body
in the line of action and get run over. The shortest distance between two
points was a straight line, but Ashley needed to learn how to take the scenic
route to the basket once in a while.

Emma
didn’t have a clue where to start with the disaster standing in front of her.
Taking a deep breath, she held a basketball in front of Ashley’s face, hoping
words would come if she started talking. “This,” she said, “is a basketball.” A
person couldn’t get any more basic than that.

Ashley
stared at the ball, her eyebrows arched over wide eyes, her lips slightly
parted, and she leaned slightly forward as if smelling a flower.

“You
control the basketball.” Emma held the ball against Ashley’s stomach. “The
basketball does not control you. Got it?”

Ashley
nodded.

Having
seen Ashley’s lack of talent in practice, Emma started with the absolute basics
to get the kid used to having a ball in her hands without fumbling it. For the
next two hours,
two
hours!
, Emma taught Ashley how to dribble. Not between the legs or behind
the back or some fancy trick move that would end in tragedy, but the basic one
dribble at a time. Left hand, right hand, straight line, zigzag, waist high,
knee high. In two hours, Ashley became a dribbler.

“How
far away from school do you live?” Emma asked as they returned the basketballs
to the rack.

Ashley
shrugged. “About a mile.”

“Do
you usually take the bus?”

Ashley
nodded. “Except on Friday’s when my mom brings me.”

“Starting
tomorrow you walk to school and you dribble a basketball the entire way.
Dribble with your right hand half way and then switch to your left. Got it?”
Emma expected the kid’s jaw to drop in shock or for high-pitched complaints to
come spouting out of her mouth, but Ashley just nodded again like Emma’s
demands made total sense. What would motivate a freshman to sacrifice her
leisure bus rides to school in exchange for a one-mile dribble trek without
complaint?

“Except
on Fridays,” Emma threw in. What she wouldn’t give to have Friday morning
commutes with her own mom. “You can have Friday’s off. Okay?”

Another
nod. Emma got the distinct feeling she could tell this kid to jump off a bridge
into ice cold water every morning, and she’d do it.

“Thank
you,” Ashley said. “I’ve learned so much from you. I already feel like a better
player.”

“Yep.”

Ashley
may have felt like a better player, but she still had a
long
way to go.

“I
mean it,” Ashley said, lighting up like a six-year-old at Christmas. “You’re an
amazing coach.”

Emma
scowled at the freshman. “I’m not a coach.”

Coaches—good
coaches—played a significant role in the life of an athlete. They built
people into players, guiding them to be better and do better, training them to
overcome whatever obstacles tried to take them down. Coaches inspired and
motivated a team to unite together and strive for perfection. It took a better
person than Emma to be a coach, and just because she taught the kid a few
skills didn’t mean she was a coach. Not even close.

***

Emma
didn’t live far from school. It wasn’t a hop, skip, or jump away, but when she
didn’t have a car, a bike, or even a skateboard, walking was the next best
thing. The darkness never scared her. She knew how to kick and scream and throw
a decent punch, and unless someone needed the day’s Physics notes, no one would
attack a girl who possessed no money or valuables. Her lack of appeal was good
considering she’d just endured a full school day, a two-and-a-half-hour team
practice, and another two-hour practice with Ashley. Yes,
two hours!
She had only planned to stay
for twenty minutes tops, but when she looked at the clock, two hours had
passed. Her legs felt like rubber, her arms like dead weights, and her backpack
seemed to weigh five hundred pounds. By the time she approached the driveway to
her house, her eyes were half closed and her feet shuffled along the ground.

“Hey.”

One
word, plus the silhouette of a person popping out from behind the bushes in
front of her house when the world was pitch black, caused Emma to jump back in
alarm. It wasn’t an overreacting girly response complete with some high-pitched
scream—no way would she sink to that level—but it was the response
of any normal person being attacked at night. Her hand curled into a fist and
her arm pulled back ready to swing at her attacker, when she recognized Riley’s
face. “Geez,” she gasped, clutching his arm. “Could you not scare me to death
next time?”

Moonless
night and a boy dressed in black jumping out from the bushes wasn’t her idea of
an acceptable greeting.

“Wasn’t
practice over three hours ago?” Riley demanded. “Why are you home so late?”

“What
are you, my warden?”

He
just stared at her, waiting for an answer.

Riley
was the last person she wanted to tell about how her post-practice time was now
devoted to babysitting some incompetent freshman girl and teaching her the
fundamentals of basketball. It would be like telling him she had to be tutored
in remedial math as a senior. He would laugh, he would accuse her of growing
soft, or worse, he would actually agree with the whole arrangement. A true
confession was not in her best interest. She stifled a yawn. “I had stuff to
do.”

“What
kind of stuff?”

She
shrugged. “Stuff. What’s with the interrogation?”

“You’re
not two-timing me, are you?”

Two-timing?
Was he serious? She squinted at him, trying to see if he was joking, but it was
hard to tell in the dark. “What kind of question is that?”

He
shrugged, not in a nonchalant way, but in an I-know-you’re-hiding-something
kind of way. “Depends on what kind of answer you give.”

“My
answer hasn’t changed,” she said flatly, rolling her eyes and pushing past him.
She was too tired to play his ridiculous games, especially after spending two
hours with a freshman. Riley and Emma were friends. Aside from all the recent
kissing action, there’d never been anything more than friendship between them,
and two-timing didn’t exist with friends.

“So,
does that mean you haven’t found yourself a boyfriend?” He didn’t bother trying
to block her way into the house, knowing she would spin around and retrace her
steps to face him.

She
opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. How was she supposed to
respond to that question? Boyfriend? Where in the world did he get such an
absurd idea?

He
leaned toward her. “Because if you’ve found yourself a boyfriend, I need to
meet him and put him through the worthy test.”

She
crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows. This ought to be good. “The worthy
test?”

“Yes,
the worthy test.”

He
was completely serious. They’d had a lot of conversations throughout their
eight years of friendship and they’d covered a lot of topics, but worthy tests
were definitely not among them. Now, as he plunged them into new territory, her
curiosity peaked. “Which is?”

“You
know, the general Q and A.” He started counting on his fingers. “What is his
motive for dating you, what are his intentions, and how well
he thinks
he
knows you? If he passes, I will guide him through the proper steps on how to
court you, and I will personally chaperone all interactions between the two of
you for evaluation purposes until he can be trusted.”