Basketball Disasters (8 page)

Nora raised her hand. “Why are they filled with ice?”

“It’s easier to hammer the nails against some kind
of surface,” Mason’s mom said. “It gives you more control.”

“But—where would colonial people have gotten ice? They didn’t have freezers.” Nora’s face furrowed with another question. “And where would they have gotten cans?”

“They would have used flat sheets of tin, hammering them on a wooden table. Then they bent them into a lantern shape.”

“Where did they get the tin?”

Now Mason’s mother looked perplexed. Sooner or later, Nora always came up with a question the parent helpers couldn’t handle.

Even Coach Joe seemed stumped by this one. He looked up from helping a student to reply. “I believe they imported it from England,” he told Nora.

“But where did
they
get it? Are there tin mines, like coal mines? I never heard of tin mines. And if there were tin mines in England, why weren’t there tin mines in America?”

“Those are good questions we can try to answer during library time,” Coach Joe said. “But now we want to finish our punched-tin lanterns before the ice melts.”

Before the ice melts even more
. Mason’s lantern was
already leaking melted ice water onto his desk. Luckily his mother had brought in towels for everyone to place under their cans. She had really thought of everything. Mason was impressed. It wasn’t as if she supervised the making of twenty-five punched-tin lanterns every day.

A howl went up from across the room. It was Dunk.

“My finger! I hammered my finger!”

Maybe Mason’s mother hadn’t thought of everything. She hadn’t thought of Dunk hammering his own finger instead of hammering his can. At least he had hammered his
own
finger; usually it was the person sitting next to Dunk who ended up injured.

Dunk was bawling as if he were two years old instead of almost ten.

“Oh, Dunk, let me see.” Mason’s mom examined Dunk’s finger. “I think it’ll be all right. Put your finger in the ice, inside your can, and go down to the health room, so they can take a look at it,” she suggested, exchanging glances with Coach Joe, who nodded his approval.

Sniffling now, Dunk left the room, sucking his
wounded finger much more like a big baby than like a Killer Whale.

“I’m going to hang my lantern on my Christmas tree,” Brody told Mason. “Along with my pomander ball and my corn-husk doll. But I won’t light a candle in it so the tree won’t catch on fire and burn the house down.”

Good idea
.

“What are you going to do with yours?” Brody asked Mason.

Mason’s design on his can was just the letter
M: M
for “Mason.”

“Is
M
for ‘Mom’? Are you going to give it to your mom for Christmas?”

Another good idea
.

“Uh-huh,” Mason said.

Maybe his dad would like a lovely pomander ball for his underwear drawer.

And maybe Dog would like a nice, chewable corn-husk doll.

“Now that we have ten players, will you still put Dylan in to play?” Mason asked his dad as he and his
parents were driving to the Y Saturday morning for their second game of the season.

Mason knew what his dad was going to say before he said it.

“Of course! Mason—”

“The coaching book says—”

“No! I don’t need to read a coaching book to know that every kid gets a chance to play. I’d rather lose every single game all season long than not give all kids an equal chance to play.”

Mason had a feeling his dad was going to get his wish.

The team they were playing today—green shirts—had two of Brody’s other friends on it: Sheng and Julio. Brody ran over to greet them when he arrived in the gym a few minutes after Mason.

Mason scowled in Brody’s direction. There was no need to be so chummy with the enemy team.

Coach Dad put Mason in to start this time, along with Jeremy, Kevin, Nora, and Elise.

Mason passed to Nora every chance he got. He always felt better when the ball was in Nora’s capable hands. One time he passed to Nora even when Elise and Jeremy were in a better position to shoot.

Sheng was guarding Nora; he stole the ball, took it down the court, shot, and scored.

Mason thought of all the reasons he had never really liked Sheng.

“Mason, look to see who’s open!” his dad called to him.

Mason still thought Nora not-open was a better bet than anybody else open.

The next time he tried to pass to Nora, Sheng leaped for the ball again. Mason was sure he saw Sheng’s shoulder bump against Nora’s, but the ref didn’t call a foul; it was a different ref this time, not Jonah.

Sheng scored again.

Mason thought of all the reasons he positively disliked Sheng.

Even with Mason’s turnovers, the score was tied 12–12 at the half. Four of the Fighting Bulldogs’ baskets were Nora’s; one was Jeremy’s, one Elise’s.

Mason hoped he would have at least one in-game basket to his credit before the season—and his illustrious basketball career?—was over forever.

At the halftime huddle, Coach Dad told the team to be sure to look to see who was open before passing
to anybody. He didn’t name any names, but Mason was sure everybody knew who he was talking about.

Brody played the second half; unfortunately, so did Dylan. Mason watched from the bench as Dylan managed to keep out of the way most of the time. Mason didn’t see anybody passing to him, which was for the best. The ref didn’t make any other bad calls that Mason noticed. Brody scored twice; Amy and Elise each scored once.

With twelve seconds left, the score was still tied: 20–20. The Y didn’t allow fourth-grade games to go into overtime, so if no one scored in the next twelve seconds, the game would be recorded as a tie.

The ball went out of bounds. Brody took the ball for the in-bounds pass. From the bench, Mason saw him scan the court, looking for an open player.

The only person open was Dylan. The other team seemed to have given up on guarding him, apparently viewing him as a random kid in a yellow T-shirt who had wandered aimlessly out onto the court but wasn’t really part of the game.

Brody passed to Dylan.

The ball bounced off Dylan’s chest. He grabbed it and made the worst shot in the history of basketball. The ball went straight up, two pathetic feet, nowhere near the basket, proving that there was no need for a green-shirted player to waste any time guarding Dylan.

Julio was on the ball in a flash, hurling it toward another kid who was in position to score.

Fwee!
The ref blew his whistle to signal the end of the game. The Fighting Bulldogs had lost 22–20.

Because of Dylan.

No. Because of
Brody
.

“Terrific game, team!” Coach Dad said, after the team handshake, during which Mason was once again able to avoid any actual finger-to-finger contact with the other players.

Terrific game?
Had his father failed to notice that the Fighting Bulldogs had lost?

“What a difference from last week!” Coach Dad went on.

Mason had to admit that having players who knew how to play had been a definite improvement.

As if reading Mason’s thoughts, his dad said, “It was great having a full roster, wasn’t it? But you original Bulldogs have also improved by leaps and bounds.”

Except for Dylan, who couldn’t have made a leap or a bound if his life depended on it.

How could Brody have passed to
Dylan
?

Mason stalked past Brody and his family on the way out to the parking lot. He was so mad that it was better to avoid Brody altogether than to say anything right now.

But Brody caught up with him. “I made us lose,” Brody said in a small voice.

Correct!

Mason’s dad laid a hand on Brody’s slumped shoulder. “I told you all to pass to someone who was open. Dylan was the only one open. Nobody else passed to Dylan for the entire time he was in the game. So you did a kind thing, Brody, to make Dylan feel like he’s truly part of our team.”

Part of our losing team
.

Brody’s face brightened. Brody was incapable of staying sad for very long. “I bet we win next time!”

“I bet so, too,” Coach Dad said.

Mason didn’t say anything.

By the next practice, Mason had forgiven Brody. He and Brody had been best friends since Little Wonders Preschool. Mason wasn’t going to stop being best friends with Brody because of one basketball game.
Besides, he wasn’t as mad at Brody for a bad pass as for having talked him into playing basketball in the first place, and so far Mason had managed to forgive Brody for that.

This is going to be great!
Ha!

The colonial craft that week was writing “mottoes”—inspirational sayings—on parchment with a cartridge pen filled with real ink. Colonial people would have used a quill pen made out of a feather, and they would have made their ink out of crushed berries.

Brody, Nora, and Mason all wrote Ben Franklin sayings.

Brody wrote, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Nora wrote, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Mason wrote, “The worst wheel of a cart makes the most noise.”

In Coach Joe’s class the worst and noisiest wheel, in Mason’s opinion, was Dunk. Dunk’s cartridge pen kept blotting. After fifteen minutes, Dunk had ink on his fingers, his nose, even one ear. Sheng laughed at Dunk, and Dunk threatened to smear ink on Sheng. The American Revolution would have broken out all over again if Coach Joe hadn’t stepped in to make peace.

On Saturday the Fighting Bulldogs lost their third game in a row, 24–18. Mason had almost scored a basket in the third quarter—the ball had teetered on the rim so long that Brody was already slapping him on the back in congratulation. And then, as if by doomed magic, the ball had refused to go in.

“But look how close we’re getting,” Coach Dad told the team when they all went out for pizza afterward.

Mason didn’t bother to point out that the score had actually been closer the game before, so that technically they were getting worse, not better. He focused on the thought that in a few more weeks, basketball season would be over forever.

Thanksgiving break stretched ahead—long, delicious days with no school, no basketball practice, no basketball game, undisturbed time to hang out with Dog from morning to night.

So long as Dog didn’t place any one of his three paws on Mrs. Taylor’s lawn.

Mason still had never laid eyes on Mrs. Taylor in the flesh. All he had seen of her was a blurry face at the upstairs window. But he had a good image of her in his mind: toothless—no, maybe with one blackened tooth to make her look like a jack-o’-lantern—a beaked nose—wild, staring eyes—wisps of uncombed white hair—a black peaked hat.…

What if Mrs. Taylor had moved next door, not to a kind, gentle, wonderful dog like Dog, but to a barking, biting dog like Dunk’s dog, Wolf? Last summer, Wolf had attacked Dog and injured him so badly that Dog had had to go to veterinary urgent care. How
would Mrs. Taylor like living next door to a dog like that?

On the afternoon before Thanksgiving, Mason was out in the driveway dribbling up and down with Brody and Dog.

“Are you going somewhere tomorrow? For Thanksgiving?” Brody asked. “I’m going to my grandparents’ house.”

Mason shook his head. All his relatives lived far away, and no one in his family felt like flying on a busy holiday weekend. So he and his parents and Dog would have their own little Thanksgiving dinner at home. Mason was glad that his mother always made normal holiday food for Thanksgiving—turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes. But then she did strange things with the leftovers. Pakistani turkey curry had been the worst, as Mason recalled.

Brody gave Dog one last hug, and both boys went inside.

The phone was ringing as Mason came into the house. His mother picked it up.

“Who is this, please? … Oh, Dunk.… How is your finger? … I’m glad.… Yes, he’s right here.”

She handed the phone to Mason, who stared at it
as if it were under some kind of enchantment. Dunk had come to the house once, to give Dog a present after Dog got hurt by Wolf, but he had never called Mason on the phone.