Break Point (2 page)

As we walked down the steps of the porch, Maddy's shoulder brushed against a honeysuckle bush. It sent a sweet, summery smell into the air. A few pink buds stayed caught in her long black hair. I couldn't help wondering if they would make her hair smell like flowers too. It probably wasn't the most appropriate thing to wonder at this moment. I looked away. She would think I was a jerk if she caught me staring at her hair like that.

We walked under a long row of trees, along the white-pebble path that led past the tennis courts and the swimming pool to the back of the property. The grass behind the last row of courts sloped down to the banks of the Rideau River. It was 8:00 am. The courts would normally be filling up with players at this time on a Saturday. Their emptiness cast a strange silence over everything. It was hard to break that silence. It was hard to think of anything to say.

At the river's edge, a blackbird sang in the cattails. A turtle sunned itself on a rock. Maddy took a seat on a bench overlooking the river, and I sat down next to her. It was the kind of place where a guy could hold a girl's hand. But that probably wasn't the right thing to do under the circumstances either.

Maddy didn't say anything. She just looked down at the path and kicked pebbles with the toes of her sneakers.

“Guess we won't be getting air-conditioning in the clubhouse this summer,” I finally said, trying to break the tension with a lame little joke. Every year, the club's board of directors discussed putting ac in the old wooden building. Every year, they decided the club couldn't afford it, and the members had to swelter under the ceiling fans for one more season.

“It's worse than that, Connor.” She raised her eyes to look at me from beneath her dark brows. “You have no idea.”

Again I felt the urge to take her hand. But how could I? She would probably think I was taking advantage of the situation to come on to her. Only creeps did that kind of thing.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“The club owes money,” she said. “A lot of money.”

“A lot?”

She nodded.

“Like…how much?”

“Like, half…” She stopped, as though the words themselves made her gag. Then she spat it out in a rush. “Half a million dollars.”

“Half a million?”

She nodded.

“Why?” I asked. “How?”

Maddy stared out over the river. The flower buds still clung to her hair.

“You know the clubhouse is really old, right?” she said.

“Sure.” I'd seen the photos of the club when it was built in the 1920s, back when Ottawa was a small town and the club was on the outskirts, almost in the countryside.

“And you know the club's a nonprofit?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I even knew what that meant, because my mom worked in charity fundraising. It meant the club was owned by a trust. The money from the membership dues went back into running the tennis programs and the clubhouse, not to some rich owner raking in the dough. The fact that the club was nonprofit was one reason my mom approved of my spending time there, even though she was a crunchy-granola type of person who didn't understand the first thing about tennis.

“We've been members here forever. But my mom only took over as general manager a year ago,” Maddy said. “You wouldn't believe it, Connor. The books were in a total mess. There was barely enough money to keep the place running. And there were all these loans that had been taken out over the years to fix things, and they were never paid back. Then we found out the clubhouse needed all kinds of major repairs. The roof, the wiring— you name it. The club had to take out more loans. It all added up.”

I nodded. I understood exactly what she was talking about. My mom and I had the same problems with our house, although I hadn't told Maddy about it. I hadn't told anyone about it.

“Anyway, there's a deadline coming up next month, when we need to put down a big chunk of money on the debt. A hundred thousand bucks,” Maddy said. “That's why my mom organized this auction. It was supposed to put the club back on the right track. She's been planning it all year, Connor.”

“So what happens now?” I asked.

“You know what happens to people who can't pay the mortgage on their house, right?”

“Yeah. They lose the property,” I said. No one needed to tell me that. I knew it from firsthand experience.

“Same thing,” said Maddy. “We lose the club.”

I followed Maddy's gaze out over the river. A great blue heron rose from the water with heavy wing strokes. Ducks floated among the reeds. There weren't many places like this left in the city. The property must be worth a huge chunk of cash. What would happen if the club was sold at a mortgage-foreclosure auction? Maybe the new owners would turn it into an exclusive private club, for rich kids only. It would become the kind of place I couldn't afford in a million years. Or maybe they would tear it down and build something else. Maybe it wouldn't be a tennis club at all.

“I love this place,” said Maddy. “I don't want to lose it.”

I wanted to put my arm around her and tell her not to worry, that I would save her club. But that would just be boasting and bragging. We didn't know who had trashed the place. I couldn't even go and punch their lights out, let alone fix the damage they'd done.

My fingers itched for my tennis racket. I wanted the satisfaction of pummeling a serve past a stunned opponent, of whipping a backhand straight down the line. I wanted to get up and fight back, not just sit around watching things fall apart.

On the tennis court, I knew how to fight back.

If only it could be that easy in real life.

chapter three

Three days had passed since the break-in, and the cops hadn't arrested anyone. Everyone was talking about the goons who'd ruined the auction, but no one understood what it really meant for the club. No one except Maddy, her mom and me.

If the members had understood what was going on, there wouldn't have been such a happy, summer-vacation atmosphere at the club. People wouldn't have been laughing and slapping each other on the back and heading up to the porch for drinks after their games. They wouldn't have been acting like the good times at the club were guaranteed to go on forever.

Good times can disappear in a heartbeat. I knew all about that.

It had happened to me a year ago. One night my dad hadn't come home from work. He was a manager at a restaurant, so it was normal for him to work late. But that night he didn't come home at all, and there was no trace of him at the breakfast table the next morning. Later that day, he showed up at my school to take me and my sisters out for lunch and “explain things.” He “explained” that he had been having an affair for two years and that he was leaving Mom to go and live with his girlfriend. For two years, the solid ground of my family had been crumbling beneath my feet, and I hadn't even noticed until the moment it all collapsed.

It was like that with the people at the tennis club—they had no idea how unstable the ground was underneath their feet as they served and rallied and called out their scores. They had no idea they could lose it all before the summer was over.

“Serve it up, Connor!” Maddy called from across the court. She bounced lightly on the balls of her feet. Her white tennis skirt swayed against the brown skin of her thighs.

I threw a perfect toss, and I was tempted to wallop the ball full-speed down the T. After all, she was ahead of me 5-4 in our friendly set. But instead, I eased off and sent it to her forehand at about 60 percent power.

I had a secret rule for myself when I played against Maddy—no smoking her with my serves. I hadn't told her about my rule. She would probably be insulted if I did. After all, Maddy was a great player, the top-ranked junior girl in the province. But no girl was used to facing a hundred-mile-an-hour serve. If I creamed her on every serve, we would never get a rally going, and that wouldn't do anything to help my training. Besides, she probably wouldn't want to play against me anymore, and I didn't want that to happen.

Playing tennis was a good way to spend time with Maddy. It was better than going out on a limb and asking her for a date. If she turned me down, I would probably be too embarrassed to ever speak to her again.

Maddy's return came sailing to my forehand. I reamed it down the line into the corner, just beyond the reach of her outstretched racket. 15-0.

Next serve, she drilled the return to my backhand. I slammed it back cross-court, hard and deep to the baseline. We hammered it back and forth until I tried to get fancy and sent a chip shot floating over the net. She sprang forward and finished me off with a sweet smile and a deadly drop shot.

She grinned. “Nice try, Connor.”

15-15.

I resisted the temptation to pound her with a monster serve, and Maddy won the next point on an angled forehand with a vicious topspin.

My next serve landed wide and caromed into the court next to ours. Just my luck.

It happened to be the court where Rex Hunter was training with his private, two-hundred-dollar-an-hour tennis coach. Rex was the second-ranked junior boy in the province and self-anointed God's Gift to Tennis. I was ranked forty-fifth, about as low as the red clay beneath Rex's feet. And while Rex sauntered around the club showing off his boy-band good looks, I was just an ordinary-looking kid, taller and more athletic than average, but with my fair share of zits and bad-hair days.

Rex paused in his training, ran a hand through his wavy blond hair and casually flipped my ball off the ground with his tennis racket.

“Over here,” Maddy called.

Rex turned, beamed his teen-idol smile and tossed the ball to her.

“Thanks!” she said.

I imagined myself at the Donalda Cup Tournament, rubbing Rex's face in the red dirt of the clay courts—metaphorically, of course.

I shook Rex out of my mind and focused on my second serve. I skimmed the ball into the service court like a skipping stone. Maddy's return came back with a spin and bounced low. I smashed it back down the line. But Maddy moved fast, reached the ball and whipped a crosscourt backhand.

The ball came deep and hard. I hit down the line again, but Maddy was already there, anticipating my play. She rifled it crosscourt and I slammed it back, feeling the thrill of matching my strength and wit against hers. For a dozen strokes, she gave as good as she got. Finally, she hit a killer shot that whizzed past my backhand.

15-40. Set point.

Now I really had to beat down the urge to whip my serve at her full-force. Couldn't I bend my rule, just to tie up the game? No, it was better to earn my comeback on a rally, where we faced each other as equals. I went for placement instead of speed, and hit a sweet shot up the middle. It forced her to the backhand. She blocked it. The ball came sailing soft and high over the net, a perfect setup for an overhead smash. I aimed and fired, hammering the ball to her forehand. Somehow, Maddy got there in time and blocked the shot with a diving lunge. I sprang to intercept it at the net. Maddy was overcommitted on her backhand. I dinked it to her forehand. Maddy twisted but couldn't reach it. The ball touched the ground, just wide of the sideline.

“Aargh!” I cried. “Out of bounds! I don't believe it!”

Maddy laughed. “Lucky break for me.”

Game and set, Maddy.

She came to meet me at the net, toweling off the sweat from the nape of her neck beneath her black ponytail.

“Good game, Connor,” she said. Her smile made losing feel not so bad.

“Want to go upstairs for a soda?” she asked.

I checked my watch. I still had twenty minutes before my shift started at noon. “Sure.”

Rex turned to look at us, missing an easy backhand.

“Hunter! Focus!” his coach shouted. I couldn't help smiling. Rex might have the best tennis coach in the city, but I was going for a soda with the only girl at the club who mattered. That was almost as sweet as beating him in straight sets.

We climbed the stairs to the common room. The wreckage from the break-in had been cleared away, but I couldn't help flashing back to the scene in my mind. I could tell by the look on Maddy's face that she was doing the same thing.

“You guys heard anything from the police?” I asked. She shook her head and shrugged. I let it drop.

“How are you getting to the tournament in Toronto this weekend?” she asked.

“Catching a bus,” I said. I wasn't looking forward to spending five hours on a cramped, smelly Greyhound, but Mom couldn't afford to take a day off work to drive me.

“We'll give you a lift,” said Maddy.

“My mom's driving me down.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I'm staying with my Uncle Phil. In Mississauga.”

I tried to sound like Uncle Phil was my best bud, and I'd rather be staying with him in the burbs than in the hotel where everyone else would be rooming. But the fact was, I couldn't afford a hotel room. Almost all the money from my summer job at the club went to pay for equipment and coaching.

“That's no problem,” Maddy said.

“We can drop you off.”

Maddy smiled again, and it spun me off balance, smoked me like a fast drive up the middle. I could barely pull my brains together to mumble, “Thanks.”

We got our sodas and took a seat at a table beside the display case full of the club's trophies. It was weird that the vandals hadn't smashed the case, now that I thought about it. You would expect rows of shiny trophies behind glass to be a magnet for thugs.

Of all the trophies in the case, the silver Archibald Cross Memorial Cup shone the brightest. It had recently been polished, in anticipation of the Archibald Cross Memorial Junior Tennis Tournament, scheduled to take place in August.

“You think all those stories are true?” Maddy asked when she saw me looking at the cup.

“Dunno,” I said. “I guess we'll find out soon.”