Crazy in Love (7 page)

Alex James is standing by to help get the Dragons settled onto the home team benches. Alex is Red’s boyfriend. She’s the one who signed the three-way-virgin pact with Alicia and me right before they started high school. Red dubbed us Abstinence in Action, which was pretty funny, since the whole point was
no
action. She and Alex started dating three weeks later.

I watch Alex with Chris, Red’s brother and the Dragons’ ace scorer. Alex is so good with the kids. “Hey, Alex!” I call.

He pats Chris on the back, then jogs over to me. “Thought you might be here,” he says. “Sandy looks good. She been healthy?”

I nod. “How about Chris?”

He grins. “I’d say Chris thinks Sandy looks good, too.”

I punch his arm. I do not want to think of Sandy ever going through what I’m going through. “So where’s Red?” Red is the Dragons’ biggest, or at least most vocal, fan. She almost refused to take a scholarship to a great private school upstate, just because she never wanted to miss any of Chris’s games. That, and the fact that she and Alex are mad crazy in love, and he’s staying in town and getting an engineering degree from Tri-Community College.

“Red couldn’t get home. I had to promise to call her every time Chris scores. She’ll be here for the Galion game, though.”

“Cool.”

“Mary Jane!” Mom’s calling me from the top of the six-row bleachers.

I wave up at her. “I better get a seat. Later.” Then I start climbing the bleachers. I would never acknowledge my parents at an Attila game, much less sit with them. But the rules of high school don’t apply here. This life, these kids, it’s all a world inside a world, set apart from everything else. We sit with moms at Roy Dale, and nobody cares.

“Where’s Dad?” I ask as I settle next to Mom. She’s wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that advertises her real estate company. The main office gave HOUSE HUNTERS shirts away at open houses last year. Oddly enough, we have a dozen of them in every color.

“He’s running late, but he said he’ll get here as soon as he can.”

We watch as the green and purple starting teams gather in the middle of the court. And the game is on.

Nobody scores until the last minute of the first period, when Chris puts one in from the side. Cheers break out—on both sides. Everybody on the court congratulates Chris, even a couple of guys from the green team. I see Alex holding up his cell to catch the crowd noise, and I know Red’s on the other end, screaming just as loud. There is something very right about those two.

Jeff, our last coach, used to make sure everybody on the team got a chance to play and usually in the first period. Not Michelle. She keeps the good players in as long as possible.

Sandy gets to play in the second period, and Dad shows up just as she’s walking onto the court. Her eyes are searching the gym for him as she strolls out. When she spots him, she waves and yells, “Hi, Daddy! I get to play!” Then she holds her shorts like she did for me and shouts, “Purple!”

Dad waves and shouts back, “Go, Dragons!” because Sandy has told us we can’t say “Go, Sandy,” only “Go, Dragons!” Then he bounds up in the stands and sits with Mom and me.

“So we’re winning,” he says, grinning at our 2-0 rout.

Michelle yells at Sandy to move on the court. For the next ten minutes, Sandy thunders back and forth with her team, but she never touches the ball. Nobody passes it to her. And she’s too polite to fight for it.

One of the green players, number 11, a skeleton of a boy, with knees as knobby as baseballs and a shaved head, keeps watching Sandy. Whenever he catches her attention, he breaks into a big smile. Sandy smiles back, and it’s almost more than the kid can handle. It’s like he can’t take his eyes off her.

But Sandy is focused on that ball. She runs up and down the court with everybody else and holds out her arms. The two best Dragon players, Chris and Matt, hog the ball, as usual, passing it back and forth, both of them shooting. Our old coach used to make them pass it to other team members, even though they were the only ones who ever scored.

I feel so bad for Sandy. Her arms are outstretched. Her face is filled with hope that they’ll throw her the ball. She gets wide open under the basket, and still the boys act like they only see each other.

Then something happens. The ball skids out of Chris’s hands and rolls toward Sandy. She dives for the ball, but the knobby-kneed number 11 green player gets there first. He grabs the ball, dribbles, then stops. His teammates keep running down the court, followed by Dragon defenders, leaving him and Sandy alone on that end.

He grins at Sandy.

She grins back.

Both coaches are screaming.

His teammates are calling for the ball.

Then Green Number 11 kind of hands the ball to Sandy and smiles, as if he’s giving her flowers.

Sandy gives him a smile of thanks as she takes the basketball from him. Then she turns and looks up into the bleachers until her gaze settles on me. Her eyes are big, questioning, as if asking permission. I nod. She shrugs. Then she dribbles once, shoots, and scores.

The fans go wild. We’re all on our feet, cheering and laughing. Everybody loves it, even the green team parents and fans. And nobody looks happier than the skinny kid with a crush on my sister.

Michelle leaves Sandy in for another five minutes, but Sandy’s focus is gone. She tries to follow the ball, moving down the court and up the court as soon as she realizes everybody else is on the move. But she keeps smiling up into the stands at us. And we smile back because you can’t help yourself. Everybody’s smiling at a Special Olympics game. They should make it a law that every human has to attend one once a month. There would be no more road rage, no NBA basketball brawls.

Sandy goes back to the bench, where she stays until the end of the fourth period. The score has risen to 14 to 2, our lead, but Michelle still hasn’t played all the kids. Dad won’t let me go down there and have a little talk with her about this. But I think somebody does because all at once she puts in the last four kids, plus Sandy.

Both purple and green teams cheer for the new players. One of the Dragons, Isaac, has only one arm, but he’s a good shot. I’ve seen him sink layups before. Two of the new Dragon players are girls who are still in middle school. They hold hands and look pretty scared. The fourth, Larry, won’t come out onto the court. He’s autistic. Most of the time we can’t get him to leave the bench. He’s usually okay in practice. In fact, if he can be on the court all by himself, he’s a deadeye shot. I watched him sink eleven three-pointers in a row one day.

Michelle tries to coax him inbounds, but he groans at her and starts rocking back and forth, getting louder, so she leaves him alone.

There’s a jump ball. Everybody misses, and the ball rolls right to Sandy’s feet.

Dad jumps up and yells, “Honey! Pick it up!”

Sandy smiles up into the stands. Then she bends down and picks up the ball.

“Dribble!” Michelle screams.

Sandy smiles. Then she dribbles once and hugs the ball, still grinning. She says something we can’t hear. Then she bounces the ball to Larry, who’s still out of bounds.

Larry catches the ball and stops swaying. He smiles at Sandy, who’s clapping like crazy. Several of her teammates are clapping, too. So is one from the green team.

The whistle blows. The ball, of course, is out of bounds. Larry allows the referee to take the basketball. Then he starts swaying again.

“You’re good, Larry!” Sandy shouts.

“One of these days before too long,” Mom says, “we’re going to get that boy all the way inbounds. You just wait and see.”

We win 14 to 4. But when the game’s over both teams hug each other as if they’ve all won and were all on the same team. And I guess, in a way, we are.

The rents are taking Sandy out for hamburgers, but I pass on the invitation to join them. I walk out the main doors of Roy Dale and head for my car. I’m not ten feet away when the voices are back at it:

9

I lie on my bed,
cell in hand, and stare at the black ceiling. Black, because in a fit of angst right before the start of my senior year, I redecorated my room, starting with the ceiling.
M.J.
had always wanted a totally black room. Fortunately,
Plain Jane
’s voice kicked in before I had a chance to extend my black motif to the walls and floor.

I was halfway through blackening my ceiling and had decided it was a huge mistake when Mom walked in.

“Mary Jane!” she cried. “What is wrong with you? Only sick, sick, sick people paint their ceilings black. Are you taking drugs?”

Her reaction pretty much sealed my fate. “I love the black ceiling, Mom. And you said I could decorate any way I wanted to. It’s
my
room. And no. Not taking drugs. But thanks so much for asking.”

She left, but she sent Dad.

He stood in the doorway, staring in. “Your mother wants me to tell you that your room is still part of my house,” he said evenly. “Our house. Just tell me you’re not planning to paint the whole room black.”

I managed a nervous laugh. “Of course not, Dad.”

He nodded and backed away.

Alicia hadn’t left for college yet, so I made her come over. She’d seen in a magazine how some college kids had painted their dorm rooms with sponges, so the walls looked like marble, or cement, depending on the sponge. All I had was black paint, so she hijacked a gallon of white from her stepdad’s garage. He was too lazy to paint, so he’d never miss it. Then we mixed black and white and dipped sponges and turned my bedroom walls into gray marble cement. It all turned out okay, but I won’t miss my room when I’m off to ISU.

For the tenth time, I punch in Jackson’s phone number, which I’ve looked up and now memorized. But for the tenth time, I click END, instead of SEND. What would I say if he answered?

I pick up the pencil Jackson gave me. It’s white, like his teeth. There’s not a toothmark on it. I inhale the smell of lead and wood, close my eyes, and think of his deep brown eyes, his enormous arms and shoulders.

I am so going to call him. I punch in the number again and stare at my cell screen.

The phone rings. The real phone on my bedside table. I’m so shocked that I drop my cell. The phone rings again. I stare at it.

Finally, I pick it up. “Hello?”

“Hey!” It’s Alicia’s “hey,” and I feel my muscles relax.

“Hey, Alicia.”

“How’d Sandy do?”

“They won.”

“Great! Go, Dragons! Was Red there?”

“Nope. Alex was, though.”

“I got an e-mail from Red. She said Alex is working an eight-hour shift and taking eighteen credit hours. And he still has time to IM her constantly.”

Red and Alex’s relationship has always been a topic of conversation for Alicia and me. “True love, I guess.”

“Mmmm,” she agrees, as if she deeply understands now. “True love.”

I change the subject. “Sandy’s psyched about having you at her game. They’ve got a big one the day after Thanksgiving. I told her you’d be there.”

“And so will Colt! We’re on. I told him all about Sandy and the games. He can’t wait to see one.”

“Great.” I try to sound like I mean it, but I’m already feeling like I’ve lost something.

“So,” Alicia says, “tell. Don’t leave anything out. I want to know every juicy detail about Jackson House.”

I give her the unedited version, including all the grief everybody gave me after the night at Cassie’s and the scene with Nicole in English class when Jackson came back to sit with me. And I finish off with the part about Star giving me the evil eye.

When I finally stop talking, the first words out of Alicia’s mouth are: “Star Simons has always been a two-faced little witch.”

I love Alicia.

“You should have seen her,” I continue. “Anybody looking on—and people were watching us for sure—would swear she was being totally cool to me.”

“I had Star in Spanish last year. Señor Marquez loved her. He thought she was the best thing since sliced tortillas. Neither of them appreciated my rapier wit. She used to give me these evil glares all the time. I know exactly what you’re talking about. I wanted to push her face in.”

I picture Alicia like she was in fourth grade, standing up to those bullies. “Well, I get the feeling Star would like to push
my
face in, and I haven’t even done anything.”

“But you’d like to, right?”

I sigh into the phone for my answer.

“Well, you be careful, Mary Jane. She may look all girl, but I guarantee she’d fight dirty. And she wouldn’t be alone. That girl would have backup.”

I have never been in a fight. “Fight? Come on. The closest I’ve ever come to fighting was that time in elementary school with you, when we faced off those bullies.” I laugh, but I can tell she’s totally serious. We’ve seen plenty of girl-on-girl fights at Attila Ill. “Seriously, I’m not going to fight her, Alicia.”

“Yeah. Well, just make sure
she
doesn’t fight
you.
”