Front and Center (4 page)

Coach K fiddled with his pen. That's the thing. That coach from the University of Minnesota? The one you talked to last month? She called me this morning."

"Called
you?
"

"She wanted me to give you a heads-up that another girl committed—committed verbally. So they only have one scholarship left."

"Oh. But I'm not going to college next year."

"You don't understand." He looked at me like this was really important. After I heard his next bit, I knew why. They only have one scholarship left for
your
year. For juniors. That's the thing. These kids verbal so early that if you don't get out there,
right now
...even if a school wants you, there won't be any scholarships left."

I
'D WALKED INTO COACH K'S OFFICE
all worried that he was going to pressure me to play point guard, like that was the worst news I could ever hear. Ha. Playing point was nothing compared to this tornado. That not only did I need to
show leadership,
but I also needed to start calling colleges and proving to all the hundreds of coaches out there that I was an all-around versatile, naturally leading player. Which was going to be that much more difficult given that I already had a whole bunch of other strikes against me, like no sophomore season and no summer ball and so-so grades and a family that doesn't have their act together enough to know you have to verbal
two years ahead.

So now in addition to my gigantic backpack of homework and gigantic duffel of old gym clothes that had been sitting in my gym locker for six weeks getting not so fresh, I had the shopping bag of letters, too, and not a clue in the world where to go. I didn't want to go to the library, that was for sure. It wasn't like I could just sit down and work on Spanish, or think about whatever it was that happened two hundred years ago that I didn't give a hoot about. Not with what was going on inside my head.

I finally ended up parked outside the middle school, wondering if I looked like the moms who were sitting there waiting. Like a middle-aged woman who spent her days driving around Red Bend as an unpaid chauffeur. Had those moms gone to college? Had they had a big old shopping bag of college envelopes once? Was this how I'd end up, when all this was said and done, in twenty or thirty years? Maybe it didn't really matter where I went to college or even if I went at all, not if I was going to end up right back where I'd started, parked outside the Red Bend Middle School gym.

Wow. I'd thought I couldn't feel worse, but would you look at that—now I did.

Curtis showed up finally, and took one look at me and leaned way over against the passenger door. Didn't speak the whole ride home. By the time I noticed, however, it was too late. I mean, if I tried to speak after all that quiet, my first word wouldn't just shatter the silence, it would shatter all the air as well and we'd probably end up suffocating. Which made me feel just that much better, to know I wasn't even connecting with my little brother, who needs all the connections he can get.

But we made it home, finally, and lugged our junk into the warm kitchen, Dad on the phone at the stove while Smuthad a little heart attack because I was back and she'd been so worried. At least getting her calmed down helped calm me down a little bit too. And I put the shopping bag in a corner and set the table same as always, listening to Dad say in a tired voice that we were doing just fine.

It's been pretty funny, actually, watching all the Red Bend ladies try to figure out what to do. Normally when there's a big family tragedy—not to sound awful, but it's been a while now with Win, and I guess I'm a little too used to it—well, all the church ladies and town ladies get together and make a bunch of meals they take turns bringing over. Only in our house Dad does the cooking and is totally into it, probably because cooking for him is still new and exciting. And he made it known that we were okay without all that extra food. He'd even given a couple of ladies advice on seasonings, which went over about as well as it would have the other way around, and so now the ladies still wanted to help but hadn't a clue in the world how.

We didn't say too much at supper, though I did ask Curtis how things were going and he said okay, and even admitted he got top score on a science quiz, which you could see made Dad's night, hearing that, and made me pretty happy too, that my brother's so smart and I actually got him to say it out loud. As we were cleaning up Mom called, which she does every night to let us know she's still Mom, and after she caught up with Dad, she said that Win wanted to talk with me.

It should have been nice, the thought of Win getting his special headphones on just to talk to his little sister. But here's the thing: he didn't want to talk
with
me, really; he just wanted to talk
at
me. About practice and all the basketball things I still needed to work on. All I could think about was how much it must suck for Mom to be stuck with him all day long, Win probably on her case nonstop to strengthen her back and lose weight, which on the one hand is a good idea but it wasn't like she didn't have enough going on already. Although it really does make him happy, as happy as he can ever be, to boss folks around, and she'd probably put up with it for that reason alone.

You really need to start thinking about college, you know." How does he
do
that? He's like a dog that can smell fear, only instead of fear he just sniffs out really awkward conversations.

"Yeah, Win. I've got the letters already."

"What letters?" he asked. If he were a dog, right now his ears would be sticking straight up.

God, I was stupid to bring this up. "Nothing. Just—it's just some mail I got from coaches because of that dumb
People
thing. A whole bunch of them sent letters and stuff."

Win can't move much, but still I could hear him sitting up straighter—sitting up mentally. This was just the sort of thing he'd work to death. "What do they say?"

"I don't know, okay? I just got home. I haven't had time to open them yet."

"Are there any scholarship offers?"

"Yeah, right. No one's going to send me a scholarship like that—"

"You don't know that," Win said sharply. "I know this guy who got written up in
Sports Illustrated,
a tiny article, and he got eleven—"

"Yeah, well, this isn't
Sports Illustrated.
" The only reason that stupid article even got printed was because the
People
people thought it was hilarious that players from rival football teams were going out. It had been one of the reasons Brian and I had broken up, actually, that article. One of the bigger reasons. Which I bet the
People
people wouldn't care about even if they knew. "Listen—I've gotten letters like this before, okay? They'll just say that they're interested in me and I need to get in touch and blah blah blah."

"Because
they
can't call
you,
you know."

"I
know
that." Did Win know he was echoing everything Coach K already told me? "I know they can't call."

"So you need to start calling them. Like tonight."

"I
know!
Will you just—it's been a really long day, okay? My coach is already breathing down my neck about this stuff."

"Because those Division I scholarships don't hang around, you know. I bet some schools have met their quota already. They only have fifteen scholarships total—"

"I know, okay?"

"Men's basketball only has thirteen."

Okay, I didn't know that. That was kind of cool, actually, that women get two more than the men do. That for once women's sports is in the bonus. But I was nowhere near calm enough to absorb that little factoid, let alone discuss it or anything. "Can we please talk about this later?" Like never?

"We need to talk about it now," Win said in his super-annoying reasonable voice. "I mean, this
is
your future."

This time I didn't say
I know.
I thought it. In my brain I was screaming it; if I'd opened my mouth I would probably have broken his eardrum screaming. Instead I just nodded. And sighed this really huge sigh. "Yeah," I said finally. "Listen, I've got homework, okay?"

"Keep me posted on all this."

Like I had a choice. Like Win would ever let it rest. The whole month of November had been one giant Win pressure cooker, him going on and on and on about my training. Which had been good, really it had been, because it meant that I was now in great shape and super ready for the season, and it had also given us something to talk about, and had given Win something to think about beyond the fact he was going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, which is a pretty awful thing to be stuck dwelling on twenty-four hours a day. But that's why it had been so great to get home to Red Bend, because it meant getting away from Win. And now, because I stupidly mentioned those stupid envelopes, I was right back in pressure cooker land.

So, even though I had a ton and a half of homework, I cleared off the kitchen table and dumped the bag of envelopes out. Win was going to call back—maybe even tonight, but definitely in the next few days—and he'd put the screws in me bigtime if I let something as important as this slide (which is how he would phrase it, not even considering the homework I had and the fact that just looking at the envelopes made me feel like crawling under the couch for the entire rest of my life). Then I sat back and stared at the pile.

Curtis wandered in and caught me sitting there looking nine kinds of miserable. I figured he'd back out right away, seeing as misery isn't something he seeks out ever. But instead he took me completely by surprise. "What's this?" he asked, picking an envelope off the floor.

"Basketball," I said, in the tone you'd use to say Projectile Vomiting.

His eyebrows went up. "All these people wrote
you?
"

"Yes, they wrote
me.
Why, is there something wrong with me?"

"No, it's just..." He sat down. "You're thinking about San Diego?"

"No, I'm not thinking about San Diego! That's like on the other side of the country."

He looked up at me. "Then why is it here?"

"Because they
mailed
it to me, pea brain—"

"I mean, you should put it in a different pile. A reject pile."

"Oh. Yeah." Since this was only the smartest thing I'd heard all week. And I felt pretty pea-brainish myself for not thinking of it.

We ended up going through the stack, putting most of the envelopes into a cardboard box, and Curtis even wrote
TOO FAR AWAY
on the outside, just to make the point. He couldn't have been nicer about the whole thing, making jokes about Oklahoma and Arizona and all these other states I can barely find on a map. He even got our beat-up old atlas out of the Caravan so we could see where all these places were, and some of them looked pretty darn far. I mean, as much as I want to be out of Red Bend, I don't want to be out of it forever.

We finally had about a dozen schools in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Michigan's UP, and Iowa and Illinois. And some of them were Big Ten schools, or other state schools like UW–Milwaukee and UM–Duluth. Plus smaller ones I'd never heard of although that doesn't mean much, but at least they were close, close as in a-couple-hours-of-driving close versus taking an airplane. Which is why for example the University of Michigan was right out, because I sure didn't want to have to fly over big old Lake Michigan whenever I wanted to come home.

This was just the first step, I knew, going through those letters. Maybe none of these schools even wanted me anymore, or wouldn't once they got to know me, or maybe they wouldn't have anything left money-wise, and there were probably a million other things I didn't even know to worry about that had already gotten me crossed off their lists. But at least I was doing
something
instead of just sitting around feeling awful, doing something I could report to Win. Plus Curtis started doing this routine, once we got my little pile in order, of going through them and saying "Big Ten! Big Ten!" whenever he got to one of those, with this really goofy grin.

Big Ten—see, Big Ten is a really big deal. Way back when I was a kid, Win explained that it really should be called Big Eleven because there are eleven schools in the conference, but he's right that "Big Eleven" sounds dumb. Big Ten is
really
big when it comes to football—which is why it was such an enormous deal when Bill got that scholarship to the University of Minnesota. It shows what an amazing player he is even if Minnesota doesn't have the world's best team—and it's pretty big in basketball too. Even women's basketball. Not big like Tennessee or Connecticut, but not too far off. So the fact they were sending me letters was pretty darn freaky. Kind of like getting a letter from Santa, or a lottery ticket or something.

That's what they were, really, a pile of lottery tickets. That's what I was looking at.

Then I took an extra-deep breath and started opening them. I didn't want to, that's for sure, but I knew Win would chew my ear off when he found out I hadn't. And I read them.

Every letter said pretty much the same thing, the first sentence talking about that
People
article and then describing their program, how good it is and their record or their improvement if their record wasn't so good, and how much I would contribute to the team and how I should keep them posted on my season and call them at such and such a number whenever I wanted. The only letter that was a little bit different was from the University of Minnesota, because the U of M coach had a bit more personal stuff to say about how nice my unofficial visit had been and even though I couldn't visit "officially" until next year, I could come by anytime and all I needed to do was call her.

Their sameness was even more obvious the second time I read through them, all of them saying call me, call me, call me right this minute! All those coaches working flat out, even when they're reading
People
magazine if you can believe it, tracking down hoops players, reaching out and reaching out over and over, like fishermen trying to catch fish. And here I was at the other end, a little fish, a tiny little one in little Red Bend, Wisconsin, watching all these hooks go by. And all I could think about was the damage those hooks can do to you, especially if you happen to be a fish.