Toby Wheeler (3 page)

         
4

I
t wasn’t the first time I had ever seen a girl at the rec center, but it was the first time I had ever seen
her.
She said her name was Megan. She had long brown hair; a lean, freckled face; and skinny arms. She wore a light blue T-shirt and baggy red shorts, and whenever she shot, she glared at the ball while it was in midair like she was daring it not to go in, which it usually did. Although we had been on the same team all afternoon, “Good game” and “Nice shot” were all we had said.

After three hours of full-court five-on-five, everyone was breathing hard. Sweat hung in the air like storm clouds. It was so humid inside the rec center, the tag-board signs advertising
KARATE
! and
AEROBICS
! were peeling off the brick walls. One was hanging by a single corner.

At the moment, I had the ball at the top of the arc. The game was tied 9–9. I dribbled in place and considered my options. On my right was Goggles. As usual, Goggles was calling for the ball even though he was guarded. I looked inside. Old Dude and Blue Shirt were setting screens for each other on the baseline.

Megan was playing on the perimeter with me. She had a smooth motion and a high-arcing jump shot that floated through the net. On this possession, though, I wanted the ball. I wanted to take it myself. After all, standing between me and the hoop was Vinny Pesto. Ball in hand, I stared him down, hoping to psych him out. Fat chance. Vinny glared back at me. He raised one arm, bent his knees, and tapped his chest.

“You should save your energy and give me the ball now, gym rat.”

“You can’t stop me, Pesto,” I said, showing him a crossover.

Vinny swiped at the ball. “Bring it on.”

Switching the ball from my right hand to my weaker left hand, I drove. Backpedaling, Vinny kept between me and the basket. When I was within six feet of the hoop, I went airborne. I figured I would either get off a shot or dump the ball off to Old Dude for a layin. But as soon as I left the floor, the lane was clogged with bodies, leaving me no room to shoot and nowhere to pass. The ball squirted free. Vinny grabbed it, ran the other way, and laid it in, giving his team the lead, 10–9.

If there was an award for cherry-picking, Vinny Pesto would win the trophy every year.

Old Dude came up to me at midcourt. “Don’t ever leave your feet without a plan,” he said, adjusting one of his knee braces.

“Thanks,” I said. “I usually make that.”

Vinny checked the ball to me. I called out the score and passed the ball in to Goggles, who instantly shot. Miraculously, the ball rattled in and we were tied again.

10–10.

Scowling, Vinny took the inbounds pass and set up the offense. He had a man wide open under the basket—the guy Goggles was supposed to be guarding. But Goggles was cherry-picking under the other basket. Sure enough, Vinny ignored the open man and, with my hand in his face, fired a jump shot from eighteen feet. The ball fell off the rim and into Old Dude’s hands. Old Dude airmailed a pass to Goggles, who caught the ball, missed, gathered his own rebound, and put it up again. This time, the ball fell through the net.

11–10.

Then Vinny’s big man turned the ball over, dribbling upcourt.

I’ve been there, Big Man.

It was our ball. I nodded at Megan.

She nodded back.
Let’s get it done.

Then I looked at Vinny. “One more and it’s over, Pesto.” There was no way he was wriggling off the hook this time.

Vinny smiled. I had to give him credit. He was sweating, but he was cool. “Hey, gym rat,” he said, “where’s your so-called friend? Did he ditch you for the basketball team again?”

“He couldn’t make it today,” I shot back, hoping nobody could see Vinny was getting to me. “He’s got a date with your sister.”

But Vinny brushed the comeback aside. He smelled blood. “If he was really your friend,” he taunted, “he’d be here now. Not off with his
real
teammates.”

I was choking the basketball. My teeth were grinding. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Pesto.”

That was when Vinny went for the kill.

“Why don’t you just face it, gym rat?” he said, letting the words hang in the air. “JJ’s too good for you.”

That did it.
I hurled the ball at Vinny’s feet. He timed his jump well and it bounced away. My fists clenched. We were nose to nose now. Too close to punch—lucky for him. “For your information, chump, JJ is
not
too good for me. And I could play on that team anytime I wanted to. I have a personal invitation from the coach.”

That seemed to surprise Megan. Her eyebrows went up.

Vinny tilted his head back and stepped out of range. “Then why don’t you?” he said.

He meant play on the team.

“Maybe I will,” I said, surprising myself.

“What?” Vinny laughed as though he hadn’t heard me right. “You?”

“Yeah, me,” I said. “Is that funny?”

“It’s more than funny,” he said. “It’s impossible! You’re a
gym rat.
You don’t know the first thing about real basketball. You probably think a pick-and-roll comes with butter.” Vinny paused. Everyone was watching, and he was really enjoying it. He made a big deal out of scratching his head. “On the other hand,” he said as my fingers dug into my palms and my forehead burned like an iron, “we are talking about Pil-suck, so maybe you do belong on the team. Maybe this is the year you and the other Pil-chumps finally get out of the basement.”

“Just wait, Vinny. We’re not gonna be anywhere near the basement. As a matter of fact, we’re gonna be in the championship game.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. And
I’m
gonna hit the winning shot.”

“In your dreams, gym rat.”

“Not in my dreams, Pesto. In your face.”

That was when Megan pulled me aside.

“That’s right, gym rat,” Vinny called. “Talk it over with Mrs. Gym Rat.”

We walked a few steps away. Well, Megan walked. I bounced backward, ready to swat back anything else Vinny had to send my way.

I was still fired up. “That’s the last time Vinny Pesto tells me a gym rat can’t play
real
basketball.”

“Yeah,” Megan said, drawing out her words, “you really showed him.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Toby, do you realize what you’ve done?”

“I scored one for all the gym rats, that’s what I did.”

“No, you just joined the basketball team. That’s what you did.”

“Good. Bring it on. I’ll show
everyone
what real basketball is.”

“Toby,” Megan started to say, “there’s something you should know—”

“I know what’s coming for Vinny,” I said.

Megan rolled her eyes. “Okay, you’re right. One thing at a time. First, you know he’d do anything to stop
you
from beating him.”

“Is that supposed to be good news?”

“It means if you set a screen for me, he won’t switch. He’d rather leave me open than risk letting you out of his sight for a second. Trust me.”

“So what do I do?”

I listened as Megan used her palm and fingers to draw up the play.

A moment later, I was checking the ball with Vinny.

It happened almost exactly like Megan said it would. I passed the ball in to her, then set a screen on her defender. She dribbled around me, leaving her man stuck behind the screen. And Vinny, instead of switching to guard Megan, stayed on me. Curling off the screen, Megan pulled up at the elbow, the spot on the court where the free-throw line meets the side of the key. Suddenly, the man guarding Blue Shirt rushed toward her, his long arms raised high. Megan never blinked. She lifted a soft jumper over the outstretched arm of the charging defender. The shot went up like a rainbow, then splashed down through the net.

12–10.

I threw my arms up in the air like we had just won a championship. Maybe it was a little over the top, but at that moment I was going a hundred miles an hour on pure emotion. Not far off, Vinny was barking at his teammates for not playing defense. When he saw me, he said, “Don’t get a big head over this, gym rat. You still needed someone else to win the game for you.”

“Pilchuck plays Hamilton in three weeks, Pesto. And I’ll be there.”

“I’ll be sure to wave to you on the bench, scrub.”

But nothing Vinny could say would dampen my mood that day. I had won. It was now Vinny Pesto: 8,497,330; Toby Wheeler: 1.

         
5

T
wenty minutes later, Megan and I were standing on the corner where Verlot Street begins. We’d stuck around the rec center after open gym, reliving the game, until the assistant director, Alberto, kicked us out so he could mop the floors before the aerobics ladies came in with their mats. Outside in the damp breeze, Megan had suggested we go for pizza.

I told her I never said no to pizza.

Usually, when I walked home from the rec center, I forgot all about the action on the court. But that day was different; tomorrow, I was going to show the world that a gym rat could play team ball, and that no matter what Vinny Pesto said, JJ was not too good for me. I was going to be JJ’s
real
teammate just like the rest of those suckers. The way I figured, they had never seen anything like Toby Wheeler.

Corner Pizza was empty except for a couple of men playing pool. The restaurant was dimly lit, with peeling walls and wood booths that people had been carving their names into for centuries. To avoid the cold air from outside, we chose a booth in the back, across from the arcade games. JJ and I used to have a running competition on the Hoop Shoot. The standing record was twenty-four shots in sixty seconds. I set that on the last day of seventh grade, the last time we’d played.

Megan smiled from across the booth, then frowned as if she had remembered something important. “I have to call home,” she said. As she was dialing, she turned to me and quickly whispered, “It might be better if you don’t say anything while I’m talking. Technically, I’m not supposed to be doing this.”

While Megan was on the phone, I looked around, trying to figure out what it was she wasn’t supposed to be doing. Eating pizza on a school night?

“I’m just getting pizza, Dad,” Megan was saying. “With who? Who am I getting pizza with?” Megan held the phone away from her mouth, bit her lower lip, then said casually, “Um, a girl I met…playing basketball at the rec center…. Yeah, she’s pretty good…. A little raw…. Okay, I will…. I
know,
Dad. No boys.” Now Megan was pretending to pull out her hair. Finally she said, “Tell Mom I don’t need dinner. I’ll be home by dark,” and hung up.

Megan tossed her phone into her gym bag. “Sorry about that. My dad is a little paranoid.”

As long as we never met face to face in a dark alley, he could be as paranoid as he wanted to be. “Hey, my dad sells
wood chips
for a living,” I said. “Nobody’s perfect.” Still, I hoped Megan was exaggerating. Nobody wanted a deranged father chasing him around town. “What does your dad do?” I asked.

Megan tore the paper off her straw. “He coaches basketball….”

Gulp.

“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” she continued. “My dad is going to be your coach. Well, that was part of it.” Megan shed her raincoat and hung it on the end of the booth. “Do you still want to join the team?” she asked.

“I thought I did.”

“You have nothing to worry about. He’ll never know I was with you. And even if he did, he’d have to go through me first.”

After we ordered, Megan told me more. A lot more. For instance, starting the next day, she was going to be a new student at my school.

“Why did you move to Pilchuck?” I asked.

As Megan took a long sip of her Coke, I tried to look at her without staring. Her hair was still pulled back, and there was a smudge on her cheek, maybe where someone had bumped into her during open gym. When she blinked, I noticed for the first time that her eyes were blue. Suddenly there was a crack from the pool table. One of the men, a giant with hands like catcher’s mitts, cursed and handed the stick to the other man. I thought about Megan’s paranoid dad and remembered seeing him in the gym the day before. He had seemed big enough to bend steel. That was when I got a little paranoid myself. I would be crazy to join the team now. What would he do to me if he knew I was the one who took his daughter out for pizza? He’d use me as an example, that was what. Like island tribes who stick the shrunken heads of their victims on posts to warn away trespassers.

“Two years ago,” she said, “my dad was coaching a small college in Portland. He was working
all
the time, sleeping in his office, eating fast food twenty-four/ seven. If he wasn’t getting ready for a game, he was on the road, recruiting at high schools and jucos.”

“Jucos?” I asked as the waiter delivered our pizza.

“Junior colleges,” Megan explained. “Anyway, if he won a game, he’d come home all smiles and my mom and I would see him for about a day. But even then, we had to snap to get him to answer a question.”

“Slice?” I asked Megan, balancing a steaming piece of pepperoni.

“Thanks,” Megan said, holding out her plate. She continued, “But if he lost a game, he went back to the office. With him it was basketball, basketball, basketball.”

“So what happened?”

Megan let her slice cool. “The past season, his team was supposed to compete for a conference title. But they had some injuries and some bad games. By the end of the season, they were in last place. And Dad was worn out. He went to the doctor, who told him he needed to take it easy and watch his blood pressure. So he quit his job and came home.” Megan took a bite of her pizza, wiped her hands with a napkin, and went on. “At first it was good. He was rested and healthy again. Then he got bored and started watching talk shows all day because his doctor wouldn’t let him watch basketball. I think that’s when he came up with the ‘no boys’ rule. He watched this show called Dr. Barb. After that, every time I wanted to go somewhere, he would tell me about some girl on Dr. Barb who went to the mall and ended up getting kidnapped. Luckily, a friend told him Pilchuck was hiring a basketball coach. I didn’t really want to leave, but at least it got Dad out of the house again. And Mom thought coaching middle school would be a way to do what he loves, but with less pressure than college. So we moved.”

“Do you miss your old school?”

Megan thought about it for a minute. “So much,” she said finally. I thought she was going to say more, but it sounded like the rest of the words were caught in her throat. Instead, she shook it off and added, “I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. I don’t even know you. You must think I’m nuts.”

I didn’t think she was nuts. I thought she was the first girl I could talk to without passing out. And even though I was already sort of scared of her dad, I had to know what had happened to him. “Your dad is fine now, right?”

“He has to monitor his blood pressure. Too much excitement or stress could get him in trouble.”

“Maybe he won’t take things so seriously this time,” I said.

Through a mouthful of pizza Megan replied, “You don’t know my dad.”

When we were finished, we left Corner Pizza. I walked Megan to the light. It was drizzling, so she pulled up her hood and tightened the drawstrings. “Does it snow much here?” she asked.

“It snows a lot,” I said. “And it gets cold. Last year we had an early freeze and there was a rush on wood chips so everyone could cover their plants before winter. Dad was working late every night filling orders.”

Megan nodded politely, but she must have been wondering why I was going on and on about wood chips. So I cut myself off and said, “Well, thanks again for helping me beat Pesto.”

“Thanks for being nice to the new girl.”

“No problem. I guess I’ll see you around school.”

I had taken three steps when Megan called, “Toby?”

“Yeah.”

“Tomorrow, at practice,” she said. “Be ready to run.”

On the way home, I sent JJ a text message: I’m coming to practice tomorrow.

Later that night I got a message back: It won’t be like the rec center.