Her glossy lips droop, her cheeks get flushed, and she confirms what I already know—she’s still a nobody, just like me. But my brother Marcus told her that our freshman year in college was about reinvention, so she hangs onto that because she thinks everything that comes out of his mouth is gospel.
“All I’m saying is, you got a job at the bookstore. You can pay Marcus back.”
“Off $7.25 an hour?”
She lifts her red-tinged cheek and shrugs.
Four-thousand dollar dues to pledge a sorority won’t fly with Marcus. There are too many other things he can do with that money. He can replace the catalytic converter on Mama’s car so she can stop taking Ubers to her doctor’s appointments. Shit, he can even knock out the balance on that loan he took out to fix the leak in the living room.
“When he said ‘reinvention’ he didn’t mean spend a grip on doing it, Chels and he was really talking about you more than me—as in he wants you to meetotherboys besides him.”
“Whatever.” She huffs, pulling away and giving me the space I’d been dying for since we sat down.
The boys dribble and laugh in their own world, waiting for Coach Williams to walk out. Practices are closed, but no one cares enough to enforce the rule. Fraternities and sororities run the yard—not our mediocre basketball team.
“I thought you talked to him last week,” Chelsea mutters, noticing the doubt in Bryson’s steps. “I see him shaking from up here.”
“I did. I’m not a psychologist.”
The team isn’t polished. It never was. Not even when my daddy played on it. We got the commits that almost made it to D1 schools—the boys who almost had theitfactor but didn’t have anyone to nurture them. My childhood friend Bryson is one of those boys. He was a good point guard in junior high and high school, but that was it. He don’t have a daddy like Dell Curry to make him shoot threes until he gets dizzy. All he has is my brother Marcus and the old basketball goal that sits at the end of our driveway, but Marcus can’t even turn good enough into great.
Coach Williams pushes out of a door from the back of the gym and Bryson’s eyes jump around. I don’t blame him. His good enough status as point guard is in jeopardy because of Coach Williams’ sudden interest in our school.
“I can’t believe President Bolden sold us out to an Uncle Tom and his Becky loving son.”
I cut my eyes at her. “You really need to stop hanging out with your granny and her friends after church. You sound like her and Esther.”
“Well, who else am I supposed to hang with after church? Ya’ll ain’t been in so long.” She falls into a fit of giggles as Coach Williams shouts.
I read once that he never uses a whistle in his practices—not even when he coached the Lakers. He said the booming of his voice did the work a whistle did—it gathered the team, started and stopped drills, and it produced prayers for his players. That last part kind of fucked me up.
“My economics professor told us he wants to build a coliseum for a losing team. I even heard he paid off all them outstanding balances for the people that graduated over the summer. He thinks he can come in and wave his money around and we’ll forget what happened at UCLA with his son. Typical,” Chelsea says, gossiping like her granny, Mother Lenola.
His sonis in his own world, dribbling the basketball between his legs with his front teeth digging into his bottom lip. Marcus called it a basketball quirk, like Steve Nash licking his fingers. I know all of Ace’s basketball quirks because the Williams are a religion in my house evenafterwhat happened at UCLA. I never drank the Kool-Aid with Ace though. He’s overrated.
“Maybe he’s just a generous dude.” I shrug, staring at Ace’s honey-toned, corded arms.
He seems larger than the other boys, even though, as a point guard, he’s one of the smallest. I can never figure out why he seems so big. I heard him talk for the first time last week. He came into my job and bought a fistful of Dum-Dums. He doesn’t sound like his daddy. He has a laid-back Californian accent that makes him exaggerate the “ere” at the end of his words and makes me want to go lay out on a beach.
“It’s hella hot in here. You ain’t hot?”
That’s what he asked my co-worker Brandy after pulling a Dum-Dum out his mouth and clutching a basketball at his side while she stared up at him.
He even dresses like he still lives in Los Angeles. He wears clothes like Fear of God Essentials and sneakers that cost more than our mortgage. When he swaggered out of the bookstore, Brandy told me they talked sometimes in her biology class and I wondered what they even had in common.
“He’s such a fuck boy,” Chelsea mutters.
Heis, but he’s a different type of fuck boy. One time Stephen A. Smith said he was a stain on the Bruins’ reputation. Marcus said it was a fucked up thing to say about a kid who breathed basketball and had rappers like Dough naming mixtapes after him even after what happened. Dough said he came back from some shit most dudes don’t ever come back from when a reporter asked him about their friendship. A lot’s been said, but nobody really knows him except his daddy because the boy never even gave an interview before—not to Holly Rowe, Jim Nantz, or even a room full of reporters after hitting a buzzer beater against Villanova in the Sweet Sixteen.
“Definite toxic city boy vibes.” I shake my head at the headphones over his ears.
The hairs on my arms stand at attention as Coach Williams gaits around in basketball shorts and a Polo. His eyes flutter up to me for a second and he gives me a slight smile, like he knows I’m one of the few people on campus that cares about his new losing team.
Maybe he can tell their squeaking sneakers make me warm inside and that this court was the last place my daddy touched before he died. I guess it’s why he ain’t kicked me and Chelsea out of his gym yet. I’m not Malika Andrews or nothing like that, but Marcus always tells me ‘basketball’ was the first word he taught me how to say. The second word he taught me was our daddy’s name—Marshall. Mama claims Marshall knew Coach Williams. She says her good girlfriend Angie is the same Angie that married him because she introduced them to each other one summer at the Fondé. I don’t know why Angie Williams would have ever had the time to bump her gums on the phone with Mama about “what the doctor said this week,” but I never told Mama that. Not even when Angie stopped calling last year.
“Williams!” Coach Williams shouts as Ace dribbles past him.
Coach Williams snatches the headphones off Ace’s head with a cool cat-daddy grin. “You know I have a zero-tolerance policy on headphones in my gym, young man. Get to the baseline and don’t stop until I tell you.”
