Ace smiles and drops the ball. The back of my throat starts itching. I cut my eyes at Chelsea to see if she notices me scoot even closer to the edge of the bleacher to get another glimpse at that basketball quirk, but she’s too busy stalking folks on Twitter for more clues to get her closer to pledging. When I turn my head back, Ace is gone.
Bryson says Coach Williams has a lot of zero-tolerance policies and he’s sure nobody but Ace has the balls to break all of them and he was right. I try not to stare at him running up and down the court while the rest of the team warms up. Instead, I force myself to focus on Bryson.
“This boy hitting bricks,” Chelsea says, looking up just in time to see Bryson miss another shot.
“Girl, shut up. Practice just started.”
“I’m just saying. He’s looking real looserish compared to baby Allen Iverson over here.”
A loud cackle barrels out of my mouth as Ace runs past us. “That’s fucked up.”
“It’s the truth!”
“Head up, Bryson!” I shout.
His head follows the sound of my voice and when we catch eyes, he’s already frowning.
“Uht oh. Lover boy’s pouting. I didn’t know basketball could make one so angsty.”
“Just as angsty as Marcus’ new girlfriend makes you.”
“Too far, Phat! Too dang far.”
Our giggles blend with the bouncing balls and Ace’s sneakers pounding the gym’s floor.
“Alright, Williams. Strike one,” Coach Williams waves his hand and then tosses the headphones on the bench below us. “Come on back.”
When Ace stops, his skin is still dry. He nods with another breezy smile as if he didn’t cross off one of Coach Williams’ zero-tolerance policies in the first practice of the season.
The team huddles together except for Ace. He hangs beside Coach Williams, looking off across the court with a bored face while the staff focuses on the team. They’re a mixture of white and black dudes who probably took this gig as a favor to Coach Williams. Marcus told me he brought them from Los Angeles too. I can tell from the way the fluorescent lights dance off the glittering watches on their wrists. They look like money.
“You guys look good. You look decent…” Coach Williams starts. “But good isn’t enough for me. You should never want to be goodordecent at anything you claim to love.”
“Okay, Coach Carter.” Chelsea snickers.
I dig my elbow into her bony side, making her squeal.
“I want great and a great team should tell a story. The film I watched from last season ain’t told me a thing about y’all—not a story, a tale, nothing. All it told me is that I’ve adopted a bunch of little boys who don’t know what characters they are on this court. Y’all don’t know nothing about working together to resolve conflict in your story. I don’t even think you know how to get to the end of a story.”
Their faces scrunch into frowns, but after watching millions of Lakers games with Marcus, I understand there’s a method to Coach Williams’ madness.
“But that’s alright, because I had a good friend that used to tell me that every main character has to overcome obstacles—internal and external ones because that’s how we find our purpose in life. But the thing is, folks don’t know what those obstacles are until something or someone brings them to the surface and today, I need them brought front and center so we can patch the holes up in this story we tryna tell as a team. So we gonna play some one-on-one with my lil’ rusty storyteller here.”
Everybody looks around until he picks up a ball from the court and tosses it at Ace.
“Alright, Brown. Come on.” Coach Williams chuckles while Marquise grins at him with big eyes.
Ace bounces the ball with lax shoulders. His teeth push back into his bottom lip.
The thing I hate most about him and his fuckboyish ways are his handles. They’re so smooth, he might as well be floating. Marcus always told me the easiest way to know if a boy haditwas if the nigga looked like he was born with a basketball in his hands, but Ace doesn’t look like he was born with a basketball in his. He looks like he came barreling out his mama with the world clutched in them—not a basketball.
“Dang,” Chelsea hisses while Ace crosses Marquise and screws up that beaming smile he had on his face.
Dangis the only word to describe how Coach Williams uses Ace. The team isn’t playing real one-on-one—they’re playing one-on-Ace and by the time he gets to Bryson it’s hard to understand why Coach Williams thinks he’s rusty because he finds the holes that lie within each boy’s game no matter the position they play just like Coach Williams wanted.
“Might as well be a one-man team versus a bunch of clowns. Yikes.”
“This is fucked up.” I groan as Bryson trots onto the court toward Ace. “He knows these dudes aren’t on the same level as his son.”
