“You’re on a team right here in Barcelona, then?” Will said.
“Not the big one, not the one like the soccer team. The smaller one just north of the city.”
“And so, what, as of twenty-four hours ago, your career is over?”
“You play professional basketball in Europe…” Whitney said, still lagging.
“Did. Six years. I was scheduled to fly home in the morning. But with all this, who knows?”
“We were supposed to fly out this—”
“So how’d you end up here?” Whitney said, cutting Will off.
“Well, I guess…I’ve been in Barcelona for two years. I was thinking this morning, and realized I’d done basically the same thing every day for my entire time. Even when my brothers visited: practice and games and practice and games.…Once, I was supposed to go on a weeklong trip with some of my boys, but Coach decided to cancel our days off. Emergency practices after a couple bad losses. So my buddies stuck around town, and actually came to this party and had a fun time. I just felt like I was always missing out, so figured one last Sunday—why not?”
“We’d heard good things too,” Whitney said, “but were supposed to be gone by now.”
“It’s weird,” Jack said, still lost in what he’d been saying. “I haven’t had a night out without practice in the morning since…”
“Wait, so this is literally the first night of your retirement?” Whitney said. “Your first free night in years?”
“I mean, I went home for summers. But it was still every day at the gym then, too. Every day of shooting, running, lifting, swimming in the lake.”
“Chicago?” Will said.
“Yeah, exactly…” Jack said, squinting at Will’s knowing-ness.
“I went to my share of games,” Will said. “I remember the lineup intro is all…”
“By his share of games he means every game,” Whitney said.
“What a gym, huh?” Jack said.
“Are you here with anyone else?” Whitney said. “Teammates? Girlfriend?”
“Just me,” he said. “Pretty last minute. Looked up the website. Sent an email just an hour ago. But the cook over there, he was manning the list and follows the team. Said he played at uni in Melbourne. So he squeezed me in.”
“Anything for JJ Pickle…” Whitney said.
His eyes fell to the crowded floor. “And that’s a thing I’m trying tonight, too, actually.…It’s sort of embarrassing, but I thought I’d give it a go.…Trying it out as Jack tonight. First time since, I dunno, since elementary school.”
Jack smiled at Whitney and Will saw in her eyes what she was seeing—not JJ Pickle, but a handsome American athlete who had just confessed to being equal parts insecure and famous, at least enough to want to change his name.
“And did you know it would be an old-people swingers’ party?” Whitney said, brightening with the wine.
He laughed. “Oh man, you’re the second person to say it. Maybe I haven’t been here long enough. Or I’m talking to all the wrong people. I’ve just been with this girl, who’s the only other young person I’ve seen so far, but she mentioned it, too. I had no idea.”
“Maybe we’re seeing things that aren’t really here,” Will said. “Maybe they’re all just, like, extra European.”
“And here I thought I’d come away with some knowledge from my time over here. Some sense of how to tell the difference between Germans and Spaniards and swingers,” he said, grinning again and squirming in place and indicating with a thumb that he still needed to find the bathroom. They each took a sip of their wine as they watched him walk away.
JJ Pickle. Six-foot-five shooting guard. Number 30 in your programs, No. 1 in your hearts. Will had been to every home game for four years. Three of which included the “Nothin But Netter from the North Shore.” An overlooked prep prospect, jilted by the bigs for his lack of being able to do anything but shoot, and picked up without much fanfare by their little program late in the recruiting process. Coach was from Chicago. He’d played in the backcourt at Immaculata with Mr. Pickle. Coach knew what to say to get Chicago kids down south.
The team wasn’t supposed to do much. No players over six-nine anywhere on the roster. They played a pro-style small ball before it was popular. Five shooters on the court at all times. Make threes or die. Outrebounded two-to-one most games, but able to beat the best if JJ Pickle got a hot hand. He scored fifty in a conference road game his freshman year. Fifty-five in the home opener the following season. Twelve threes in the finals of a Thanksgiving tournament on a Caribbean island, creeping the team into the top twenty-five for the first time in program history. A perfect game his junior spring: fifteen for fifteen from the field, eight for eight from the line. Will was in The Weevil for that one. Six rows back, standing on the wooden risers, his eyes level with the rims. Packed in shoulder to shoulder—sweating, stuffy—tilting his face to the rafters to breathe cleaner air, lifting the foam pickle he wore on his hand with each JJ swish, just like everyone else in the gym.
He couldn’t jump. He’d never dunked in a game before. At the end of his junior year, just before the wind-down of a route, JJ took an outlet pass on a fast break and, all alone, planted his feet in the key and leaped straight up, like measuring a vertical, extending toward the rim with the ball on his fingertips and easing it over the insurmountable edge in what would be widely derided on the internet as the saddest slam dunk in the history of basketball. Sliced and diced and made viral. A meme for the weakest version of something awesome. Will had been there. Will had lifted his pickled hand and cheered for the seemingly impossible. It didn’t matter; JJ was a shooter. And they were winning. He led them late into March during Will and Whitney’s senior spring, JJ shooting his way through the opening round of
