I pull my hands out of my pockets. Lean forward to scratch the back of my neck as I rest my elbows on my knees. My parents and I stare at each other until I can’t stand it anymore.
“Well, that was a close one,” I joke. “They almost discovered my heroin stash.”
“Kolt,” my dad warns. He always comes home with his tie loose and his top button open. Not today.
“I didn’t do anything wrong! Effing Seth Cooper and his effing lies. He’s the one they should be questioning again.”
Mom twists the dish towel she was holding when the cops showed up. “Watch your language,” she says.
I wonder if she remembers that Kmart used to scream the actual word right in her face.
It had to be Seth who sent the cops over here. I want to hate him, but the idiot probably pissed his pants right there in the office and said the first thing that popped into his brain. Probably wasn’t trying to get me in trouble so much as get an attaboy out of them. To hell with the truth, I guess, and who cares if my parents end up shizzing their shorts when the police show up to visit their “good” son?
“You really don’t have any idea where he might have gone?” Mom asks.
I slump back in the chair and cover my face with my hands. “I thought the questioning was over.”
“It is,” Dad says. “It is. We’re just trying to help. The sooner he’s found, the sooner your life goes back to normal too.”
Like finding Jake for Jake’s sake isn’t enough to make it worthwhile.
Up in my room, my phone’s all lit up with notifications from Daphne. We used to be closer, back when she was dating Jake, and I still miss her sometimes. It’s not like I cut her out or blamed her for what happened. Jake got all drama since last summer and probably deserved to be dumped on his ass. But still, it feels better not to have Jake between us, messed up as that sounds.
So I do what she asks and jump on social media to log in as Jake. (She obviously doesn’t know his password is still daphne32 or she would have hacked into his account herself.) I shut down the garbage thread she asked me to. Then I log back into my account and comment on her “Find Jake” page, even though I don’t think it’ll do any good, since all of social media is a garbage thread. Gotta respect the girl for giving it a shot, though.
Speaking of garbage, I stand over mine and make myself drop the soda-can tab.
I didn’t lie to the police, but I didn’t tell them everything, either.
Just because somebody’s your best friend doesn’t mean they can’t be an asshat sometimes too. Case in point: our first summer-ball tournament before senior year.
Coach was usually a little less intense for summer ball, but not this time. When we got to the locker room for our first game of the tournament, he sat us down and unzipped the bag he’d lugged from Ashland. We’d all been speculating about what might be in there—new there. New uniforms? Personalized water bottles? A metric ton of junk food?
The second I saw what it actually was, I froze.
One beat-up old sign, three words:
HEAD
HANDS
HEART
“Isn’t it bad luck to take that out of the locker room?” I asked, backing away, just in case. “Like when you tell an actor to break their leg or something?”
Seth and Jake both laughed at me.
“That’s good luck, idiot,” Seth said. “And there’s no superstition about the sign. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
Coach Cooper held it up for us. “Do you remember six years ago, when you first came to Junior Warriors camp? Remember how we sat in the locker room on our last day of camp and Coach B asked if I wanted to keep this?”
We nodded. There were a few new guys and younger guys, but most of us had been in the room that day. This was the team Coach had been building all along, and the season he’d been building it for.
“This sign has hung in that locker room since I played at Ashland. But I never really took the time to think about it, to understand it, until that day. Here’s what it means to me, boys.
“You play with your head. Run every play like we practiced it. See the court. See each other. Be smarter than your opponent during every single second the clock’s running. That’s the part I can help you with most, but still, it’s the five on the floor who have to make it happen.
“You play with your hands. Hard passes, soft touch on the shot, your hand in their face or at the waist or wherever it needs to be to stop them on defense.
“And you play with your heart. That’s the part you boys have shown me for six years now, at every single practice, in every single game. This is our season. I promised you it would be. Today is the day we begin to keep that promise.”
We stood and shouted, gathered in the center of the room by the speech and the adrenaline and all those years of working toward this moment. As we piled our hands in the circle, nobody even had to tell us what the chant would be.
“Head, hands, heart!” All our voices came together as one, and for a second I almost felt sorry for the team that had to face us that day.
But then Jake looked over at me with this weird panic in his eyes. No way he’d play the way we needed him to if he was in his head that bad. Time to lighten it up a little.
“Break a leg, gentlemen!” I shouted. “Break them both, if you’re an overachiever like Foster!”
Everybody laughed but Jake.
He pulled me aside as we headed
