“Jake, I love you, man, but you’re wound tighter than a two-dollar watch. We’re a team, you know. It’s not all on you. Lighten up.”
“What would Arizona State say if I lightened up?”
There it was again. Jake had a verbal agreement to play for the school he’d been dreaming of since sixth grade, and he wouldn’t let anybody forget it.
“They’d say, ‘Congratulations on being less of an uptight ass.’ ”
“Shut up, Kolt. Verbal agreements don’t mean shit, and you know it. Until I sign on the dotted line, they can walk away.”
It was so dumb I had to laugh. “Dude, they’ve been recruiting you since eighth grade. They’d be gold-plating your toilet seat if the NCAA would let them. They’re not walking away. Just go out there and play your game. That’s all they want.”
Jake walked away, muttering about how I’d never get it.
“Yeah, maybe I won’t. What I really don’t get is why you changed.”
He didn’t even turn back, like I wasn’t worth an answer. We’d disagreed with each other about five thousand times before, but this time felt different somehow. Deeper.
Whatever was off between us, we carried it onto the court: missing each other’s passes, not quite anticipating each other’s cuts, not calling the switch on the screen in time to prevent a score. Jake’s nothing special in the classroom, but he usually reads the court like a damn novel. Not that day, though. And okay, maybe I missed a few key rebounds myself.
We still had a pretty solid lead in the third quarter. When Jake swatted the ball from his guy, I took off, ready for the easy layup at the other end of the court. I looked back just as Jake fired a pass to me—and then watched it sail right over my outstretched fingers.
“Next time,” I said as we jogged back down to play D.
“Would have been this time if you hadn’t let yourself get so slow in the off-season.”
Jake and I had been trash-talking each other for six years straight, but this had an edge to it I hadn’t heard before.
The kid guarding me snickered.
“Dude, shut up,” I said. “You’re down by twenty.”
“Whatever, Assland.”
I slapped him on the back, just hard enough. “Congratulations, man. That is literally the first time I’ve ever heard that joke.”
After that, he slunk off like the idiot he was. But still. I didn’t like getting laughed at by some punk kid who was stealing my material and belonged in the JV bracket. In spite of the scoreboard, we still had something to prove.
So when Seth put up a shot that clanged off the back of the rim like a back-alley trash can, I crashed the boards hard, determined to grab the rebound. Unfortunately, so did Jake—which meant I smashed straight into his back while he was in the air.
He slammed down sideways, right on top of me. We hit the hardwood together, and the impact was brutal against my back and chest. I rolled out from under him and popped back up, ready for the next play, expecting him to do the same. But he just lay there, bent and buckled, grabbing his knee and rolling on the floor and making these long, low sounds like a wounded animal.
“Martin!” Coach barked at me. “What the hell was that?”
I didn’t argue that Jake shouldn’t have even been in there—that he should have hung back to play defense. That he wouldn’t have gotten hurt if he hadn’t come flying in, trying to do my job. You didn’t argue with Coach—especially not about Jake.
Coach shoved me aside to get to Jake. “You’d better hope he’s not out for the rest of the game.”
I didn’t mean to hurt him. Of course I didn’t. Yeah, something was off between us, but he was still my best friend—and I wouldn’t even take out my worst enemy like that. The way Jake’s face had gone all tight and white had me pretty shook.
Two athletic trainers rushed out and helped him to his feet. The scattered crowd cheered as Jake limped out, arms slung around the trainers’ necks, eyes shut tight against the pain. I tried to follow them, but Coach yanked me back.
“We’ve got a game to finish, Kolt,” he said. “And you’d better make damn sure we still win it after that stunt you just pulled.”
We won, even with some new kid named Ruckert playing like crap at point. But it didn’t feel like it was supposed to. Everybody’s eyes kept flicking toward the locker room, hoping to see Jake running or, hell, even hobbling back out. As soon as the buzzer went off, we fived the other team and filed down into the locker room to check on him.
But he wasn’t there.
“They took him to the hospital,” the trainers told us. “His knee was messed up pretty good.”
So we piled into cars to head over there, still in our uniforms. Everybody was too quiet, too stiff, too worried. Something had to change before we walked into that room and stressed Jake out even worse. Dude hated anything medical. My guess: it had something to do with his dad. But you can bet we never talked about it.
“Maybe you should have showered first,” I said to Seth as the hospital door slid open for us. “Pretty sure making people puke is the opposite of what they’re trying to do here.”
Seth stared me down. “Don’t you ever know when to turn that crap off?” he asked, and he’d never looked as much like Coach as he did right then.
It took a while, but they finally let us see him. Not gonna lie, it was weird. Jake had barely been to the doctor since I’d known him, and now here he was in a hospital bed.
“My boys!” He threw his arms out and nearly knocked over his IV stand. “You came.”
Whatever they’d given him for the pain had definitely done some unwinding on him.
“He has to
