Kolt opened his mouth, but Coach tapped his jaw shut. “Think before you speak, Martin. In fact, don’t speak at all. Show me your answer on the court tomorrow.”
I walked out of the office with the other guys, always careful in the gym to act like just another player, even when Coach wasn’t there. The three of us were headed for the parking lot when the sound of one lone ball bouncing made us turn around.
A girl. One I didn’t recognize, with a long brown ponytail and long tan legs. She had a rack of basketballs all set up to shoot threes, even though the girls’ coaches had already gone home.
“I bet she misses,” said Kolt, and sure enough, she did. But she just grabbed another ball and another, like once one ball left her fingers, she was already focused on the next shot. She had great form, and a lot of them were falling.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“New this year. Her name’s Daphne,” Jake said, elbowing me forward. “At least, I think it is. You’d better go check.”
I wanted to. I almost did. But the focus and the rhythm and the rightness of her alone on the court held me back. “Nah,” I said. “Let’s give her some space. You guys need a ride home?”
“I’m good,” Jake said, still watching the girl shoot. “But take Kolt. He needs a shower.”
“Your face needs a shower, Foster. Come on, Seth. I’m starving.”
Kolt and I drove through at Best Burger and spent the next hour playing video games and filling our faces in his basement.
“Best of seven,” Kolt said, chucking his controller onto the couch when I beat him at Madden for the third time. “Or hey, how about we play something I’m actually good at. It’s time to slay some demons, am I right?”
“Nah, I’ve got to get home. Math homework.”
Kolt belched. He didn’t quite have the range that Jake had, but it was still pretty impressive. “You wouldn’t even have math homework tonight if you hadn’t signed up for honors. You know that, right?”
“I know, I know. I’m sure I’ll look back and regret not playing more Demon Slayer when I’m making six figures as an engineer.”
“Dude, whatever. I’ll try to remember to come back for you when I’m making seven figures slaying demons after the apocalypse.”
—
At home, I’d barely had time to start my homework when Coach came through the door, dropped his keys on the counter, and went to the fridge for a beer.
“Taking it easy, huh?”
I stared at him. Could he not see my homework? And wasn’t he the one who told us to get some rest?
“The Foster kid stayed after and shot around for another hour. That kid gets it.”
I set down my pencil, lining it up with the thin red stripe on the side of my paper. “I’ll stay after tomorrow. My shoulder was tight today, so I wanted to be smart about that.”
“You can be smart and tough. There are ways to play through a sore shoulder. I want you in the weight room too. Three times a week. And fix your form, for hell’s sake. There are mirrors in there for a reason. No wonder your shoulder’s sore when you lift the way you do.” He sat down, setting his beer over the corner of my homework. “We barely had a winning record last year. You know that, right? You know what that means for my job? If we don’t step it up this year in a serious way, they might cut me loose. I’d be taking a real risk putting three sophomores on varsity.”
I watched as a bead of condensation dripped down his bottle and onto my homework, bleeding and blurring the thin red line.
“I know,” I said. “It’s okay if you need to leave me on the sophomore team.”
Coach slammed his fist on the table. “No, it’s not okay. That’s not how the game works. You play at the highest level you can for as long as you can. And then, if you’re lucky, you do the same thing as a coach. You do not get to make your talent smaller to fit into your schedule or to keep from breaking a sweat. You do not decide when you’re done with the game. The game will decide when it’s done with you.”
He picked up his beer, and when my homework stuck to the bottom of the bottle, he peeled it off like skin from a popped blister. “From now on, you never leave the gym before the Foster kid. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, taking the paper from him and pressing it between the pages of my book. I shoved the book into my backpack and walked away, letting him think I was done with this thing I cared about. Knowing I’d come back to it when he turned his attention to basketball again, which never took long.
And I realized: that’s how it was going to be, from there on out. Sometimes, even in a family, you keep secrets from each other.
And sometimes you keep them for each other.
Even in the dim light of the basement, things are beginning to come into focus. Jake remembers a fight with the man—the hand over his mouth, the taste of blood, the bite of the needle in his thigh. But somewhere in there, he’s still got a gap, a gap in the footage.
Jake’s not exactly in the mood for metaphors, but that night he dreams his life is literally written in a book. He grabs the spine and flips back a few pages, desperate for answers.
What is he doing here? Is it true what the man says, that this was all his idea?
Impossible.
Maybe.
But the pages are missing; there’s a chunk torn out of the
