Page 25 of Break Your Fall

Fireworks

Thomas

The first person I see when I walk back home from the court after a game with Mason—Crabbs, the best guy on our team to shoot hoops with outside of school—is my father. He’s at the top of a ladder, tightening the last screw in my basketball hoop—restored and ready to be yanked off again.

The Fourth of July officially sucks. The holiday keeps most people home from work unless you work on the boardwalk.

I bounce the ball in my hand and the sound gets his attention.Why’d I just do that?To let him see I’ve been playing elsewhere? Somewhere that’s not here in this driveway? A place where I can figure this out on my own, away from his hearing and questioning?

“If you hadn’t tried to destroy our hard work,” he starts as he climbs down, “you could’ve played here.” He walks over to me with a smile. “You know I love hearing you playing ball.”

Yeah, Dad, you’re my biggest fan.

“Well, you’re welcome,” he adds when I fail to express the gratitude he wants to hear. My dad cares. I know he does. His one need in life after I was born was for me to have one. A future. He was thrilled when I came to him with basketball. There’s a life there—a lot of money and security—if you want it bad enough. The problem now is I’m not so sure I do anymore, which threatens my scholarship, which threatens my prospect of a backup future, which will make my father disappointed, which is the last thing I want to put on him right now, especially with the problems he’s having with Mom that neither have wanted to put on me.

I’m placing the fault for that one on Dad. Gotta keep me focused, eye on the ball.

“Did you lose your tongue today?” he jokes, and I laugh despite myself. But that’s all he gets. “What’s going on with you?” He motions to the hoop. “What was that about?”

I bounce the ball between my hands, then roll it toward the grass. My mouth opens to encourage words, but I stutter on air, the disappointment and apprehension already showing on my father’s face in that slight moment of hesitation.

“It wasn’t about anything. I’m fine.”

He smiles and pats me on the shoulder. “Yes, you are.”

“Ashby?”

Dad walks backward at Mom’s call from the front door, motioning a last time to the hoop. “Let’s try to put less slam in the slam dunk, huh?” He gives me his back, not saying a word to Mom as he passes her to the house. She walks over to me when he shuts himself inside, tying her long brown hair back at the nape of her neck.

“Do we have any relish?” I blurt through frustration as she stops beside me.

“For hotdogs?”

I release a self-deprecating chuckle. “For nothing. It’s nothing.”

“Is everything okay?” Mom asks, each word pronounced and knowing.

My hand shoots toward the hoop, my mouth firing the complaint at her instead. “Why’d he put that back up?”

“Did you not want him to put it back up?”

“Sure,” I say with a shrug as I shove my hands inside my shorts pockets, then retract with a sigh, “Not really. I don’t know.”

“Well, that was quite the outburst,” Mom notes. “Not exactly like you.” I’m avoiding her sympathetic stare that almost always manages to pull everything out of me. “So I’ve been mulling over the right questions to ask to get you to tell us what’s wrong. We almost have to pry to get it out of you sometimes,” she says with a laugh. “There is anit, huh?”

I smile at her phrasing, then blow a breath through my lips. “A lot ofits.”

“Tell me one?”

I shake my head, shaking around the options. None of them are easy, but basketball is the hardest, especially if word gets back to my father.

“I told Reyna,” I appease, still avoiding Mom’s stare, still awed, unnerved, and slightly proud that I can now say those words and mean them. Thisitwas years in the making. Before the year I decided I have no chance with her and let it sink in that I’m carrying this torch—that everyone likes to call it—alone. But this year,I told Reynais no longer a private phrase I’d say alone in my room when I was younger to encourage myself to actually make it true. It is true. It’s out. If only because I wasoutof my mind.

Though, having time to sleep—mostly toss around—on it, I realize that Ineededto get my feelings out. And though it’s selfish to think this, I handed them to her and I don’t have to hold them alone anymore.

Mom lets out a small gasp that makes me chuckle. “Well, it’s about time.” Her excitement diminishes when my stare falls to my feet. “But I take it she didn’t react the way you needed her to?”

“She reacted the way I expected her to,” I say with a nod, rubbing the back of my neck, feeling the sweat I’d worked up at the court. “But it still. . .” My fingers dig into my skin before my arm drops back to my side, an emptiness swirling in my stomach.

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