Page 41 of One on One
“What ca—No, that’s a blanket.”
“It has a hood.”
“It’s a wearable blanket. Shut up. You’re as bad as Eric.”
A smile spreads across his face, and it’s contagious. He has a nice smile. I can admit that now. It’s sweet and boyish but the corners are lazy, turning up a beat after the rest. “I thought you were messing with the thermostat to torture me. I thought you stole my string cheese too.”
He tosses me the ball and I catch it. “I don’t even like string cheese.” It’s the truth. Part of the truth, because I don’t care much for rubbery mozzarella, but I ate his anyway. Not that he needs to know that.
Ben shakes his head like he doesn’t believe me but also doesn’t mind.
This is what it feels like to get along with each other. For the first time, I think,Too bad we can’t both stay.“What would it take to avoid the budget cuts completely?”
His response is immediate. “A national championship.”
I laugh, but he doesn’t. “You’re serious?”
Winning a national championship is about more than skill and strategy. It’s also about luck. Who gets the mostadvantageous matchups, who gets hot at the right time, who gets one favorable call in one close game. That’s why it’s difficult for even the best teams to do.
I step away from the window. “Let’s go win a national championship, then.” I chuck the ball toward the basket, and it bounces off the rim twice before going in.
Like I said, it’s about luck. Butsomebodygets to be the lucky one. Why not us?
TWELVE
At nine o’clock the nextmorning, a maintenance worker appears in my office to inspect the air vents. Ben must’ve called them first thing. A strange light feeling bubbles inside me.
An hour later, word arrives: Quincy’s injury is a sprain. An ankle sprain is one of the most common injuries in the sport, and so far nobody’s asked too many questions about how it happened. Quincy gets a lecture on pushing himself too hard outside official team practices, a sympathetic pat on the back, and he’s off to the land of rest and ice and physical therapy for two weeks. He’ll miss four games. It could be worse, but four more losses would make it impossible to win the regular-season conference title.
On the bright side, Quincy’s spirits improve immediately after the first couple days of respite from the spotlight. He has a concrete, achievable task to focus on: recovery. He has breathing room.
“Tell Mom not to worry. He’s handling it well.” Mom always had a soft spot for Quincy. I’m on the phone with Kat on Sunday night, padding barefoot into the green room with an insulated tumbler full of Cassie’s favorite bedtime tea. A pink glow fills the space, thanks to the strawberry-shaped string lights I hung from the ceiling.
“You must be relieved it didn’t blow up in your face.”
“Well, yeah. I was pretty nervous at first. I’d have been fine lying, I’m a good liar. My accomplice was the bigger concern.”
“You don’t think he’s going to have a crisis of conscience and come clean, do you?”
The morning after, Ben did look a little pale when Coach Williams stopped by to talk about what happened, but he managed to keep it together. “I don’t see why he would. We’re in the clear. And it’s obvious we did the right thing.”
“Obvious to you. You better make sure it’s obvious to him. What if he confesses to the team chaplain? ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned’? Which one is it, bearing false witness against your neighbor?”
I set my tumbler on the floor and light a candle, which perfumes the air with citrus and jasmine. “I don’t think he’s that Catholic. And the priest isn’t allowed to tell anyway.”
“I don’t remember the rules. I haven’t gone to confession since grammar school.”
There’s only one seating option in the room, a monstrous, sagging purple beanbag chair. When I moved, I snagged it from my parents’ basement, where Kat and I hung out with our friends in high school. Part of my virginity is somewhere in this chair, deep in the mountain of beans, never to befound. It’s so big it’s unsafe to sit in without someone else present to haul you out. I flop onto it anyway.
“Neither have I. In fifth grade I told Father John I used curse words, and he said God was going to cut my tongue off if I didn’t stop. After that, I told Mom I was never going again. I still think of him sometimes when I use the word ‘fuck.’ ”
Kat laughs. A seed of worry plants itself inside me, and I can’t shake it. Ben seems sincere in his concern for Quincy. He has no reason not to stick to the plan unless he wants to screw me over, which I don’t think he does anymore.
But maybe I’m thinking too much like myself. At heart, Ben is a rule follower. Under stress, isn’t he always going to revert to that behavior? At the same time, my biggest takeaway from that night was that a lot of my assumptions about him are wrong.
“Oh, two things before I forget,” Kat says. “One, Mom wants you to help her figure out how to do her family tree on that ancestry website.”
I groan. If my remorseless abuse of obscenities lands me a spot in hell, I’m going to be assigned to whichever circle involves an eternity of teaching my mother how to use a computer.
