Janae Read online

  Eighteen, the other girl, is deadly, and even though she wants nothing to do with me, I feel pride watching her hit shot after shot. Even Coach Tucker lets out an approving whistle. Now it’s my turn.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Coach Tucker says. I ask him what the problem is.

  He grabs the ball out of my hands. “You don’t just get to waltz in whenever you feel like it and chuck up jumpers.”

  Now I’m mad. I try to snatch the ball back. “My bus was late.”

  “If I had a nickel for every time some loser’s bus was late, I’d be living in Cabo drinking mojitos! But maybe there’s a secret group of bus drivers conspiring to make every loser’s bus late. Maybe every time some loser gets to the bus stop, a light goes off and the bus driver has to slow down a little. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I don’t see you out here hitting any jumpers! You ain’t doing no wind sprints! You ain’t done shit except stand here with your stupid steak and shout!”

  Coach Tucker grins. He takes the other tryouts to another court. I stay back on purpose, shooting the balls on every rack until I’m done. I make eighteen out of twenty.

  Today is cut day. One by one we’ll be called in to Coach Tucker’s office somewhere in the gutter of the gym. We wait in the bleachers, biting our lips, staring at our shoes, until we’re called. So far one kid has walked out with his head in his hands, and three kids have walked out with yearbook smiles. Then the girl goes in. Fifteen minutes later she comes out, smiling for the first time since the tryouts started.

  “You’re up,” she sings to me.

  I know I should be happy for her, a girl like me, a girl who makes beating boys look easy, but all I want to do is punch her.

  Coach Tucker’s office smells like Ben-Gay. There are pictures on the walls of him shaking hands with famous coaches: Pat Riley, Bob Knight, Rick Pitino. Framed next to the pictures are odd inspirational quotes: “There Is No Try in Championship”; “I Would’ve Cut Judas on the First Day”; “Coaching Is 90% Strategy and 100% Motivation.”

  He kicks his feet up onto his desk. “Pretty great, eh?”

  I look around and nod.

  “Okay,” he says, folding his hands behind his head. “A team is in many ways like a hand, like an organism, if you will. An organism that needs all its parts to function competently—the riboflavins and nucleotides. And a great organism must also be lean and free of fat. Are you following me here?”

  “I didn’t make the team,” I say.

  “No,” he says. He pulls out a wrinkled blue shirt. “But we’d like to give you this as a token of our appreciation for your hard work and dedication.”

  “Tell me why, at least. Why did you cut me?”

  He leans back, looking confused. “Janae: You just weren’t good enough.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Hoop Nightmares

  I know I’m dreaming, but it feels too real. I’m in the store painting lamps a rusty red, trying to pass them off as antiques. When I lean over to paint the bottoms, my drooping boobs tap the floor, making the dust dance. I smell my fingers and they smell like old nickels, and for some reason that makes me happy. So happy that I go outside and ogle the bodybuilders I’ve hired to stand outside my store and rip foam numbers in half with their bare hands so that everyone knows we’re slashing prices. “Worth every penny!” I shout at them, sounding like Granny. Back inside there’s somehow a piping-hot pan of beef lasagna sitting on the counter. I eat it with my hands; the meat sauce runs down to my elbows. One of the bodybuilders opens a beer using his nipple, and I drink it down. When I’m done, he bows and breaks the bottle on his head and thanks me over and over. I look down at my half-eaten lasagna, which now has pieces of glass in it. I keep eating.

  When I wake up, I stay awake for as long as I can, pinching myself, for once glad to feel the pain.

  CHAPTER 8

  LIFE AFTER DEATH

  I don’t know how long I’ve been lying in bed. I spend whole timeless chunks of the day asleep. My dreams float above me like a black cloud, a kind of velvety curtain a couple of inches from my face. I like feeling nothing. I pull the covers even higher, all the way to my chin. Now the sun is high in the sky, but I have no idea what time it is. All the sounds of the day—the sirens, the seagulls, the car horns—they’re all blurring together into a sound that feels like a needle behind my eyes. Then I hear a sharp tinkle against my window. I hear it maybe a dozen more times before I realize I’m not dreaming.

  Justin is on the sidewalk, holding a handful of pebbles.

  I throw open the window. “You almost broke the glass,” I say.

  “Sorry,” he says, dropping the rest of the rocks.

  “What is it?”

  “Where you been?”

  “Busy.”

  He kicks some of the pebbles into the street. “We were wondering.”

  I can feel my headache getting worse, the needle behind my eyes sharpening. “I’m fine.”

  “Got it.”

  He’s smiling up at me like a newborn, all innocent and well-meaning, and suddenly I’m overwhelmed with anger. The night at the fair comes back to me. The way I remember it, Justin forced us to see the psychic. So what if I don’t believe in all of that? What if it did something? What if that’s what made me turn my ankle and made my bus late? What if that’s what got me cut?

  “We’re playing in Berkeley again tonight,” Justin says. “You want us to meet you here at seven?”

  “No,” I say. He winces at the sharpness in my voice, and something about that makes me feel better.

  “Well, what time then?”

  “I’m not coming.”

  “Oh okay. Okay, I’ll just come back tomorrow then.”

  “Don’t. Just stop coming.”

  Justin looks down at the sidewalk and then up at me. “Did I do something?”

  “I don’t hoop anymore, and if I did, I wouldn’t hoop with your lame asses.” I slam the window shut and lie back down. For the rest of the afternoon I listen to the pebbles plunking softly against the window.

  I don’t know when I fell asleep, but when I wake up, the doorbell is buzzing. I wait for it to stop, to confirm the worst about Justin, that he’s a simp, that he gives up easy, that he never really cared in the first place. But the bell keeps buzzing, and with a little more hope than I expected, I throw open the window and look down at the street.

  It’s the bald guy from Bay Area Ballers, the one who invited me to the camp in the first place.

  “Ahoy,” he says, waving. “Can I come up for a minute?”

  I try to shut the window, but it’s jammed, and I’m too weak to move it.

  “I’m guessing you don’t like me very much right now,” he shouts.

  “Who gave you my address?”

  “You wrote it down at the tryouts, when you signed in.”

  “Thanks for that, by the way. Exactly what I needed.”

  “Okay.” He holds his palms out to me. “That was admittedly not a great experience. Didn’t turn out the way a lot of us wanted.”

  I’m watching a squirrel tightrope walk across a power line, hoping it somehow falls onto this guy’s big, shiny head.

  “Coach Tucker’s lost it, Janae,” he says. “He’s a nutcase, a dictator. He was saying that next year tryouts are going to be even harder. He’s been watching The Hunger Games and taking notes.”

  “So? Why should I care? I’m not on the team, remember?”

  “Because he fired me. Because I brought you. So I’m done. And I want to start something new, something fresh. I want you to be a part of it.”

  “I’m retired.”

  “I highly doubt that.”

  “Stop trying. Don’t come here.”

  I slam the window shut and lie down and pull the covers over my head. Bald guy is shouting. He’s laughing. He
’s saying I’ll change my mind, so just come find him when that happens.

  CHAPTER 9

  EXTREME MAKEOVER

  Life without basketball isn’t so bad. With Granny still gone, I take packs of her rolling papers to the library, where I watch videos and practice making crippled origami birds and insects. I catch up on episodes of Extreme Food Makeover, and with the leftovers from my breaded nachos I feed the ducks at the lake. I count the scars on my legs, documenting their size, shape, and degree of brownness, trying to remember where I got them. I watch my sisters’ Hip-Hop Abs videos, smirking at all the greasy six-packs. My basketball gear sits in a black bag next to the front door, where we keep trash before it goes downstairs.

  The sun rises, the sun sets. A day goes by, then a few days, then a week. My sisters show up on a Sunday, in pink, bedazzled sweat suits, carrying matching pink gym bags. They flop down next to me on the air mattress, nudging me until I’m backed up against the wall. I can’t tell what it is they smell like, something sweet and heavy and stale.

  “And so I told him, ‘I’m not that kind of girl.’ And he said, ‘Well, what kind of girl are you?’ And I said, ‘A good girl.’ And he said, ‘Looks to me like a good girl with a little bad in her.’ And I said, ‘Are you calling me bad?’ And he said, ‘If the shoe fits!’”

  They scream. Then they turn to me.

  “Shouldn’t you be out sweating somewhere?”

  “Not my thing anymore,” I say.

  “About time! All those boys and you never had a man!”

  I roll over and face the wall. Behind me, I hear them sniffing around until they’ve put their noses right against my armpits.

  “You stink!” they shriek. “You don’t take showers anymore!”

  I shrug. “I guess it’s been a while.”

  My sisters are Barbies. They are foreign to me, another species, some new dolled-up, busty version of Homo sapiens. For as long as I can remember, they have been the pretty ones. Their eyes are straight out of a Disney movie, big and seductive. In high school they were voted “Most Likely to Have a Drink Poured on Them in a Reality Show” four years straight. As kids, they dressed me up like one of their dolls—smearing our mother’s lipstick clownishly over my mouth and trying to fit their tights over my gangly legs. I don’t understand how we’re related.

  Suddenly they’re up, rifling through their gym bags. Out come the push-up bras and nail files and curling irons.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m not getting a—”

  “Makeover!”

  I pull the covers over my head. “Please. Leave me alone, y’all. I’m not like you.”

  But they’re already jumping on the bed. “One of us!” they shout. “One of us! One of us!”

  A boy whose name I can’t remember is telling me about his workout routine. It’s an L name, I think: Lamar, Lucas, Larry.

  “Most people don’t know this,” he says, “but you have to split your reps into smaller chunks. That way you get more definition.”

  Lamont, LeSean, Landré, Leroy, Lincoln, Lorenzo, Luke, Leo, Langston, Lateef, Luther.

  “Now if you really want to build, then you start getting into proteins, which can be animal-based or plant-based, depending . . .”

  He rolls up his sleeve to show me his biceps. Next to me, my sisters are looking at the dessert menu, stopping every now and then to giggle at their dates. It took them forty-five minutes to eat their Caesar salads; they picked at them like finicky rabbits. When I ordered the ribs they looked at me like I’d farted. After we ate, they made me go to the bathroom with them.

  “What are we doing?” I asked.

  “You think this is easy?” they said, adjusting their bras.

  My girdle is killing me. I tell myself that this is better than nothing. And it kind of is: at home I was driving myself crazy, baking gingerbread men with Coach Tucker’s face and then chomping their heads off. On the rare nights the twins slept at home, they said I churned my legs in my sleep, like I was running somewhere. I’m grateful to be out of the house, even if that means I have to give up deep breathing.

  Now the boy is asking me about my favorite movies. In my fake Louis Vuitton purse I’m carrying a book titled How to Always Have Something Interesting to Say. When you don’t have anything interesting to say, just ask a question.

  “What’s your favorite movie?” I ask.

  “Scarface,” he says, his eyes bulging.

  “Oh. Well, what’s good about it?”

  “Uh, everything! Al Pacino! And that other guy who’s his best friend, the guy with the hot sister.”

  “Oh, wow. What other movies do you like?”

  As he talks I imagine what Justin and Frank and Adrian and Mike are doing. I can’t help it. It’s Sunday night, which means they should be at Marcus Garvey Park, where you have to fight off the seagulls to get on the court. Mike would probably look for some bread to lead them away, and Frank would demand we take off our shoes so he could throw them. Adrian would smile secretly. Justin would move a step or two closer to me, in case the seagulls made a move. We’d play until they turned out the streetlights and then walk to the corner store and get two-for-one ice-cream sandwiches and sit on the curb and rinse the sticky off our hands in the water fountain.

  “Right?” the boy says to me.

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t you think Scarface is all about making it even when the whole world is against you?”

  I lean back. “I don’t know,” I say.

  He leans forward. “You don’t know what?”

  “Aren’t we too old for favorites? Favorite movies? Favorite colors? That’s stupid.”

  He leans back, throws his napkin onto the table. “You need to get out more.”

  The twins are relentless. They make me roller-skate. We walk over the crumbling planks of the Embarcadero in high heels. We ask boys for directions on the way to the Berkeley Bowl, even though we’ve been there a million times and know exactly where we’re going.

  “Isn’t this fun?” they exclaim. They’re flat-ironing my hair. Long fingers of vapor emanate from my head.

  “Sure,” I say. “Ow.”

  “The price of beauty!”

  We’re on our way to a basketball game I don’t want to go to. We’re bunched in the backseat of some guy’s mom’s car, drinking Jack Daniels out of Solo cups. I can feel the bass of a song I’ve never heard in my fillings. I can’t move my face under all this makeup. My legs jam up against the back of the seat in front of me. There’s an ozone-depleting amount of Axe body spray in here. Not even Coach Tucker’s camp made me this miserable. One of the twins nudges me in the ribs, reminding me to look like I’m having a good time. I smile.

  “Woo-hoo,” the twins shout, and we all drink.

  By the time we get to the court I’m so drunk that I’m sure I’m there to play. I reach under my skirt and start undoing my girdle straps. I grab the twins by the arms, ask them for my shoes, my lucky shorts. I demand they run a couple warm-up laps with me. I want to see their shooting form, their knee bend. They’re laughing, and I want to know what’s so funny. I want to know what they’re laughing at.

  “We’re getting your team together right now,” they say, dragging me into the stands.

  I don’t like the players on the court, guys who pass recklessly and shoot ugly three-pointers. They don’t talk on defense. They are blurring into each other, their neon shoes clashing greens and reds. My stomach is a washing machine. My sisters sit next to me, scanning the crowd as they complain loudly about the cost of nachos. They are too loud, everything is too loud, all I want is a little quiet, a little shhh. But everyone keeps talking, and I hate them. The ball sails into the stands and spills the soda of a girl sitting right in front of us.

  “Boooo!” I shout, jumping to my
feet. “Boooo!”

  My sisters pull me down by my wrists.

  “Boooo!”

  Then someone behind me boos, and another person, and soon a whole chorus of boos spills out of the stands. Everybody on the court is frozen. A deep voice shouts for a new game. A big guy jumps out of the stands and takes the ball. He says he’ll be taking things from here. The players walk off the court slowly, looking back with thin, embarrassed smiles, like it’s a joke, like they expect us to call them back any second. The crowd cheers even louder. People all around are giving one another high fives.

  Then it’s two new teams, and I laugh to myself because one of the kids looks like Justin. I mean, he’s got the funny gimp in his step and the same long, alien arms. And what’s even funnier is that the kids with him look like Adrian and Mike and Frank.

  “Hey, Janae!” the Justin look-alike says.

  I look around.

  “You look different,” he says, and it’s the eyes—the way they’re asking questions he’d never say out loud—that tell me it’s him.

  “Hi, Justin,” I hear myself say. I can feel my arms moving to cover my frilly top.

  He tries to spin the ball on his finger. “Catch up after the game?”

  He bounces back to the court and points to let everyone know where I am. They all wave.

  They pick up a random guy as their fifth. It’s doomed from the jump. Frank likes to bring the ball up and hand it off to Adrian, who dances a little before he drives down the middle of the lane. When that happens, I usually slide down to the corner, and Adrian doesn’t even have to look at me when he passes it. But their new guy doesn’t move like me, and Adrian misses and throws the ball into the stands. That’s all it takes.