This is the Part Where You Laugh (14 page)

When I wake up, it's stifling hot and I can tell that I've been sweating for hours in my sleep. It might be 11 or 12 o'clock and I'm even more sore than I was this morning. I moan as I crawl out of the tent and stand. Stagger to the house and strain to open the back door. No one's in the living room and I go into the kitchen. There's a note saying that Grandpa took Grandma to an appointment at the hospital.

I make two large cups of Tang. Gulp them both down. Stand and lean against the counter, feeling a little bit better. Less thirsty. I get the peanut butter jar out of the cupboard and eat a few spoonfuls. Then I drink some water to unstick my mouth.

I go to the phone and look at the calendar for the number. I don't want to call, but I know I have to. If I don't, he'll hear about it from someone else. So I dial.

It rings twice, then he answers. “Taft High Athletic Department, athletic director here, how can I help you?”

“Uh, Coach? It's Travis.”

“Hey, Travis, how's it going?”

“Not so good, Coach.”

There's a long pause. Coach says, “What happened?”

“Well…see, I jumped off a bridge into the river, and I got hurt.”

“How hurt?”

“Not too bad. I mean, bad, but not too bad. I cracked four ribs and I'm pretty sore. I can't play basketball for three or four weeks. Or at least that's what they say. I'll play sooner, don't worry.”

“Okay,” he says, and exhales. “I'm sorry that you're hurt. But it's July right now, not the worst time in the world to be dinged up. You'll be healthy by October.”

“And that's not all,” I say.

There's another pause. “Go on,” he says.

“I have to admit something.”

“All right, then.”

“I just want to be honest with you…so I needed to tell you that I punched someone.”

“Punched?” he says. “Who?”

“This missionary sort of guy. But not the good kind of missionary or anything like that.”

“A missionary?”

“Yeah. He was handing out Seventh-day Adventist pamphlets at the Chevron.”

“And you punched him?”

“Well, he…it's hard to explain. He said something terrible to me.”

“So that justifies you punching him?”

“I guess he said something pretty bad, and I just…I'm sorry, Coach.”

Coach exhales long and slow on the phone. “This is bad, Travis. I'll just be honest with you too then. That's a two-game suspension to start the season.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really,” he says. “Those are the team rules and everyone knows them. There are consequences for getting in a fight. Doesn't matter who you fight with. Our players and our team, we have standards. So you ended last year with a suspension and you'll start this season with a suspension too.”

“But it wasn't really a fight. And it wasn't at school.”

“I know. But it's good to have solid consequences for our actions.”

“Okay,” I say. “I guess.”

Coach pauses for a long, long time, then he says, “Travis, I want to be in your corner. I like you. I believe in you. But you've got to stop making these mistakes. These are big mistakes. And you now have two huge marks on your record. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And these things matter. Do you want to go back to juvie? Do you want to lose another season of basketball and any shot you have of playing college ball?”

“No, Coach.”

“Then you can't make any more mistakes,” he says. “None from here on out.”

“I know, Coach. I really do.”

“Because I can't stand by you forever. You're a good kid and you could be a great player, but at some point I'll have to draw a line in the sand, and you're starting to take me there.”

After we hang up, I take two oranges out of the fridge and go sit in the living room in the big recliner chair. Peel the first orange and eat it slice by slice, worrying about Coach and what he must be thinking about me.

On the table in front of me, there's a big orange pill bottle: Grandma's pain pills, the ones she never wants to take. I pick it up. Three-quarters full. Read the label:
PERCOCET
. I don't know if that's stronger or weaker than the Vicodin I'm on for my ribs. I open the bottle and look at the pills—round, smaller than my Vicodin. Since Grandma won't take that many and Grandpa shouldn't, I steal my three pills back. Put two of them in my mouth and swallow.

I pick up the newspaper, sit back, and read the sports page. After a while, I realize that I'm sort of floating in the room, that my body's lifted a little, and I'm smiling at nothing. I don't want to move. My ribs don't hurt much at all. The recliner is the most comfortable seat in the world. I peel the second orange and start to eat that one.

I realize that someone's knocking on the front door. I don't know how long that's been going on. I look at the door and it seems to shift in its frame. Another knock. I push myself up to my feet with my good arm. Walk over. I'm made of pieces of wood bolted together. The skin on my arms has hardened into grains, a sheen of electric varnish over the top.

I open the door.

Natalie's standing there with yellow flowers in her hand. She says, “I know it's cheesy, but I bought these flowers for you since you're hurt.”

“Oh,” I say. “Thanks.”

She looks great. Wearing a blue tank top. Thin yellow bra straps. Short jean shorts. She steps in and kisses me, says, “How's the pain today?”

I pull her close, pull at the belt loops on the sides of her jean shorts. “I feel good right now. I feel all right.”

She's wearing a little perfume, and it smells good in the small space by the door. She says, “Were you super sore this morning?”

I nod.

She says, “Your smile's kind of crazy. Are you on those pills?”

“Yeah.” My smile's so big that I have to wink one eye to keep it from cracking my face open.

She says, “You crashed last night. I sat with you and your grandpa for a long time but since you never woke up, I finally went home.”

“Sorry.”

We stand there and kiss in the space next to the door, and Natalie's body is against me and her chest feels good against mine, and her hips are so strong and the pills are heavy in my brain.

Natalie stops us. She says, “I don't want to hurt you.”

“I'm all right.”

“But you should be careful today.” She squeezes my arms but doesn't hug me. “I don't want to hurt your ribs.”

“I'm not hurting.”

She kisses me again. “Only because of the pills.” She takes my hand and leads me into the living room. “You smell like oranges.”

I point to the orange peels.

Natalie says, “Come on. Let's sit you down. You need to rest today.”

I'm a wooden puppet, folding my jointed arms and knees. Natalie holds my elbow as I bend to sit.

Once I'm settled, Natalie turns and lies back, her head on the couch's armrest. She lifts her legs and places them across my lap. “Is that okay?”

I run my fingertips along her calves and shins, then back down to her ankles and feet. Natalie closes her eyes. I trace up her leg to the scar on her right knee. “Does it hurt?”

“Not too much. Just a little when I do my stretches.”

“And you'll be ready for tryouts?”

“I hope so. I've been working so hard, and there's still a month.”

Her scar has one long line and four little circles around it. I trace the line with my finger. The pills make her legs feel like warm plastic. I blink and look at the scar again. Touch each little circle. “Was the surgery bad?”

“No,” she says. “Not bad at all. The lying around after the surgery was terrible, though.” Natalie tilts her head off the edge of the couch. Looks back at the room behind her.

I watch the rise and fall of her chest. See the edges of her bra under her arms. Yellow underneath the thin blue of her tank top.

I say, “How long did you have to lie around?”

“Three months of nothing but flexibility rehab, three months of light strengthening, and three months of fitness and strengthening. It hasn't been my favorite year.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I lost the entire season.” She lifts her head and looks at me. “Hey, are you looking at my chest again?”

“Maybe.” I look away.

But when I look back at her, she's smiling. “I don't mind if you look.”

My eyes feel heavy. Start to close. I force them wide again.

She says, “Those pills are super strong, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“My mom takes those, and she does that eyes-shut, eyes-wide thing that you just did.”

“Your mom's hurt?”

“Not at all,” Natalie says. “She used to have a little back injury. Nothing major, no blown disks or anything. But it hurt some. I think the pills got her through other stuff, though. And she still takes them every once in a while.”

I don't say anything. The pills make it hard for me to come up with new questions.

Natalie says, “But enough about my awesome family. How much time were you out last season?”

“I lost the whole season too. All but the first few games.”

“Were you injured?”

“No, I got a league suspension.”

“Really?” Natalie props herself up. “This should be a good story.”

I shake my head. “Just me being stupid.”

“No. I want the whole story.”

“Okay,” I say. Take a deep breath. “I was the backup point guard, but I was getting more playing time each of the first five games of the season. And in the fifth game, still before league play started, we were going against the Catholic school.”

“Is that the school with all the rich bitches?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, I've heard about their soccer girls already.”

“Right. So they had a junior point guard, a good player, a slick guard, but a dickhead. And he talked a lot of trash. Said all kinds of stuff. I was matched up on him for the entire second quarter and he kept talking trash and it started to get to me, some of the stuff he was saying.”

“Well, what did he say?”

“It doesn't matter.” I look away.

Natalie leans forward and looks at me. “What did he say?”

“It really doesn't matter.”

“It doesn't? 'Cause it seems like it does.”

“Not really. People talk trash. I shouldn't have reacted to him.”

Natalie raises her eyebrows. “Okay then. So forget what he said. What did you do?”

“Well, during halftime, I thought a lot about his trash-talking. I should've been focused on the game, focused on my team and our game plan, on winning, but I let that one guy bother me way too much.”

“Then?”

“Then when I subbed in halfway through the third quarter, I waited for my chance and I punched him.”

“Wait, you lost an entire season over a punch? One punch? Isn't that a little bit excessive?”

“Well…”

“Well what?”

“It wasn't exactly a fight. And it was way more than a punch.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I hit him when he didn't have the ball, hit him when he was running downcourt going the opposite direction, so there was a lot of force behind it. And he wasn't looking. He didn't expect it. On film, it looked really bad, like my punch came out of nowhere. And on the play before, he switched on a screen so he wasn't even guarding me. It looked like I targeted a player for absolutely no reason.”

“Did he get hurt or did it just look bad?”

“He got hurt. He went to the hospital. He was knocked out and didn't come to for more than an hour. Then he couldn't play for another month because of concussion syndrome.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah, it was sort of crazy. There was a local news crew at the scene and they caught the whole thing on tape. I got arrested the next day. Charged with assault three. I went to juvie for a while.”

My hand is resting on Natalie's leg. She reaches down and squeezes it. “You really do punch people, huh?”

“Not normally. Or, I mean, sometimes.”

Natalie squeezes my hand again. “Hey, Travis,” she says, “look at me. It's okay. We all mess up sometimes. We all make mistakes.”

“It was a big mistake, though. It was a whole season.”

“Yeah, well, I lost a whole season because of my mistake too.”

“How was yours a mistake?”

She purses her lips and that scar wrinkles under her eye. “You wanna know how I really got this scar on my knee?”

“Didn't you tell me already?”

“Sort of. I didn't lie about it. But I don't tell people the whole story either.” She lets go of my hand. “I stole my teammate's boyfriend.”

“What?”

“At a party.”

“The teammate who tore your knee in practice?”

“Yeah.” Natalie wipes her eyes with the back of her wrist. “She was my good friend too, and I don't even know why I did it.”

“So she was dating this guy, and you…”

“Saw him at a party. I'd been drinking a lot. And I didn't even like him.”

“But still you did something?”

“Yeah, we did. And when she found out, she was pissed. But she waited until practice to get me back.”

“What'd she do?”

“We were scrimmaging and I was playing in the midfield, defensive mid. I went to slide-tackle her and I missed. Normally a striker like her would step over a missed tackle and continue her run, but she stepped on my knee, or, more like, she stomped on my knee.”

“On purpose?”

“Seemed like it. And it popped. MCL and ACL. The MCL was torn partially, but the ACL was gone.” Natalie puts her two index fingers together, end to end, to form a straight line. Then she makes a clicking noise with her mouth and moves one finger sideways.

“That's messed up. Did she ever apologize?”

“Later. We both did. But we were never close again. She kept dating that guy and she finished the season as second-team All-League. I had surgery and did rehab.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah, well…” Natalie rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Fuck it, I guess. Right?”

“It'll be better this year. Success during the season is all about practicing in the off-season. Creature and I always talk about that. And you're doing it. You're working hard now.”

“Who's Creature?”

“My friend Malik. But his nickname for AAU was ‘The Creature.' Now everyone but his mom calls him that.”

“So he's a basketball player too?”

“He wrecks.”

Natalie laughs. Wipes her face on her tank top. “ ‘The Creature'?”

“You should see him play.”

Natalie pulls her phone out of her pocket and touches the screen. “Whoa,” she says, and sits up. “I should walk home now. I didn't realize what time it was. I said I was only going to be gone for 20 minutes.”

Natalie gets up and opens the sliding glass door. I struggle to my feet and follow her out. On the picnic table, there's a dented 7UP can blackened in the middle where someone has used a tack to poke holes. Natalie picks it up and smells it. “Is this a weed can?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I think that's what it is.”

Natalie laughs. “Your grandpa's a blazer!”

“But how'd he know he could use a soda can?”

“Well,” she says, “he probably checked on the great wide interwebs. Googled ‘How can I smoke marijuana without a pipe?' ”