Long Shot - Mike Lupica [11]
This time he decided not to let it go.
“It’s Pedro,” he said.
Jeff ignored him, turned to Ned and Bobby and said in a loud voice, “Guess Pedro here never heard of a little thing called a landslide.”
In a quiet voice, Joe said, “Wow. Landslide. Learn a new word today, Harmon?”
“Hey guys, chill,” Ned said now. “We’re all teammates, remember?”
It was true, all five of them were on the town team, and sometimes they were the five on the court.
“Ned’s right,” Pedro said.
“And teammates are supposed to stick, right?” Ned said.
Then before Pedro or anybody else could agree with him on that, Ned Hancock said, “Even when they decide to run against each other.”
Now he looked right at Pedro as if he were looking at him for the first time, as if he’d turned into a stranger.
“Right, Pete?” he said, grinning.
And in that moment, it was as if Ned was the one who had turned into a stranger.
Then Ned and his buds were out the double doors and gone.
SIX
The gym at Vernon High School was so big they could pull down a divider from the ceiling and make it two separate gyms on weekends once the town teams started playing games.
Tonight the sixth-grade team, the Vernon Knights, was at the high school. And just out of sheer luck, they didn’t have to share the gym with anybody.
“Madison Square Vernon,” Joe said when they walked in.
As far as Pedro was concerned, having the whole gym to themselves just made the night better. The newly polished floor, the overhead lights brighter than ever, everything feeling clean, as if you could just feel the whole season stretching out in all directions.
Even after the way the assembly had ended, with Pedro feeling as if he’d been called out—weirded out, really—by Ned and his friends, he was still excited, in an almost goofy, Christmas-morning way, to have the basketball season start, right here and right now.
It seemed to Pedro that everybody had shown up tonight with new sneakers—Jamal called them “right-out-the-box kicks”—and just the sound of them, the crazy, constant squeak of them on the polished floor, was like the best possible music downloaded straight to Pedro’s ears.
Their coach, Cory Harwell, was the same one they’d had from fifth-grade town ball, a coach they all loved playing for and couldn’t believe had moved up along with them. Coach Cory—as they all called him—had played Division I college ball for Vermont, even though he was only five-seven and looked enough like the little guard the Knicks had, Nate Robinson, to be his twin brother.
Coach Cory didn’t just look like a kid, he acted as happy as one, happy as any of them, to be back on this court.
If they weren’t pumped already, the sound of his voice—a voice that was a whole lot bigger than Coach Cory was—was really pumping up the volume now, echoing all over the big gym, bouncing off the walls and the ceiling as he got them right into a three-man weave fast-break drill.
“Pass and cut behind!” he was yelling from the half-court line. “Pass and cut behind. Uh-huh. Move that ball and move yourselves. Uh-huh.” Turning basketball into rap, getting them right into it in the first ten minutes of practice.
A few minutes later Pedro ended up in the middle, Ned in the right lane, Jeff Harmon to Pedro’s left. Pedro didn’t need any help from Coach Cory to get into this particular drill—it was one of his favorites, even though a lot of the guys thought it was boring. He loved making crisp passes, running at full speed, making his cuts behind the other two guys as tight as possible, like he was rounding a base in baseball. Loved seeing if the three guys in his group could make good enough passes and cuts that they could get in more than the five passes Coach Cory wanted