Tilt - Alan Cumyn [4]
“What?”
Her tattoo was something sinewy, coiled but not a snake, prettier and . . .
Biggs snapped his fingers. “Canceled!”
Gray desiccated flesh hung off the pitiful eyeball.
“How can he do that?”
“He just did. They couldn’t find another coach. Lapman is doing girls’ JV this year. You’ll have to try out for Burgess.”
Burgess, the varsity coach, ate juniors for breakfast.
“You can keep going, Jason,” Right Eyebrow said. “Let’s get the cross-section.”
“Lapman’s coaching girls’ JV?” Stan said. He felt his gut contract into a hard rubber ball. No JV? After he had trained on his own, night after night, month after month . . .
“Weren’t you the final guy cut last year?” Biggs said. “You should have made it, man.”
This felt like one of those bits of news that was going to take a long time to comprehend. Like when his father left five years ago to live with the twenty-three-year-old he had impregnated. That could not be understood all at once. Stan didn’t feel like he understood most of it even now. It took time to soak down through the layers, like water working its way through clay.
He hadn’t seen his father since.
“No way you should have been cut. Towers is a pretty good guard but he can’t shoot. I’ve seen you shoot, man.” Biggs looked up like a doctor in the middle of some surgery and said to the twins, “This guy never misses. I’ve never seen him miss.”
“It’s about time we had a junior varsity for the girls,” Left Eyebrow said.
Stan’s hands flexed as if holding the pebbled grain of an imaginary basketball. Now what was he supposed to do? Varsity only had two spots open. Everyone else was coming back. Now there would be twelve from last year’s JV competing for those two spots — all right, eleven. Collins broke his leg skateboarding. But what about all the seniors who didn’t make varsity last year?
Suddenly Janine Igwash loomed above him. Completely clothed. Her tattoo was just a little red and black blob near the creamy white corner of her collar.
“What are you doing about the retina?” she asked him. Even though Jason Biggs was the one with the scalpel in his hand mucking about with the retina and who knew what else.
“We sketched it before we sliced it,” Right Eyebrow said.
“I didn’t think we were supposed to slice it,” Janine Igwash said to him directly again. Her eyes were dark green with little brown blobs that flashed with light.
She looked down at the hatchet job Jason Biggs was doing, and back to Stan, and down and back again.
“There’s this dance that my parents’ youth group has forced me to help organize,” she said to Stan. “And I’m supposed to go and it’s like there’s no possible way out of it in any way and, there’s this stipulation.” She shoved her hands in her pockets.
Was she really saying this? Stan went through a mental checklist. Everyone else was listening; she was wearing all her clothes. Probably it was real.
“Stipulation?” he said.
“I need to bring, like, a guy.” She stood very still and looked at him, her green and browns scanning his face. Jason Biggs was most of the way through the eye now.
Someone kicked Stan’s ankle. It was Left Eyebrow.
“A guy?” Stan said.
Janine Igwash couldn’t seem to say anything more. Left Eyebrow kicked him again.
“Ten minutes, people, before you need to clean up,” Mr. Stillwater announced. He was sitting at the front in the same blue shirt he wore every day, or maybe he had a whole closet full of blue shirts.
When Stan glanced at Janine Igwash again she was back at her station cleaning up. Her face was redder than her hair.
“You sure blew that one,” the twins said together.
—
The rest of the day slid by in jagged fragments, during which Stan heard again and again the unbelievable news about JV. Everyone seemed to know, maybe through Biggs, what the disaster meant to Stan personally. He thought he’d been secret about his obsessive practice.
But this was a complete crash and burn.
Once he caught sight of Janine Igwash at her locker on the second floor reaching for something on the top shelf