Tilt - Alan Cumyn [7]
Janine Igwash was instantly in his head, standing quite close to him though turned slightly away, looking down. She had dropped a button and was just about to bend over to look for it. Her black silky shirt was almost falling open, and the little tattoo at the base of her neck nearly peeked at him.
She was in his head like she was living there. The black shirt falling so softly off her shoulders, undone. Shirt tails. Off the rails. Light blue underwear the color of the sky. His heart hammering and all he was doing was lying there, still as a board. Stiff as a post.
Holding up the sky.
4
Stan spied the tiny notice on the bulletin board outside the gym. Tryouts for the boys’ varsity basketball team begin Monday at 6:30 a.m.
How could information of such vital importance be so sparse in detail? Thin blue ink, easy to miss. Maybe Coach Burgess was hoping no one new would show up. He only had two spots to fill anyway.
Six-thirty in the morning!
But instead of driving people off, the awkward start time only seemed to pique more interest. Marty Wilkens, who could barely tie his own shoes, said he was going to come out. He’d grown six inches over the summer and so maybe he might be able to play basketball. Leonard Palin, a hockey player, announced he’d been working on a left-handed hook shot. “It’s unstoppable,” he said in the hallway outside geography.
But really that hallway was owned by the enormous Karl Brolin, six feet six, 220 pounds of senior orangutan who flicked illegal bounce passes to Ty Blake and Jamie Hartleman, the core of the varsity team. No teachers told them to take it outside. They ran, jumped, pivoted, ricocheted off the lockers while Stan and others let them pass.
That’s the way it was with those guys. Once last year at lunchtime Stan tried to guard Karl Brolin when Brolin decided to play at the junior basket outside just because he could. Brolin got the ball and backed in — backed in with his big rump and his huge shoulders until he was underneath the basket. Then, as now, all Stan could do was give way.
Stan carried his Janine Igwash letter — he’d retrieved it from the wastebasket — in an outer pocket of his backpack where it was zipped and sealed secure. He didn’t want her to see it and so he kept it with him at all times.
Janine walked past him talking with Katherine Loney. Janine was a head taller than Katherine, though she didn’t slouch like some tall girls did. He held the fire door but Janine did not glance at him. She simply kept listening as Katherine said, “ . . . pieces of it everywhere, even in her hair!” If Janine had glanced over, Stan was prepared to say, “I’m sorry, I dropped the phone.” His jaw was relaxed, the words were lining up, then she was by. Coldly, Stan thought. Determined not to look. “But why in her hair?” Janine asked. Stan didn’t hear the reply. He was headed in the other direction. Nearly running.
To hell with her.
In the break after first period he sat underneath the stairwell at the south end of the building and wrote in tiny script at the bottom of page six of his letter to Janine: what we cannot know/in the chaos of control. He looked at those two lines — minutes were draining away, he was going to have to head to biology soon — and finally he scratched out the lines and added, Why is everything so difficult?
He didn’t have a good sense in his head of how he was ever going to make the varsity team. There were too many good players. The players were too big, too strong, too experienced. All year he’d been imagining making his shots against the JV guys. But most of them were not going to make the varsity team, either.
In biology Jason Biggs said, “Tryouts for varsity start Monday at 6:30 in the morning!” They were supposed to be finishing their diagrams of the components of the eye. Janine Igwash did not look around once in the first ten minutes of the class.
“Six-thirty in the morning!” Jason Biggs said.
She was working on her diagram. If Stan’s letter wasn’t safely