CHAPTER
01
TIME-OUT, WOLVES!” THE ANNOUNCER SHOUTS.
Matt slaps my back and the guys sprint over. Coach leans in, jaw rigid, breath reeking of Twizzlers. “You got this, Josh. That’s your bucket.”
The buzzer sounds and we jog back out onto the court. The ref straight-arms me the ball. I bounce it once. Whomp. Look at the scoreboard.
75–74.
Whomp, whomp. I let the ball become the slow, lazy pulse of the gym, let it drown out the yelling and jangling keys of Warsaw’s fans, who outnumber ours ten to one, even though we’re only an hour from home. Whomp. Whomp, whomp. Drown out the cheerleaders with their “Thir-TEE-two! Thir-TEE-two,” and Matt saying, “Come on, man, let it fly.” Just me and the beat of the ball.
Whomp.
Whomp, whomp.
“Come on, Joshie!” a kid yells, and my eyes go right to where Twig would be—second row from the top. I almost convince myself I see him there, Dad right behind him, long arms draped over Twig like the shoulder harness of a roller coaster. I blink against the picture, but my mind puts Mom up there too, next to Dad, her hand over her eyes; she never could bear to watch me at the line, even back in the when, where this image belongs—back in middle school. Uncle Stan would be up there too, laughing at Mom and urging her to look, but she wouldn’t. Twig would blow a raspberry, try to crack me up. My lips curl at the almost memory.
“Come on, Joshie! Nothing but net!” the kid shouts, and I see him—not Twig—just some random kid in the stands waving a poster board cutout of a Wolf wearing a Woodson High jersey. The ref snaps his fingers in my face, ripping a hole in the nostalgia just big enough for the ball in my hands and the net fifteen feet away.
I set the ball, overlay the rim with the ball’s top curve, let my breath whistle, and pull the trigger.
Up, up, and—
“Yessssss!” the announcer yells. “Josh Roberts brings the score even with two seconds to go!”
The ref tosses me the ball, harder this time, his eyes all Let’s get this over with. I lock my elbows, let the force reverberate along the tendons and bone, keep my heartbeat inside my chest.
Whomp. Don’t look at the boy who is not Twig.
Whomp, whomp. Don’t look at Coach, although his voice pierces my concentration. “You better nail that shot, Roberts!” he yells. “Nail it!”
I stare at the net, dripping from the rim like saliva. You still hungry? It opens its mouth for me and I stuff the ball down its throat.
The announcer’s voice is drowned out by the fans, but none of that matters right now. Warsaw’s forward is already in motion, lobbing the ball downcourt where it careens off the corner of the backboard. The buzzer sounds.
Now I look at the boy who is not Twig. The dad who is not mine is lifting him into the air, the mom who is not mine is smiling so huge, she might be crying, but the kid’s eyes meet mine and he’s yelling, “Yay, Joshie! Yay!” just like Twig would be. I blink hard and when I look back, they’re gone. Lost in the churning mass of teammates and cheerleaders and Coach, hands clapping my shoulder, my back, my arm.
***
Most of the guys rush through their showers, but I stand in the steam, let it soak through my skin to the muscle beneath. By the time I come out, toweling my hair, everyone else is already packed up and waiting with Coach.
“Nice shot,” he says, his voice implying ownership, like he coached it into me over the last two and a half years.
Coach doesn’t own that shot any more than Matt or Nick or the rest of the team. I own it. Me and Stan and the hours we spent in the junkyard, him feeding me the ball, me feeding it to the basket we pieced together from an old milk crate and some chicken wire. “That basket’s starving, Josh. Hungrier than your worst day. It’s a bear, Josh, towering over you—blinded with rage and ready to rip out your guts and eat them steaming in spring’s shitty snow. That basket’s a bear and you gotta stuff that ball down its mother. Fucking. Throat.”
But Coach is in my face, the guys all watching, and so I grin and say, “Yeah, it’ll do,” and then Coach herds the guys toward the door, toward the bus, and I toss my towel in the heap on the floor and follow.
Matt’s saving my seat in the back. The playlist on his phone’s fired up and everyone’s talking so loud, I can’t tell what song’s playing, just that there’s a backbeat to the conversation. We bounce along, replaying the game, analyzing each shot, each foul, until the bus glides into Mickey D’s and everyone flows off, comes back with shakes and fries and burgers, filling the bus with the stench of grease on grease. The acid in my stomach roils and revolts.
“You eat?” Matt asks, tipping his bag at me. I look away from the fries, nod, dig in my pocket for the roll of Tums I pinched from Gas n’Go. Thumb a few into my mouth. Chew. It helps. Matt downs two Quarter Pounders and enough fries to feed a village of trailer park kids.
Nick hangs over the back of his seat, breathing onions and pickles in my face. “You get pickles?” he asks. He reaches for Matt’s bag. “I ordered no pickles, this thing’s covered in them.”
Matt yanks his bag back, grins. “No pickles, but, dude, I ate it already.”
“Shee-at.” Nick balls up his sandwich and launches it at Matt.
It rebounds off his forehead and lands in my lap. I jump up, knock it to the floor. “Man, that’s nasty! Don’t be throwing that crap at me.”
“Chill, man,” Nick says. “You been pissed all night.”
“Yeah?” I shoot back at him. “So what?”
“So nothing. I just don’t get why you got a stick up your ass.”
“I don’t get why you’re worrying about my ass. Mind your own fucking business.” I sit down and hunch my shoulders toward the window.
I can see Matt’s reflection in the rain-splattered glass, watching me. When he turns back to Nick, I toe the crumpled sandwich into the corner and reach down. Slip it into my jacket pocket.
Back at Woodson, the bus belches us into a lot packed with parents, classmates, cheerleaders. I let the crowd swallow me, suck me into its self-congratulatory swarm, but my mind has drifted to the burger in my pocket. Everyone ignores the rain and the maintenance guy’s not so subtle hints until he loses his patience and kills the lights for good. The bus driver hangs out after the lot clears, fiddling with something in his trunk, waiting, I know, for my ride to appear. Finally he calls across the lot to ask if I need to use his cell.
I hold up my wallet like it’s a phone. “Dad’s on the way,” I tell him. “Be here any minute.” That’s good enough for the bus driver, who climbs into his car and is outta there without so much as a glance back.
For a second I believe my own lie. I look up the road like any second Dad’ll screech into the lot in Gran’s piss-yellow Datsun. A day late and a
dollar short, as Gran would say. Except even Gran would have to admit that while Tye Roberts is always broke, he is never late.
I pull Nick’s discarded burger out of my pocket and wolf it down in two bites, tossing the wrapper into a puddle. Then I stuff my hands into my empty pockets, duck my head, and start to walk.
CHAPTER
02
I’M BARELY OUT OF THE PARKING LOT BEFORE MY JACKET IS soaked through and my shirt sticks to my flesh like a thin layer of ice. No amount of blowing on my hands can keep the cold from needling my fingertips. I dart from blacktop to mud puddle to avoid being pancaked by cars doing at least twenty over the speed limit, their headlights blinding me.
Gran lives about two miles east of town. While the idea of a warm towel and a dry bed sounds great, as soon as I see the split-rail fence at the front of Gran’s trailer park, I want to turn around. Looks like Santa did a flyby and tossed his cookies all over it. Huge red and green bulbs, half of them burnt out, drip from fake garland. Couple of glittery bells lie forgotten in the dead grass, like Mac got the garland up, realized how pathetic it looked, and said, “Screw it.”
Less than a week from Thanksgiving and “Jingle Bells” already blares between bursts of static from the speakers outside the office. People used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said the usual stuff—firefighter, policeman, creepy sewer-dwelling circus clown. Now if somebody asks me, I’m gonna say homeowner, that way nobody can put speakers right outside my house and pipe that crap into my ears 24/7.
The seasonal vomit-fest has hit about half the trailers in the park and I know by Sunday, it’ll consume every lot except Gran’s. That’s when Mac awards the prize for the best decorations. The way everybody gets all jazzed, you’d think he was giving away free Hamburger Helper for a year, instead of the ten bucks off January’s lot fee. Gran never decorates. Says the prize isn’t worth the migraine she gets from all those flashing lights. But really, why would she bother jumping through hoops when she gets a discount from Mac every month?
Gran’s trailer is around the third bend. Her Datsun’s parked exactly how it was when I left for school that morning. Gran leans against the rail of the little jetty of wood she calls a porch. She’s bundled up in a blanket, smoking. Smoking outside is the one thing she listens to me about—Twig can’t be showing up at school reeking of weed. Without so much as a hi, Gran holds the blunt out to me. I wave it off. I’ve told her a hundred times I don’t do that junk, but she says there’s always hope.
She sizes me up and makes a sad puppy face at my wet clothes and chattering teeth, but doesn’t move out of my way so I can go in to get dry. She doesn’t ask about the game or why I walked home in the freezing rain. Instead she says, “Where’s your dad?”
“Beats me. Supposed to pick me up.”
“Supposed to pay the rent, too, but I don’t see that happening, now do I?” She inhales quick and deep, holds it, tapping that foot of hers, and I
know it’s coming.
“Look, Gran, I just got home—”
“Home? I told your dad a hunnert times this ain’t nobody’s home but mine. My name on the leash. My name on the utilities.”
I hate the way she says that word, “leash,” but it’s exactly right. That four hundred bucks a month is a tether around all of our throats and she doesn’t let any of us forget it. She rips right on past the rent and lays into me about the grocery bill, even though me and Dad know better than to touch anything she buys except the Sunday dinners she serves. We stash our own food in the back bedroom—ramen noodles and peanut butter straight out of the jar. All Gran has to feed is herself and Twig. Well, and Mac on the nights he ditches his wife and kids. Maybe if she didn’t smoke up half her Social Security she’d have enough to cover that.
Gran snuffs out her blunt and tucks it under the fake geraniums she calls her potflower. Then she fixes me with those black eyes of hers. “You know what he gone and done? That father of yours?”
Spittle flies as she says the word “father,” and it’s all I can do not to step back to avoid the spray. I know what she’s gonna say, same thing she always says when she doesn’t know where Dad is.
“Took off again, I know it. Long gone, if you ask me.” She links her thumbs and flutters finger-wings toward the sky. “Bye-bye, birdie. Shoulda named him that—Birdie! He took off and left you two here. Took the damn dog, though. I told him I ain’t raising no more kids and I ain’t. I’d rather kept that dog. At least it’s good for scaring off the raccoons.”
Any energy I had left after the walk drains out of me. I’ve been so distracted by her tirade, I haven’t noticed the absence of Axl whining in the back pen. Dad never takes Axl with him on a job. Never really pays any attention to that poor old dog. It’s me who feeds him and cleans out his pen. Twig who puts him on a chain and reads to him out back of the trailer. Twig. That kid is gonna be just devastated.
“Gran, I’m getting hypothermia out here.”
She huffs and heads into the house, not bothering to hold the door for me. “Don’t drip on the linoleum,” she snaps. Her voice rebounds in the emptiness of the trailer.
I want to tell her that I wouldn’t drip on the linoleum if she had a doormat like everyone else in the world, but I bite the words back. You’d think after living here so long I’d get used to the echo, but I just can’t. I’ve been in plenty of other trailers—kids in the park are always running in and out of each other’s like it’s one big happy family—but nobody ever comes in Gran’s because it’s just plain spooky. “Where’s all your stuff?” a kid asked me the one time I had dragged a friend in, shortly after me, Dad, Twig, and Axl had first arrived on Gran’s doorstep five years ago. “It’s invisible,” I told him. He’d rolled his eyes at me, but Gran heard us by then and hollered at me to get “that white trash” out of her kitchen.
It’s going on eleven thirty, but Twig’s still up. I find him cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV, my beat-up basketball in his lap. “Horse?”
“Go to bed, little dude. It’s almost midnight.” I start to walk away, but his shoulders slump. “It’s raining ice shards. I’m not going back out there.”
“How about 2K?” Twig scrambles for the Xbox controller and holds it out to me. “I’ll let you be the Bulls.”
He blinks up at me. Now there’s a kid who has mastered puppy dog eyes. “Let me, huh? Little man, I’m always the Bulls. I gotta get changed first.”
He calls after me, “Just one game, I promise.”
Yeah, right. But I nod like I believe him and go to retrieve some dry clothes from the room we share with Dad. Gran’s trailer might be as barren
as the United Center on a Tuesday morning, but our room could take up a whole episode on Hoarders. One wall is nothing but boxes stacked floor to ceiling—mine and Twig’s are open, spewing clothes like Mount St. Helens. Dad’s are closed, the flaps tucked under each other haphazardly, like a kid’s do-it-yourself pinwheel. His pile leans against Mom’s. Only her boxes are sealed, a pyramid small and fragile, two on the bottom, one on top. Her name is printed neatly on each in black Sharpie and below that a date so long ago, it’s irrelevant, like the expiration date on a box of Twinkies.
I snag a shirt and a pair of torn sweats from the heap and head down the hall. The bathroom’s my favorite part of Gran’s trailer. It’s small as a closet, but there’re no boxes and no empty echo. I wrestle out of my wet clothes and throw them in the tub. I’m tempted to climb in after them, turn the water on as hot as it can go, but soon as Gran hears the water rattling the pipes, she’d be banging on the door, yelling that water “ain’t free.” Besides, Twig’s waiting. My towel’s bunched up in a corner like someone used it to mop up the floor. I pick it up, give it a sniff, then use it to dry off before spreading it over the shower rod where it can air out.
When I come out of the bathroom, Twig’s already got the game fired up. He hands me a controller and hits start. For a few minutes I don’t think about Dad or anything else that might disappear in the night. Twig’s all speed. He jams on the sprint button and sure, he scores some quick points, but me? I’m more about the strategy. Twig’s never been good at spotting a pick. You’d think after about a bazillion losses Twig would give up, but each time I win, he leans in further, holds his controller tighter, and goes straight for the basket.
We’re in the third quarter when Twig says, “Gran thinks he’s gone again.”
The cramping in my hands tells me we’ve been playing at least an hour. I nod, pretending to concentrate on the game. After a few minutes, Twig says so quiet, I almost don’t hear him, “Is he?”
Ignoring him would be easy. If he really wants an answer, he’ll speak up, I tell myself. But I know better. I was about his age when we lost Mom. Wanting an answer isn’t the same as needing one. “What do you think?” I say at last.
“Axl went with him.”
“Yeah.”
Another minute passes before Twig says, “He’s stayed put real good, ’cept for that one time.”
I nod again. No reason to point out that the one time he’s talking about was half Twig’s childhood. And that the times before that were so frequent, we’d need an abacus to tally them up. No reason to tell him any of that or what Gran says about not raising any more kids. But her words bounce around inside my head. If she’s right and Dad is gone, where does that leave me and Twig?
Before long, Twig’s players start lagging and I know he’s fading. Each time I look over, he shifts positions and rallies. When he sprawls out on his stomach, holding the controller with straight arms stretched like Superman playing 2K in midair, I know he’s toast. Couple plays later the controller clunks to the floor. A streamer of drool hangs from his mouth. I switch off the game and scoop Twig up. He mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like “I ate all the ice cream” as I tote him down the hall to our room. Door’s shut again, but I manage to scooch Twig up to my shoulder so I can free a hand for the knob. Ozzy hisses and races out between my feet. I settle Twig on the bed and go after the mangy furball, taking a few scratches for my troubles.
“Should just let Gran cook you,” I tell Ozzy. I pin him against my body so he can’t shred my arms. When I bring him back into the room, he scrambles straight for Twig, curling up next to him like the world’s ugliest teddy bear.
I kick the door shut and climb into the bed, flopping around trying to get comfortable on the lumpy pile of rocks we use for a mattress. My hands slide under the pillow and recoil at the feel of something under there. For half a second I think Twig brought home another cat. But there’s no fur and it doesn’t move. Just some crumpled paper. Or a note. My eyes fly open and I swat at the light switch, blinking partly from the sudden glare and partly from shock. Wads of cash litter the top of the bed like bills from a generous but overworked Tooth Fairy. Ones, tens, more than a few twenties. And right in the middle is a note from Dad scrawled on the back of a receipt:
Have to see a man about a horse. Take care of your little bro.
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