Home Court Read online

  I guess there was a lot of business to talk about because my legs were good and stretched out before their mouths were anywhere close to shut. I decided to walk around to the other side of the big yellow house and take a look at the main lawn.

  First of all, it was a long walk. These big houses right on the lake were something else: three floors and who knows how many rooms. Second, it was worth the trip. I turned the corner and saw a huge green lawn, sloping down and ending in the blue water of the lake. It was just green and blue, stretched out in front of me.

  “Any problems?” I heard behind me.

  I whirled around like I was coming off a screen and looking for a pass, but it was just my dad.

  “What d’ya mean, Pops?” I said.

  “The way you were looking around, I thought that same herd of buffalo might’ve come through here,” he said.

  “You mean whoever’s been messing up lawns lately?” I said.

  “Yep.” We both took another quick look around the lawn.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” I said.

  “Nope,” he said. “All I see is a whole lot of grass in need of mowing.”

  Right on cue, I heard the sound of one of the big riding mowers coming around the side of the house. Dad heard it, too, and it kicked him back into Big Boss mode.

  “Well, I’m not paying you to stand here gawking,” he said. “Fire up that push mower and get started on the front.”

  “All right, all right,” I said, heading back the way I’d come.

  Dad continued to shout instructions as I went: “Make sure you get down by the road — but watch out for the mailbox! And those rose bushes!”

  That was always my job. I mowed around the front, taking extra care to avoid the garden and shrubs and all that other stuff that those turbocharged riding mowers were liable to run right over. I’d gotten pretty good at it: cutting the grass and leaving the rest. I was like a specialist: Secret Agent Double-Mow-Seven!

  Back out front, I gave the cord two good, hard tugs and the mower started right up. After that I got right to work. All I could hear was the BRRRRRRMMM of the engine, and all I could smell was the fresh-cut grass. Between that and the sun beating down on my head, I started to zone out a little. I kept thinking about that big back lawn.

  It looked like an acre or maybe two, and right now Dad and his guys were mowing all that tall grass as neat and trim as any barber ever could. And at the end of it, there was the lake with a little wooden dock and a boat tied up at the end. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a house like that myself someday?

  I caught a flash of red in front of me — it was the hat of a brightly painted garden gnome. I turned the mower just in time to avoid running it over.

  “Phew!” I said.

  That was close. Running over that little statue would have been bad for it, worse for the mower, and worst of all for me! I needed to get my head back in the game before I committed gnome-icide.

  For the rest of the job, I kept my eyes down just like I did when I was skating over an extra-bumpy stretch of sidewalk. The only other thing I let myself think about was what I’d do with the money I was earning. Maybe the movies … or a new pair of kicks … I’d definitely get some music. As the day got longer, the grass got shorter.

  I was mowing the last few feet of grass, down by the road, when I saw it. Someone had taken an empty soda can, twisted it so the metal was bent, and then crushed it flat. Then they’d just dropped it on the lawn. A few feet later, someone had kicked a little hunk of grass up. Next to that, there was a candy wrapper hanging from a bush like a chocolate-smeared earring.

  The sidewalk was just a few feet away, but whoever did this had kicked up this guy’s lawn anyway. And there was a trashcan on the corner, but they’d used the lawn for that, too. I threw out the wrapper and the crushed-up can. Then I put the little wedge of grass back in place and pressed it down, just like the golfers do on TV. I decided not to tell my dad. I knew it would just make him mad. No need to ruin a good day.

  “Hey, hey, can you drop me off here?” I said to Dad as we turned the corner in his truck. We were headed home after finishing up the job, and we’d already dropped the other two guys off.

  “What, right here on the side of the road?” he said, and then he saw them too. “Those your boys?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We were rolling right up on Mike and Deuce as they walked down the sidewalk.

  “Yeah, all right,” said Dad, but instead of slowing down, he started speeding up. When he pulled up even with them, he mashed his hand into the center of the steering wheel.

  BREEEEEEEEEP!

  The truck’s horn was really loud. Mike jumped about two feet in the air, and Deuce froze like a rabbit caught out in the open. Dad was splitting his sides laughing as I climbed down out of the truck, and, okay, maybe I was laughing a little, too.

  “Man, you guys,” I said. “You should’ve seen your faces!”

  I imitated Deuce’s, making my mouth really tiny and my eyes really big.

  Then they both got to work insisting that I hadn’t seen what I just saw.

  “Nah, nah,” Mike was saying. “I was just a little surprised, that’s all. I definitely wasn’t —”

  But Dad beeped as he pulled away, and Mike jumped again.

  Deuce and I both started laughing at him, and he just slumped down.

  “Can’t believe I did that,” he said, shaking his head.

  Once the sound of the big truck faded away, the street was quiet and the three of us were just standing there.

  “You definitely know how to make an entrance,” said Deuce.

  “All my pop’s idea,” I said. “Where you guys headed?”

  “Big baseball game going on over in the park,” said Deuce. “Left you a message, but I guess you were getting your mow on. Timmy told me about the game. I think it’s mostly his crew.”

  “Sounds cool,” I said. “That what’s in the backpack?”

  “Yeah, a couple of gloves, a ball, and some other things,” said Deuce. His blue backpack was stuffed extra full today. It made him look even smaller than usual.

  We headed straight for the park and took all the shortcuts we knew, but the game had already started by the time we got there. Home plate was a flattened-out cardboard box, first base was a Frisbee, and second was an old T-shirt. I pointed to the metal fence post they were using for third. “I hope no one slides in,” I said.

  “Seriously,” said Mike. “Think I’d take the out.”

  Timmy was Deuce’s cousin. He called time when he spotted us, and came over to talk. The first baseman doesn’t usually just call time-out like that, but then first base isn’t normally a Frisbee either.

  “Hey, cuz,” said Deuce.

  “Hey, Big D,” said Timmy.

  “Any chance we can get in on this?” said Deuce.

  “Yeah, mos def,” said Timmy, looking around the field. “We already chose up sides, but we could definitely use another outfielder. That would save us a lot of time chasing the ball. And we could probably use a shortstop, too, now that you mention it.”

  “I can play in the outfield,” I said.

  “Yeah, big man,” said Timmy. “I know you can.”

  We fist-bumped. Timmy was a good guy. To tell the truth, Deuce’s whole family was pretty solid.

  “Can’t have all three of you on the same team, though,” said Timmy.

  “S’all right,” said Deuce. “We only have two gloves.”

  We wound up playing the last five innings. It was a pretty fun game. I know it was good because I had twice as many grass stains on my shorts at the end as when I’d started. That and no one slid into that metal pole at third base.

  I was a little beat after that. I mean, I’d spent all morning pushing a lawn mower around in the sun and then played most of a baseball game. But it was Saturday, I was with my best friends, and the sun was still up. There was no way I was going to go home just yet.

  “What n
ext, guys?” I said. Lake Wales wasn’t a big town, so it’s not like we had tons of options. But that didn’t matter because, for me and my friends, the answer was always going to be sports.

  “Could head over to the court,” said Mike as he slipped on the backpack. His team had lost, so he had to carry it for the rest of the day.

  “You got a ball in that thing?” I said to Deuce, since it was his pack.

  “Don’t leave home without it!” he said.

  We were all up for it. I hadn’t gotten to play at all the day before, and they’d only played one short game against those older kids. And from the looks of them afterward, that had been more like Ultimate Fighting than hoops.

  We took our time walking over, just sort of enjoying having the day to ourselves. When we reached the court, they were still busting on me for a fly ball I missed in the outfield. The sun got in my eyes — at least that’s what I told them! But when I looked over at the court, I thought I really was having trouble seeing.

  “Aww, man,” said Deuce.

  “What are they doing here?” said Mike.

  It was the hacks again. We’d never seen them before yesterday, but there they were for the second straight day, strutting around our local court like they owned it. One of them was scraping the bottom of his sneaker against the wire fence, and another one had just finished off a tall can of iced tea and tossed it at him. They were all shouting and laughing about something.

  “What do you think?” said Deuce. “Up for a rematch?”

  “I don’t know, maybe,” said Mike. “I’m still pretty banged up from yesterday, but at least we’re at full strength now.”

  He looked over at me.

  “Up to you,” I said. I wasn’t really at “full strength” after those hours of mowing and innings of baseball. But if my friends wanted a second shot at these guys, I wasn’t going to say no.

  Mike and Deuce looked at each other. Deuce shrugged. “They probably won’t even play the three of us,” he said. “They wouldn’t yesterday. And I don’t see Roger anywhere.”

  We looked up at the court, and the biggest guy was hanging on the rim after dunking the ball. They were so into themselves that they hadn’t noticed us yet.

  “Yeah,” said Mike. “Probably not. What do you think, Amar’e?”

  “Like I said, man, it’s up to you guys,” I said. “You’re the ones who had to put up with their cheap shots. But you know I like to play for fun, and playing these guys today? It just doesn’t sound like much fun to me.”

  “Yeah,” said Mike, looking down at the scraped-up knee he got yesterday. “Definitely not much fun.”

  So it was a mutual decision. We weren’t scared of those guys. We just didn’t want to let those punks ruin a good Saturday. I looked at the bulky backpack. “What else you got in there?” I asked.

  “Got a Nerf football,” said Deuce.

  A few minutes later, I had it in my hands, ready to air it out.

  “Mike, you go long,” I said. “And Deuce?”

  “I know, I know,” he said. “Go short.”

  We had a good time playing — I got my best grass stain of the day diving for one of Mike’s passes. Still, it kind of bothered me that we’d let those guys kick us off our own home court.

  I woke up Sunday with stuff to do, and as soon as I hit the kitchen, Dad added one more thing to the list. He was holding up my shorts from yesterday like Exhibit A in the Crime of the Century. I’d just thrown them in with the rest of the laundry. I guess that was wishful thinking.

  “Think I can see some cloth in between all these grass stains,” he said. Then he leaned in and put his eyes right up close.

  “Yeah,” I started (what was I going to do, deny it?), “we played some baseball and I was in the outfield, and then there was some Nerf —”

  “I don’t know about Nerf, but there’s definitely some turf,” he said, cutting me off. Then he tossed me the shorts. “Those are good shorts, so you get those stains out of there even if you’ve got to use a washboard.”

  I grabbed the grungy shorts out of the air and put them back by the washer. I sort of made a mental note to add it to my list of things to avoid doing. I looked around at the detergents and all that stuff. Whatever a washboard was, I didn’t think we had one.

  Sunday was always kind of heavy on chores. I also had to get some serious work done on that history paper, plus the rest of my homework. I had kind of a panicky feeling when I realized how much that was. That feeling must’ve passed pretty quickly, though, because I was down at the little park with my skateboard an hour later.

  I was rolling along the pavement at the bottom of a set of concrete steps. I tried an ollie and nailed it. Even though it was just a small one, it felt cool to jump through the air with the board stuck right to my sneakers. I felt like Superman, if Superman had any reason to skate.

  When I landed, I still had some decent speed. I tried to hop up on the first step for a boardslide. The steps had worn-down metal edges, so they were perfect, but I doinked it. The board got hung up on the edge and I went flying. And this time, it wasn’t the Superman kind of flying. I had to catch myself on the railing to avoid feeling like Clark Kent in the worst possible way.

  That was okay. It was just my first attempt of the day, and I already knew I could do a boardslide. I was just trying to get a little better at both tricks and to start linking them together. It’s just like basketball: Okay, so you can dribble and you can shoot. Now, dribble and shoot. Put those together for a pull-up jumper.

  The next trick I wanted to learn was a little tougher. I wanted to have these two down before I tried the pop-shuvit. In that one, you pop the board up in the air so that it’s spinning around under you. Then its wheels land on the ground right before you land on it. That was the idea at least. The few times I’d tried it, the wheels had landed somewhere else, and I was the one who ended up on the ground.

  Anyway, I worked on those first two tricks for a while, but before too long I had to leave to get back home. I wasn’t that late when I rolled into the driveway, but Junior was out there dribbling a basketball. “Come help me out,” he said, as if he were painting the house instead of working on his ballhandling.

  And what am I going to do, not help my older brother? So we got into it. He’d shield me off with his body; trying to get around him was like trying to get to the other side of a building. My brother definitely had more size to work with. When he’d back me down toward the imaginary basket, there wasn’t much I could do. But then he’d help me out by dribbling high or out away from his body, and I’d shoot around for the steal.

  “Oh, man, got me again,” he’d say. Or, “Where’d you come from?” He pretended he hadn’t helped me out at all, but he always had a sneaky little smile on his face.

  “Guess I was just lucky,” I’d say. In a way, I was: lucky to have an older brother who’d play hoops with me without Mack-trucking me into the pavement. We just had fun. There was no basket, but there were no bullies or sign-up sheets either. We were out there for an hour, even though we both had chores to do. Or maybe because we both had chores to do.

  “Wash!” Dad called as soon as I walked in the door. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure if he meant me or those darn shorts, but I figured I could do both at the same time. I used my dirty hands to carry my dirtier shorts over to the sink. I knew from years of grass-stain experience — I was practically an expert — that you had to get most of the stain out before you put it in the washer.

  “Mmm-hmmm,” said Dad when he walked by and saw me bent over the sink and scrubbing away. “That’s what I call taking responsibility for your actions.”

  And that’s what I call wrinkly fingers. But fifteen minutes later, the shorts were ready for the washer, and I finally had one chore crossed off my list.

  After that, I went to my desk and spread out the stuff for my paper. I’d done the reading, now I had to start writing. My plan was to write three pages. That would leave just one more for
tomorrow: the one on what Dr. King meant to me. I couldn’t write that tonight anyway. I was still trying to figure it out.

  I was getting a little worried about that. If I couldn’t come up with something original, and got a bad grade on this big paper, I probably wouldn’t make honor roll. That was something Mom and Dad were both pretty proud of, and I didn’t want to let them down. Plus, Deuce would be on me for it. I was glad I still had a little time.

  Anyway, after spending another day running around under the sun, it felt kind of good to sit inside the cool, quiet house and flex my brain a little. When the phone rang, I nearly fell out of my seat. I picked it up. “Hello?”

  It was Mike: The bullies had kicked him off the court again!

  “Yeah,” he said. “The other half of the court was basically open, but some random dude showed up and they told me to get lost so they could run full court.”

  “They told you to get lost?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but they didn’t put it quite so nicely,” he said. “And they’ve pretty much trashed the court now.”

  “Think they’ll be there again tomorrow?”

  “I guarantee it,” he said. “Because they told me not to bother coming back.”

  “Then I guess they’ll be pretty surprised,” I said.

  “You in?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. I knew I might be getting drawn into something big here, and that there were other things I could be doing that were more fun. I’d even heard that Timmy was organizing another baseball game for tomorrow. But I also knew that these were my friends. No one should kick us off our own court, and no one should trash it either. “I’m in.”

  I had that Game Day feeling all day on Monday.

  “So you’re sure they’ll be there?” Deuce said to Mike as we walked down the hall before math class.

  “That’s what they said,” Mike answered. “And anyway, it sort of seems like they’ve moved in.”