Basketball Disasters Read online

  Mason looked up at the Taylors’ upstairs window. Sure enough, the curtain was pulled back, and he saw a glimpse of someone’s face.

  Maybe Mason’s sign should say NO SPIES, with a bright red line through a picture of a pirate spyglass.

  “Do you think she saw him?” Brody asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  They threw a few more balls for Dog, but the fun had gone out of the game. Dog seemed to sense it, too. He started chasing a squirrel that scampered up a tree to escape him. Not that Dog would ever hurt a squirrel. Dog was the best dog in the world and would never hurt anything.

  “Let’s go in,” Mason said.

  Then they saw Mr. Taylor coming up the front walkway to Mason’s house. Ever friendly, Dog dashed over to greet him.

  “Beautiful morning,” Mr. Taylor said heartily, stooping down to give Dog an awkward pat.

  Mason knew Mr. Taylor hadn’t come out of his house to comment on the weather, speaking the only two words he had ever spoken thus far to Mason.

  The boys nodded. Dog wagged his tail.

  “Sure is,” Brody added.

  “I just wanted to say—to ask you—if you’d make an effort to keep your dog—I’m afraid I don’t know his name—”

  “Dog,” Mason said.

  Mr. Taylor looked baffled, as people often did when Mason told them Dog’s name.

  “To keep your dog in your yard. My mother is particular about things—like how the snow looks when it’s all fresh and new—”

  Mr. Taylor gestured toward Mason’s well-trampled yard, where the snow was stamped down into dirty slush.

  “And I think I mentioned the other day that she doesn’t—”

  “Like dogs,” Mason finished the sentence for him wearily.

  “That’s right.” Mr. Taylor sounded apologetic.

  Mason decided against making any witty remark like, What a coincidence! Dog doesn’t like old ladies!

  “Sure,” Brody said. “Sure,”

  Mason echoed.

  With Dog trailing behind them, they trudged back inside.

  4

  Coach Joe’s class went to the library on Monday to find books for their Famous Figures of the American Revolution reports, the big language-arts project for the trimester.

  Nora was looking discouraged. “I wanted to do a famous woman of the American Revolution, but all the ones I looked up on the computer at home aren’t real.”

  “What do you mean, aren’t real?” Brody asked.

  The three of them had grabbed some books from the selection the librarian had prepared on a cart and were looking at them together in the reading nook over by the windows.

  “Like Betsy Ross. The thing I read about her said she didn’t really make the first flag. Or Molly Pitcher. She didn’t really carry a pitcher of water to the wounded soldiers on the battlefield. I don’t think she even existed.”

  “What about Martha Washington?” Mason asked. “She was real.”

  “She was just famous because she was married to someone famous.”

  “But maybe she helped him to become famous,” Mason suggested. “She sent him off to war with extra-wonderful pomander balls so he had the nicest-smelling uniform in the whole army, and that’s why they made him general.”

  Nora laughed. “Anyway, I decided to do Benjamin Franklin instead, because he was a scientist as well as a politician, and I’m going to be a scientist.”

  “I was thinking of doing him, too,” Brody said. “I saw his printing shop the summer before last when my parents took us to Philadelphia, and I have a hat like his that I can wear if Coach Joe has us dress up.”

  Brody loved dressing up.

  Mason didn’t.

  Brody loved Halloween, which was coming up this weekend. This year Brody was going to cover himself with green and purple balloons and be a bunch of grapes.

  Mason hated Halloween. For the class party he was going to wear his regular clothes and say that he was a werewolf but it wasn’t the full moon yet. He had been enormously relieved when he thought up that particular idea.

  “Okay, I’ll do Ben Franklin, too,” Mason said. It might as well be unanimous.

  “Is it okay if we all do the same person?” Brody asked.

  “Sure,” Nora said. “So long as we write our own reports. Coach Joe didn’t say everybody had to do someone different.”

  After they each found a Ben Franklin book, they stood in line for checkout. Just ahead of them in line, Dunk was also carrying a book about Ben Franklin. Well, it wasn’t as if Dunk could ruin Ben Franklin for everybody else just by writing a report about him.

  Unlike the way Dunk could ruin basketball for everybody by being on their team. Or on a different team. Or on any team at all.

  Mason might as well find out the worst. “Hey, Dunk, are you playing basketball this season?”

  “Yeah, why?” Then Dunk seemed to answer his own question. “Don’t tell me you guys are playing basketball. Brody the Midget? And Mason the Klutz?”

  Mason didn’t point out that he wasn’t the one who had tried to juggle pomander-ball oranges and failed miserably. He couldn’t remember ever having done a klutzy thing in front of Dunk. Except for that time he had fallen over during the kindergarten concert while pretending to be a teapot short and stout. But that didn’t have anything to do with sports.

  “Wait till you guys play my team,” Dunk chortled. “Do you know what the name of our team is?”

  How could Mason possibly know the name of Dunk’s team when he hadn’t even known for sure that Dunk was on a team?

  “The Killer Whales,” Dunk told him.

  “I never heard of any whales that were especially good at basketball,” Mason couldn’t resist saying. Fighting bulldogs had to be better at basketball than killer whales. At least they had feet and lived on land.

  “That’s because you haven’t heard of these whales,” Dunk retorted. “But you will.”

  He whacked Mason in the shoulder with his Ben Franklin book in a way that wasn’t very beneficial either for the book or for Mason’s shoulder.

  “You will,” Dunk repeated.

  On Tuesday night, Mason and his dad arrived at the first basketball practice twenty minutes early. The team practices were held not at the Y but at the elementary school. Mason’s dad was clutching his coaching book, which had indeed arrived yesterday as promised. Already the book bristled with sticky notes marking the most important pages.

  “The book said I need to figure out my coaching philosophy,” Mason’s dad said. “I need to decide the most important thing I want my players to learn.”

  “How to get the ball through the hoop?” Mason thought that was a good one, for starters.

  “Not things like that. What values do I want you to learn?”

  “Perseverance. Giving 110 percent. Striving for our personal best. Sportsmanship. Teamwork.” Mason rattled them off. He must have been paying more attention the other night than he had realized.

  “But which of those values is the most important? Do you want to know what I’ve decided? Which one I’ve picked as the core of my coaching philosophy? Sportsmanship. ‘It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.’ ”

  That was probably a good choice, given that Mason was expecting their team to lose every single game.

  “We may not be the winningest team,” Mason’s dad said.

  An understatement, if Mason had ever heard one.

  “But we can excel in sportsmanship. Unless—do you think I should have picked teamwork?”

  “Sportsmanship is good,” Mason reassured him. He was confident that just about any team could beat the Killer Whales on sportsmanship. “But aren’t we also going to have to learn stuff like how to actually play the game?”

  “Of course. Tonight we’re going to work on”—he checked his notes—“layups. And dribbling. And different kinds of passes. But I’m hoping most of the kids will already have some of those basics down from P.E.” His brow fur
rowed with worry. “We’re not going to have to start from scratch, are we?”

  Mason felt sorry enough for his dad that he said, “Nah. We did a lot of that stuff in P.E.”

  For three weeks.

  Almost a year ago.

  Toward seven o’clock, the rest of the team began trickling in. Brody was first, of course, followed by Jeremy, also from Coach Joe’s class, and three boys Mason didn’t know from the neighboring town. Was that going to be the whole team? Six kids, all of whom had probably never played team basketball before or they’d be on a team already?

  Mason thought his dad did a good job of welcoming everybody and making his speech about the importance of sportsmanship. He didn’t talk too long, and he said the positive, encouraging things Mason’s mom had wanted from a coach for Mason.

  “I know each one of you has a unique contribution to make to this team,” he concluded. “And I’m here to help you make that contribution.”

  Mason wondered what his own unique contribution was going to be, or if he even had a unique contribution. He suspected that his father might have taken that line directly from his coaching book. Still, it was a positive, encouraging line.

  “Okay, team!” Now his dad sounded like Coach Joe. In fact, perhaps inspired by Coach Joe, he had asked the kids to call him Coach Dan. “Coach Dan” and “Coach Dad” sounded enough the same that if Mason called him Coach Dad, no one would be likely to notice.

  They started with some stretches to warm up their muscles, and then did a dribbling drill back and forth across the gym. One chubby, red-haired kid, Dylan, kept losing control of his basketball and having to chase it across the gym. Then Mason was partners with Dylan for a passing drill. Dylan could neither catch a ball thrown to him nor throw a ball so that anybody else could catch it.

  Maybe Dylan’s unique contribution to the team was going to be making everyone else feel better about himself in comparison.

  Mason’s dad stepped in to offer Dylan some pointers. “Good job!” he praised, after Dylan finally caught the ball one time instead of throwing up his hands to shield his face.

  Mason could only imagine what Dylan’s parents had said to coax him into trying basketball. If he himself had been the coach, he would have suggested that Dylan reconsider this choice. But if Dylan quit the team, they would have just five players—the bare minimum for a team, without a single substitute.

  In his opening remarks, Mason’s dad had urged the players to try to find a friend or two to join. But Mason’s second-best friend was Nora, and the fourth-grade teams weren’t co-ed. And Brody’s second-best friend, Sheng, was already on a team.

  During the layup drill, Mason was gratified when a couple of his shots went through the basket. He wished his mother had been there to see that her son was more talented at basketball than she seemed to think.

  “Water break!” Coach Dad announced.

  Mason thought it might be a good idea to end the first practice a bit early—or a lot early—so that the players wouldn’t get overtired and strain their muscles. A little bit of basketball practice went a long way, in Mason’s opinion. But after the quick water break, his dad put the players back to work, practicing one-on-one offensive and defensive strategies.

  This time Mason wasn’t stuck with Dylan. Instead, he was paired with Brody, the king of hustle. Scrappy little Brody kept knocking the ball out of Mason’s hands and diving after it. For a moment, Mason felt the tiniest flicker of dislike for Brody. Why would a friend try so hard to take the ball away from another friend?

  “Mason, you’re not trying,” Brody complained after he made the next basket.

  “Maybe you’re trying too hard,” Mason shot back.

  “That’s what hustle is,” Brody explained, grabbing the ball away from Mason and aiming it at the hoop.

  Mason was glad when Brody missed, but then, too busy smirking, he forgot to go for the rebound. Brody snagged it and shot it again; the ball went in this time.

  “Twelve to two,” Brody announced.

  Oh, put a sock in it, Mason wanted to say.

  Finally, practice was almost over.

  “One more practice—one!—and then we have our first game!” Coach Dad told the team as they did their cool-down stretches. “Remember to try to find some friends to join us. We could really use a few more kids.”

  Brody walked home with Mason and his dad. Even after a solid hour of running and jumping, Brody kept springing into the air to shoot imaginary baskets, doubtless racking up an ever-higher imaginary score in his head.

  “Cut it out, Brody,” Mason said. “Practice is over.”

  “Brody has the right idea,” his dad said. “Good job tonight, Brode. Oh, and good job, Mason,” he added, clearly as an afterthought.

  Surely his coaching book would say that a coach wasn’t supposed to have favorites. Right now it seemed as if Mason’s dad might have forgotten that particular piece of coaching advice.

  5

  On the second colonial-crafts Thursday in Coach Joe’s class, the parent helper was Sheng’s mom, Mrs. Lin, and the colonial craft was making corn-husk dolls.

  It was too late in the year for anyone to be able to gather corn husks from a cornfield, so Sheng’s mom had bought several big packages of corn husks from a Mexican food store. Selling corn husks at a food store seemed somewhat strange to Mason. Even Mason’s mom, who liked to cook all kinds of foods from other countries and cultures, had never yet tried to make Mason eat corn husks or anything wrapped in them.

  Mason rolled his moistened corn husks into a little bundle and tied it with a piece of string, as Mrs. Lin had demonstrated. Then he flipped the husks over the tied string and tied them again to form the doll’s head.

  Brody was already talking to his doll.

  “Now I’m going to make your arms,” he told the doll. “I’m going to make you a nice pair of arms!”

  The heads didn’t have faces painted on them yet; the students couldn’t draw on the faces until the dolls were all done and had time to dry, or their faces would smear. A smeary face was worse than no face at all. So Brody had to imagine the expression on his doll’s face. He held her—him?—it?—up in front of him and made the doll give a little shake of joyful anticipation.

  “My doll’s head is too big,” Mason complained. “I tied the string down too low.”

  “A big head is good!” Brody reassured him. “It means your doll will be extra smart because of all those extra brains.”

  Mason doubted that greatly.

  Nora was working on her doll with quiet competence. Her doll’s arms were already done, complete with hands, and she had tied its waist and fluffed out its long skirts.

  “You don’t have any other dolls, do you?” Mason asked her. He had been to Nora’s house a few times and had never seen any dolls or stuffed toys in her room, just her ant farm.

  “No. I mean, what’s the point?”

  Mason’s thought, exactly.

  “Are you going to make your doll a boy or a girl?” Brody asked Mason.

  Mrs. Lin had told them they could either give their dolls a long full skirt or tie the corn husks at the bottom of the doll into two sections to form its legs.

  Nora gave a little snort. “You mean, is your doll going to have pants or a dress? You aren’t a boy just because you have on pants.” She pointed to her own blue jeans. “Every single girl in our class is wearing pants, even Emma.”

  “But this is back then,” Brody said. “In colonial times.”

  “I know. But even nowadays, restroom doors have a picture of a person in a dress, and that means women, or a picture of a person in pants, and that means men. Which is dumb.”

  “I’m going to make my doll a girl,” Brody said. “She just seems like she’s a girl.”

  Mason was going to make his a girl, too, to save the extra step of tying legs.

  “I’m going to name you Abigail,” Brody told his doll. “Do you like that name? Abigail?”

  The doll
gave another little happy shake.

  “She likes it,” Brody said.

  Dunk had finished his doll. He walked over to Mason’s desk with it. Dunk’s doll—if you could call it that—was the worst-looking corn-husk doll Mason had ever seen. No one could have guessed that this bunch of corn husks tied in random places was a corn-husk doll if it hadn’t been made during a class on how to make corn-husk dolls.

  Dunk made his corn-husk doll leap into the air and then jerked it forward.

  “Two!” Dunk shouted.

  Mason figured out that Dunk’s doll had just made a slam dunk, scoring two points for the Killer Whales.

  In the effort, though, one of the corn husks slipped from its string and dropped onto Mason’s desk.

  “Your doll is falling apart,” Mason pointed out politely.

  “Yeah, well, after our first game, your team is going to be falling apart.”

  Another corn husk came loose as Dunk waved his doll in Mason’s face.

  “Actually, your doll just fell apart,” Mason said.

  Mason was pretty good with snappy lines.

  But it would take a lot more than snappy lines to beat the Killer Whales in basketball.

  The snow had long melted by the weekend, so when Mason and Brody were outside on Saturday afternoon playing catch with Dog, no telltale footprints betrayed Dog for having run twice into the Taylors’ yard, chasing his ball. Besides, surely Mrs. Taylor didn’t sit peering out her window every single minute of the day just in case a dog crossed over her property line.

  Brody’s next throw went wild, and this time Dog did dart all the way to the Taylors’ front walk to retrieve it. But Mason couldn’t get too stressed about it. Dog wasn’t peeing or pooping in the Taylors’ yard, he wasn’t making any noise except for one or two friendly barks that couldn’t bother anybody, and he had never bitten anyone, ever. Well, except for chewing up Puff the Plainfield Dragon.

  How could anybody not like Dog? Or mind the sight of him out playing on a sunny autumn afternoon?

  Then, a few minutes later—to Mason’s utter disbelief—a panel van with CITY OF PLAINFIELD ANIMAL CONTROL written on the side pulled up in front of his yard. A man in a green uniform got out of the van, carrying a clipboard.