Basketball Disasters Page 5

  They lost, 43–8.

  Then came the moment Mason was dreading above all others, the moment when the Killer Whales and the Fighting Bulldogs had to file past each other in the center of the court and shake hands.

  Mason held out his hand the way everyone else was doing. But he made sure that the tips of his fingers never actually touched any Killer Whale fingers. Dunk didn’t dare say anything nasty with the two coaches standing right there. Mason knew Dunk would have plenty to say at school on Monday.

  Win with grace? Ha! Lose with dignity? Ha!

  Coach Dad should return that coaching book to the publisher and demand his money back.

  7

  Sunday afternoon, Mason and Dog went over to Nora’s house. The day after the worst slaughter in the history of fourth-grade basketball was a good day for spending some peaceful, quiet time with a friend and her ant farm.

  Until Mason had become friends with Nora, he had never heard of such a thing as an ant farm; he had never known anyone who had ants as pets. Though they weren’t pets, really, for Nora. They were objects of scientific study. Nora did experiments on her ants—not experiments that could be fatal, but definitely experiments that might annoy an ant or two. She liked giving her ants a challenge and seeing what they would do.

  Today she had placed her ant farm in the refrigerator.

  “The refrigerator!” Mason was shocked. Still cold from walking the few blocks to Nora’s house, he shivered on behalf of her poor refrigerated ants.

  “Mason, if they lived in nature, as ants are supposed to live, they’d be outside all winter long.”

  Of course, Nora was right. But still.

  She had rescued the ants from the fridge and placed their farm back in its usual spot on top of the bureau in her room.

  “See how much more slowly they’re moving,” she commented.

  Mason watched them going about their ant business. It looked like pointless motion, but Nora had told Mason that it was actually highly purposeful activity.

  After their stint in the fridge, the ants did seem sluggish. This was one way that Dog was different from ants. Cold weather made him extra energetic and peppy. Mason reached down and rubbed Dog’s ears.

  “So how was your game yesterday?” Nora asked Mason.

  “Horrible.”

  “You lost.”

  “Good guess.”

  “Not to Dunk’s team?”

  “Who else?”

  Then Mason told Nora everything—how the Fighting Bulldogs had no subs; how bad Dylan stank; how bad they all stank, really; how the gum-chewing ref had been bribed to make bad calls by the corrupt and cheating Killer Whales.

  Nora nodded thoughtfully for all of it until Mason mentioned the bribing of the ref.

  “You don’t know that,” she said.

  “The evidence points that way.” Mason thought Nora would approve of an appeal to the evidence.

  Nora shook her head. “Anybody can make a bad call.”

  “Especially if he’s paid to make them.”

  “Oh, Mason.”

  Silently they watched the ants for a few more minutes.

  “I wish I could quit,” Mason said. “But then my mother would say, Oh, you know how Mason is—Mason never likes doing new things.”

  “Well, you don’t like doing new things.”

  “I still don’t want to hear her say it.”

  “Anyway, I wouldn’t quit just yet,” Nora said.

  “Why not?”

  “I have a feeling things are going to get better for the Fighting Bulldogs.”

  Mason stared at her. Nora wasn’t the kind of person who relied on feelings.

  “You don’t know that,” he echoed her line to him from before.

  Nora smiled. “Actually,” she said, “I do.”

  “Forty-three to eight!” Dunk greeted Mason and Brody on the school playground the next morning.

  “Wow, Dunk,” Mason said. “I didn’t know you could count that high.”

  “I knew your team would stink,” Dunk continued. “I knew it would stink big-time. But forty-three to eight?”

  Mason should have grabbed Brody’s arm and walked away. Instead, he said, “Well, your team is just a bunch of no-good dirty cheaters.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Traveling all the time. Fouling everybody. Bribing the ref.”

  “We did not!”

  “Did, too!”

  Brody wasn’t saying anything. Mason knew Brody thought Mason was being a poor sport, but he wasn’t. Besides, how could you lose with dignity if the other team wasn’t even trying to win with grace?

  The bell rang.

  Mason and Dunk were still squabbling as they took their seats.

  “Cheater!”

  “Loser!”

  Coach Joe appeared out of nowhere and laid a hand on each boy’s shoulder. “What’s going on, guys?”

  “My basketball team beat Mason’s team, and he’s a sore loser,” Dunk told Coach Joe.

  “His team cheated! They bribed the ref!”

  Coach Joe rubbed his chin. “That’s a pretty serious accusation,” he told Mason. “A very serious accusation, I’d say.”

  Mason knew Coach Joe meant that he shouldn’t be accusing Dunk and his team of cheating unless he had real proof. Which he didn’t have. Unlike the time Dunk had copied his football story for language arts and Nora had found the same story, virtually word for word, on the Internet. How could he prove that Dunk’s team had cheated? It wasn’t as if he could expect to see them handing Jonah huge bags full of chewing gum.

  “For now,” Coach Joe went on, “maybe we should just decide that what happens on the basketball court stays on the basketball court. What do you say?”

  He gave both boys a friendly grin. But Mason couldn’t stop seething.

  In math that morning they did division. Mason wished he could divide Dunk into tiny pieces.

  In science they learned about electricity. Mason didn’t wish he could electrocute Dunk, but he wouldn’t have minded giving him a small shock or two.

  In P.E. they started their unit on basketball, the last thing that Mason needed more of in his life right now. But with all his practice in the last couple of weeks, he was definitely better at basketball than he had been last year.

  As Mason had guessed, Nora was excellent at shooting, the best in the class. She looked directly at the basket, calm and collected, as if measuring the exact angle and distance she needed to shoot. In the ball would go.

  For language arts, Coach Joe gave the class time to work on their reports. Mason read his library book about Ben Franklin and took notes on index cards.

  Brody raised his hand. “Are we going to have a day when we dress up in colonial clothes?”

  “On our Colonial School Day,” Coach Joe answered, “you’ll be encouraged but not required to wear period clothes, if you have any handy.”

  Brody’s face lit up, presumably at the thought of himself in his three-cornered hat.

  Mason felt his own face light up at the thought of Dunk in a dunce’s cap.

  And he and Nora could both wear their nice, normal, regular clothes, with no hats at all.

  * * *

  On Tuesday morning at breakfast, Mason’s dad was still studying his coaching book. Mason hadn’t seen him doing a sudoku puzzle since basketball season began. Maybe he had decided that coaching was challenging enough to stimulate his aging brain cells.

  “Tonight we’ll do pivot-shooting drills,” his dad announced.

  Mason swallowed a mouthful of plain Cheerios. He didn’t know what pivot-shooting drills were, but he didn’t need to know.

  “Oh, and Mason, I got an email from the Y registration office, with some great news for our team.”

  Had Dylan decided to drop out?

  “Four new kids are joining us. Four! It’s going to make a world of difference, believe you me.”

  Mason didn’t ask if his dad knew the names of the new p
layers. He’d find out soon enough.

  That night at practice, Mason and his dad were there first, as usual; this time Brody walked over to the school with them.

  The others trickled in: Jeremy, Kevin, Matt, Dylan. Nobody else. Maybe the four new players had heard about last weekend’s hideous defeat and changed their minds about joining.

  Then the four new players came bounding into the gym. One was wearing a pink princess T-shirt. Another’s long ponytail bobbed behind her as she ran across the court. The third had her hair held back from her face with sparkly clips.

  The fourth was Nora.

  8

  “But—” Mason could hardly grasp the fact that Nora and three other girls were apparently now team members of the Fighting Bulldogs. “But fourth-grade YMCA teams aren’t co-ed!”

  “True,” Nora said.

  “So—?”

  “There are boys’ teams and girls’ teams. Boys can’t be on girls’ teams, but girls can be on boys’ teams.”

  Mason shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “They think it does. They think the boys are going to be better than the girls, so it would be unfair to the girls to make them play against boys, but not to let them play against boys.”

  Mason lowered his voice so the rest of his team wouldn’t hear. “The boys on our team aren’t better than anyone.”

  Nora laughed. “Anyway, Amy, Elise, Tamara, and I were all on a team last year, but this year half the team moved away or couldn’t play, so we were just going to take a break from basketball. But then I made my plan.”

  If Mason had been a hugging kind of person, and if Nora had been a hugging kind of person, he would have hugged her.

  Brody was already warming up by shooting some layups with Jeremy. The other three new players were shooting from outside, making a higher percentage of shots than anyone thus far in the short, doomed history of the Fighting Bulldogs.

  Mason’s dad was too excited about the new recruits to remember to do the warm-up stretches the coaching book had recommended. He skipped the pivot-shooting drill he had planned as well. Instead, after the usual shooting and passing drills, he put the players into one three-on-three game and one two-on-two game. This time Mason and Brody were on the same team, playing against Dylan and Nora.

  Handicapped by Dylan, Nora couldn’t overcome the Mason-Brody duo, despite her shooting prowess. Mason appreciated Brody’s hustle more when they weren’t playing one-on-one against each other. It even proved to be catching. Mason leaped for the rebound of one of Nora’s shots as if it really mattered who caught it.

  Right then, ahead of Nora and Dylan 8–6, it did.

  “Great game,” Nora said as they stood in line at the water fountain for the water break.

  “Thanks,” Mason said, wiping his sweaty face with the bottom of his T-shirt: gross, but effective. This might be the first time in his life that he had ever won anything.

  He hoped Nora knew he wasn’t just thanking her for what she had said. He was thanking her for what she had done.

  Thursday’s colonial craft was punched-tin lanterns. The parent helper for the day was Mason’s mom. She was good at all crafts, though knitting and sewing were her specialties. She had made a Puff the Plainfield Dragon costume for the first concert of the Plainfield Platters a few weeks ago. Brody had worn it to sing a solo of the school song. Still, it was strange having her there in the classroom, showing everybody how to make punched-tin lanterns.

  Each student was given a tin can that had been filled with water and frozen solid. Mason’s mother had prepared the cans yesterday and stored them in the freezer in the teachers’ lounge. Mason and Brody helped her carry them to Coach Joe’s classroom, using lids from large cardboard cartons as trays.

  The cans were all different sizes.

  “I want to make a tiny lantern.” Brody pointed at the smallest can. “Or maybe a huge lantern! How many can we make?” he asked Mason’s mother as they walked down the hall together.

  “Just one, I’m afraid. It was hard enough coming up with twenty-five cans, believe me.”

  “Okay, I’ll do the littlest one. Which can do you want, Mason?” Brody studied the cans intently, his head tilted to one side.

  “Um—they’re all fine,” Mason said. They were all … cans.

  Back in Coach Joe’s room, Mason’s mom showed everyone how to draw a design on the outside of the can with washable marker, and then how to hammer in holes with a big nail along the lines drawn. There were only six hammers—Mason didn’t know where she had even found those six—so kids had to take turns. He also wondered what the point of the ice was supposed to be.

  Nora raised her hand. “Why are they filled with ice?”

  “It’s easier to hammer the nails against some kind of surface,” Mason’s mom said. “It gives you more control.”

  “But—where would colonial people have gotten ice? They didn’t have freezers.” Nora’s face furrowed with another question. “And where would they have gotten cans?”

  “They would have used flat sheets of tin, hammering them on a wooden table. Then they bent them into a lantern shape.”

  “Where did they get the tin?”

  Now Mason’s mother looked perplexed. Sooner or later, Nora always came up with a question the parent helpers couldn’t handle.

  Even Coach Joe seemed stumped by this one. He looked up from helping a student to reply. “I believe they imported it from England,” he told Nora.

  “But where did they get it? Are there tin mines, like coal mines? I never heard of tin mines. And if there were tin mines in England, why weren’t there tin mines in America?”

  “Those are good questions we can try to answer during library time,” Coach Joe said. “But now we want to finish our punched-tin lanterns before the ice melts.”

  Before the ice melts even more. Mason’s lantern was already leaking melted ice water onto his desk. Luckily his mother had brought in towels for everyone to place under their cans. She had really thought of everything. Mason was impressed. It wasn’t as if she supervised the making of twenty-five punched-tin lanterns every day.

  A howl went up from across the room. It was Dunk.

  “My finger! I hammered my finger!”

  Maybe Mason’s mother hadn’t thought of everything. She hadn’t thought of Dunk hammering his own finger instead of hammering his can. At least he had hammered his own finger; usually it was the person sitting next to Dunk who ended up injured.

  Dunk was bawling as if he were two years old instead of almost ten.

  “Oh, Dunk, let me see.” Mason’s mom examined Dunk’s finger. “I think it’ll be all right. Put your finger in the ice, inside your can, and go down to the health room, so they can take a look at it,” she suggested, exchanging glances with Coach Joe, who nodded his approval.

  Sniffling now, Dunk left the room, sucking his wounded finger much more like a big baby than like a Killer Whale.

  “I’m going to hang my lantern on my Christmas tree,” Brody told Mason. “Along with my pomander ball and my corn-husk doll. But I won’t light a candle in it so the tree won’t catch on fire and burn the house down.”

  Good idea.

  “What are you going to do with yours?” Brody asked Mason.

  Mason’s design on his can was just the letter M: M for “Mason.”

  “Is M for ‘Mom’? Are you going to give it to your mom for Christmas?”

  Another good idea.

  “Uh-huh,” Mason said.

  Maybe his dad would like a lovely pomander ball for his underwear drawer.

  And maybe Dog would like a nice, chewable corn-husk doll.

  “Now that we have ten players, will you still put Dylan in to play?” Mason asked his dad as he and his parents were driving to the Y Saturday morning for their second game of the season.

  Mason knew what his dad was going to say before he said it.

  “Of course! Mason—”

  “The coaching
book says—”

  “No! I don’t need to read a coaching book to know that every kid gets a chance to play. I’d rather lose every single game all season long than not give all kids an equal chance to play.”

  Mason had a feeling his dad was going to get his wish.

  The team they were playing today—green shirts—had two of Brody’s other friends on it: Sheng and Julio. Brody ran over to greet them when he arrived in the gym a few minutes after Mason.

  Mason scowled in Brody’s direction. There was no need to be so chummy with the enemy team.

  Coach Dad put Mason in to start this time, along with Jeremy, Kevin, Nora, and Elise.

  Mason passed to Nora every chance he got. He always felt better when the ball was in Nora’s capable hands. One time he passed to Nora even when Elise and Jeremy were in a better position to shoot.

  Sheng was guarding Nora; he stole the ball, took it down the court, shot, and scored.

  Mason thought of all the reasons he had never really liked Sheng.

  “Mason, look to see who’s open!” his dad called to him.

  Mason still thought Nora not-open was a better bet than anybody else open.

  The next time he tried to pass to Nora, Sheng leaped for the ball again. Mason was sure he saw Sheng’s shoulder bump against Nora’s, but the ref didn’t call a foul; it was a different ref this time, not Jonah.

  Sheng scored again.

  Mason thought of all the reasons he positively disliked Sheng.

  Even with Mason’s turnovers, the score was tied 12–12 at the half. Four of the Fighting Bulldogs’ baskets were Nora’s; one was Jeremy’s, one Elise’s.

  Mason hoped he would have at least one in-game basket to his credit before the season—and his illustrious basketball career?—was over forever.

  At the halftime huddle, Coach Dad told the team to be sure to look to see who was open before passing to anybody. He didn’t name any names, but Mason was sure everybody knew who he was talking about.

  Brody played the second half; unfortunately, so did Dylan. Mason watched from the bench as Dylan managed to keep out of the way most of the time. Mason didn’t see anybody passing to him, which was for the best. The ref didn’t make any other bad calls that Mason noticed. Brody scored twice; Amy and Elise each scored once.