Edenville Owls

Chapter 10

Billy sat beside me in the back row in homeroom.

“Was it him?” Billy whispered to me.

“Yeah.”

“He recognize you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I said I liked his car.”

“What are you going to do now?” Billy whispered.

“Billy,” Miss Delaney said. “Will you swap seats with Manny, please, for the rest of class?”

Miss Delaney knew that Manny rarely said anything, and putting him between me and Billy would quiet us all down. But she didn’t break the Owls up, just shuffled us around a little.

“Thank you,” Miss Delaney said when the swap was completed.

When school was out, we went to the basketball court in the yard.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do that weave again to warm up.”

“Okay, Coach,” Russell said.

“You been over to the high school again this week?” Nick asked.

“I got some new stuff,” I said. “After we warm up.”

“They warm up at the high school?” Manny said.

I was always a little startled when he spoke, he was so silent so much of the time.

“Course,” I said.

Manny smiled and loped into the corner with the basketball and started the weave.

“Inside,” I said to Russell. “Inside the guy you’re handing off to.”

“Screw you,” Russell said. “I started this team. I’ll go where I want.”

“You want to go to the tourney or not?” I said.

“We got to get better, Russell,” Nick said. “We stunk up the gym when we played the JVs that time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Russell said.

And the weave continued.

“Now,” I said when we were done weaving, “we’re going to work on screens.”

“We don’t need screens,” Russell said. “Until spring.”

“Very funny,” I said. “Manny, say you got the ball over there. Now you pass it to me and run over here and stop. You got to be set to screen for me. A moving screen is a foul. Okay, come on... pass me the ball... and run over... stop... Now I got the ball, I can either dribble past the screen and lose the guy guarding me... or if I can’t lose him, or they switch, I can pull up behind Manny and hit the set shot.”

I put up a one-hand shot, which hit the front of the rim and bounced away.

“Work even better,” Russell said, “if you hit the shot.”

“You’ll get your chance,” I told him.

We practiced screens for the rest of the afternoon. I noticed that a lot of the plays the JVs ran had people moving without the ball and getting the ball passed to them when they were behind the screen. And I’d heard Coach talk about a double screen, but I didn’t quite see what that was. Today we’d just keep it simple. Pass the ball and set the screen.

After practice when I was walking home with Manny, I saw the car again, parked on Church Street this time, in front of the school. I kept my head down and didn’t look at it as we went by.