Читать книгу The Long Shot - Ellen Hartman - Страница 10

CHAPTER TWO

DEACON SLAMMED HIS hand against the glass door of the university administration building and stalked out. He made no attempt to hold the door for the idiot he called a brother. In fact, the way he felt right now, he hoped the door would hit Wes in the face. The kid desperately needed someone to knock some sense into him.

“Deacon, wait,” Wes called.

He kept walking. His Porsche convertible was parked in a visitor’s spot right outside the building. “Deacon!” His brother was behind him, the flip-flops he wore slapping the pavement.

“Get in the car.”

“Can’t you listen for one minute?”

“I was just at a meeting with your coach and a very nice woman from the dean of students office. A meeting in which I fully expected to listen to what you had to say, but— Wait a minute. You weren’t there, were you? They were talking about kicking you out of school, Wes, and you couldn’t be bothered to show up?”

“I got there.”

“A whole hour late. The meeting was over before you managed to drop by.”

“Aren’t you even going to listen to my side of the story?”

“How can there possibly be ‘your’ side to paying your roommate to do your work? How can there possibly be ‘your’ side to skipping practice? Or getting caught in a bar with a fake ID? And I’d really, really like to know how there can be ‘your’ side to stealing your coach’s car and ‘parking’ it inside the weight room.”

He heard Wes’s barely suppressed snicker when he mentioned the car.

Deacon walked back up the sidewalk to face his brother, muscling into his space because he was angry enough that he didn’t care about being nice. Deacon and Wes Fallon were both over six foot and both had spent a good part of their lives in the gym. But Deacon was ten years older and he’d shouldered responsibility for their family at an age when most boys were dreaming about learning to shave. So while he and Wes might be physically matched, he was still able to back his little brother down a step when he wanted to.

“You wouldn’t be laughing if Coach Mulbrake had called the cops when he found out his car was stolen—”

“It was a joke, not auto theft.”

“How is it not theft if you took his car out of his garage without his permission? The only reason he didn’t file charges is that I begged him not to. I worked too damn hard to get to a place where I don’t have to ask anyone for favors, and I spent the last hour doing exactly that because you think everything is a big freaking joke!”

Wes squared his shoulders and put his hands on his hips. “You’re not even going to listen, are you?”

The kid might be eighteen, but he still sounded six when he thought he was being treated unfairly. Which happened more often than expected in the privileged life of Wes Fallon.

“I don’t know what you could say that would convince me you haven’t screwed up the sweet deal you have here to play ball and get a college degree on top of it. You’re suspended, Wes, and unless we scare up three hundred hours of community service and a fistful of letters of recommendation, you can kiss your college-basketball career goodbye.”

Deacon felt sick thinking about how wrong college had gone for Wes. He’d tried to give his brother everything, and he had a horrible feeling Wes didn’t want any of it because he didn’t know how much an education, respect, a life with value meant. How could his brother throw away his life on irresponsibility?

Wes might have been too young to know what had really happened to their parents, but Deacon had watched his dad drug his life away, day after agonizing day, until the man had died of exposure, drunk and strung out in the snow, just a few months after Wes was born. Their mom had died two short years later, killed in a fire at a club on a night when she’d called in sick to work. Deacon understood what happened to people who didn’t fear consequences.

“No, Wes, I’m not in the mood to listen. Get in the car. Keep your mouth shut, and we’ll talk later.”

“I’m not getting in the car.” Wes’s cheekbones were stained with splotches of red, a sure sign he was angry. That only served to piss Deacon off more. What exactly did Wes have to be angry about?

“I’m not asking you, Wes. I’m telling you. Get in the car, because if I leave without you, I’m not coming back.”

He climbed in the driver’s side and slammed the door. He took his time finding the key and fiddling with his seat belt, the whole time praying that Wes wouldn’t call his bluff. Deacon felt a stab of the panic he thought he’d left behind when he signed his first pro contract—panic that he’d lose his brother because he was too stupid to figure out how to rescue him.

Wes took off, striding down the sidewalk in those stupid flip-flops, head and shoulders above most of the other college kids.

He put the car in gear and crept along, keeping behind his brother.

They’d gotten to see their mom in the hospital for a few minutes before she died. He was twelve when he promised his mom he’d look after his two-year-old brother. Not a day of his life had passed since that he hadn’t worried about Wes. Which was why a big portion of his anger today was aimed squarely at himself. He’d let his brother down, and it was up to him to get him back on track.

He pulled up next to Wes. “You’re acting like a child. Get in the car.”

“You’re treating me like a child. Screw off.”

They reached a corner, and Wes crossed, while Deacon had to wait for a bunch of students to slouch past the bumper of his car, cell phones pressed to their ears, oblivious to the traffic, oblivious to the beauty of the campus or the beauty of being kids who fit in there. No wonder Wes took all this for granted. Every last one of them did. When Deacon finally had an opening, he eased the Porsche through and caught up to Wes. He hit the horn, but his brother didn’t turn his head.

“You’re suspended, remember?” he yelled, and three girls turned to stare. “You can’t stay on campus. Where the hell are you even going?”

When Wes stopped walking abruptly, one of the girls ran into him. He grabbed her arm and helped her catch her balance. She swept her hair back off her shoulders, looking up at Wes and falling for his smile without a second thought. One of the other girls stepped closer. Moth to the flame. Deacon shook his head, watching as his brother’s inexhaustible charm claimed another victim. The girls said something, and Wes shrugged. They walked off, Wes eyeing them, focusing anywhere but on him waiting in the car. Wes could follow the girls, walk right on out of Deacon’s life if he wanted to. He’d turned eighteen and the legal guardianship was over. Wes was under no obligation to do what Deacon said anymore, so he did the only thing he could. He held on. Waited.

Finally, Wes opened the passenger door and slumped into the seat, his long legs, in beat-up jeans, stretching under the dashboard.

“Can you not talk to me?” Wes asked.

Yeah. He could do that.

He edged back into the campus traffic. The sooner he got them out of here, the sooner he could start making plans for how he could pull this rescue off.

They stuck to the not-talking plan while they stopped at the dorm and packed up Wes’s stuff. Wes spoke once to ask if they could wait for his roommate, Oliver, whose hearing for his part in the cheating had followed the Fallons’, but Deacon was mad at Oliver, too, and he said no. They didn’t speak again as they loaded the car and left campus, or on their drive back north through New York toward the upstate town of Lamach Lake, where Deacon lived.

In fact, the not talking to each other lasted longer than Deacon had expected. Wes wasn’t normally one for extended silences. Or brooding. If something was wrong with him, everyone in the vicinity knew all the gory details because he whined and moped and generally made a nuisance of himself until someone fixed whatever the problem was or until Wes forgot there’d been a problem in the first place.

The silence lasted so long it unnerved Deacon. He said something he’d never said to Wes: “Do you know what I had to do to give you this life you’re bent on throwing away?”

Wes didn’t look at him. Didn’t move. Deacon should never have said that. He’d raised Wes because he loved him, and he didn’t resent it. When he glanced over, Wes lifted his eyebrows as if daring him to say something else.

“You’re freaking smirking at me? You have no idea how easily your life could have been utter crap. It still could if you’re not careful. You can’t go around not caring and blowing off opportunities forever. Someday you’ll have to settle down and work.”

He could hear himself yelling, hear the things he was saying, and he wanted to stop, but he was just so angry. How could Wes not know he was lucky to be where he was?

Wes’s voice was clipped, controlled and utterly cold when he spoke. “I don’t have to stay with you, you realize. If looking at me is going to piss you off this much, I can leave. I’m eighteen.”

“Too bad you’re suspended from college or you could go back there.”

Wes turned his face toward the window.

“You made a commitment to your team when you took that scholarship. Fallons don’t let their teams down. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

If it did, Wes wasn’t telling.

Deacon couldn’t allow this situation to fester. He needed to put a game plan together quickly, before Wes decided to handle things on his own. He pulled the car off to the side of the highway and, heedless of the traffic spinning past him, got out, then slammed the door. He called Victor Odenthal, his former agent and current business partner.

“Vic, are you busy?”

“Sadly, no. I had a date tonight and she canceled on me. If a woman says she forgot about her salsa class, so she can’t go out with you, are you supposed to volunteer to join the class? Was this a test?”

“Can you meet me at my house? I need to talk to you.”

“Sure. Now? Where are you? Sounds like you’re in a wind tunnel.”

“Standing on the highway. Make it an hour,” Deacon said.

“What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.” He was about to hang up, but then he added, “And yes, she wants you to take dance lessons. Dance lessons are like a free pass to best-boyfriend status. Say yes to them and you could forget her birthday and she’d still forgive you.”

“Okay. Good to know. I’ll sign up while you drive home. See you in an hour.”

* * *

ALMOST BEFORE THE car came to a stop in the driveway of the house, Wes practically climbed out the car window he was in that much of a hurry to get away. Vic drove in right behind them and parked his black Miata into the large turnaround at the right side of the house. Deacon reached into the backseat and grabbed the envelope he’d gotten at the meeting that morning.

He and Vic walked up the flagstone path to the side door of the house, which led directly to the indoor court. When Deacon was a kid, he’d played basketball at any neighborhood hoop he could find. Net, no net. Bent rim. Backboard with bullet holes because some hunter had used it for target practice. Cracked concrete or potholed pavement. None of that had stopped him from playing, because when he was a kid, basketball was the only thing he did that made sense.

Now he had an indoor court laid with perfectly balanced hardwood. The court was well lit and climate-controlled, and had baskets he could raise or lower using the electronic controls concealed behind a panel on the wall near the scoreboard. The same panel controlled the surround-sound system. On this court, basketball didn’t just make sense—it was beautiful.

Deacon grabbed a ball and tossed it to Victor. “Let’s play for fifteen before we talk.” He removed his glasses and set them on the bench under the windows.

Victor dribbled the ball once and said, “You’re on.”

Deacon played harder than he usually did; the tension of the day had him wound so tight he needed the release. Every shot he sank centered him, chipping away some of the load of embarrassed futility that had piled up during the campus meeting. Before too long he and Vic were both sweating, cursing under their breath at missed shots or lost opportunities.

He drove for the basket, sending the ball behind Victor and taking it in. Victor gave up the chase and Deacon went up, one hand pushing the ball over the rim, before he landed lightly on the baseline.

“I had you,” Vic said. Since he was standing with his legs spread, his hands on his knees and his face dripping with sweat as he sucked in one deep breath after another, he was obviously delusional. But since he was also twenty years older than Deacon, and so lacking in natural ability that he’d never even played high school ball despite his deep desire to do so, Deacon cut him some slack.

“You did have me,” he said. And then, because Vic hated condescension as much as he hated cheaters, he added, “In your dreams.”

He walked to the bench and grabbed his water bottle, his glasses and the envelope with the papers about Wes. Vic sat on the ground in front of him and Deacon tossed him a water bottle before opening the envelope.

“Wes got suspended,” he said. “This is the paperwork.”

He looked at the papers as he handed them over one by one. As always when a page of text confronted him, his stomach clenched and the print danced and blurred. He squinted through his glasses and the squiggles on the first sheet settled down enough that he picked out his brother’s name: Weston Bennett Fallon, which reflected his mom’s attempt to mimic the names she heard on her favorite soap opera. He recognized a few other words, but not enough to make sense. Frustrated, he passed the rest of the set to Vic.

He propped his elbows on his knees, head bent, while Victor shuffled through the papers. The court was quiet and he wasn’t sure where Wes was—the one-story modern house was big enough that they could easily avoid each other. The place was far from ostentatious, and at just over three thousand square feet, it wasn’t in contention as the biggest in this Adirondack community. The court was the only true luxury. Deacon didn’t waste money and he didn’t spend it just to spend it. But he’d promised himself that he’d have a court of his own someday and that he did.

He didn’t make many promises. But when he made one, he kept it.

Victor started to read the pages aloud. He’d been reading to Deacon for years, and his voice kept a steady pace. Deacon listened and watched him at the same time. He used to watch kids read in school. With basketball, if he saw a move—a dribble, a fake, a shot—he absorbed the lines of the action unconsciously. Once he’d seen the sequence, his muscles knew how to replicate it. Sure, when he was a kid, he wasn’t perfect at everything he saw on SportsCenter. He had to work on technique and grow into his body. But basketball was never a struggle.

Reading was the opposite. He watched and listened to the other kids, and every time his turn came around, the page looked like a jumble of scratches. Eventually he’d learned enough simple words and patterns to fake his way through. Some of his teachers must have known he couldn’t read, but once he was in fifth grade, none of them did much about it. Of course, that was the year Wes was born, and then his dad had died, so he’d missed a bunch of school. Two years later his mom died and he and Wes got sent to foster care, so maybe the teachers figured he didn’t need to be hassled about his grades. He’d never been sure why no one seemed to realize how little he could read, but he guessed they looked at his parents, his address, his wardrobe and just dismissed him as another dumb kid with no future.

Victor was in the middle of the letter the teacher had written about the assignment Wes had cheated on. Deacon interrupted his friend.

“My draft-day suit was a disaster. You never saw it, but that thing was so no-class.”

“I saw a picture. Green and shiny.” Vic shuddered. “If you’d been my client then, I’d have burned it.”

“Right after I got drafted by the Stars, I got custody of Wes. We moved up here, and that fall, he started third grade at the Dalton Day School. I wore my draft suit to the parent-teacher conference. The teacher never blinked an eye. She treated me straight up, even though I guarantee none of the other parents in Wes’s school looked the way I did. You know what she said? ‘When your brother comes through the door every morning, I can count on his sunny smile.’” Deacon flattened his hands on his knees. “His freaking sunny smile.”

Vic lowered the papers and waited.

“I felt like I was drowning. In high school, I was at the top but in the NBA, I was nothing but a scrawny teenager with acne who played a couple minutes a night off the bench and wouldn’t go out to the clubs with the team. The guys didn’t have any use for me. But then that teacher told me Wes was excelling in school and smiling every day, and I figured I’d pulled off the biggest upset of all time.” He shrugged. “I saved that damn report card. The teacher made an actual smiley face on the bottom. I carried it with me when I went back on the road with the team and looked at it every night.”

“You took care of him, D. Just like you promised your mom.”

“I didn’t see any stupid sunny smile today.”

“Let me finish reading,” Vic said as he stacked the papers back up and squared the corners.

“Can you give me a quick recap and I’ll get a voice file from you later?” Deacon didn’t want Wes to come in and see Victor reading to him. He clasped his hands. “Sorry for making you drive out tonight.”

Vic was the only person who knew he couldn’t read. Deacon hated having to ask him for help. He never would have told him, but Victor figured it out himself when they were in the midst of an intense contract negotiation about six months after they started working together. Victor invited him out for dinner, confronted him and said he didn’t care if Deacon could read English, Martian or neither. They had to be honest with each other, or their partnership had no point.

Deacon thought about the meeting that morning and the additional details Victor had just given him. He couldn’t make sense of the books most second-graders could read with ease, but his memory was exceptional. Without that, he’d never have been able to fake his way along so effectively.

“The community service is the key. If he does that and shows up at the next hearing at school with some letters of recommendation, he can be reinstated, right?”

Victor nodded.

“So I just need to find community service for him to do.”

“Or you could let him find it.”

“Right.”

“Seriously, man. You’ve been cleaning up after Wes your whole life. How many times did he get suspended from high school? Six? Eight? And that vandalism thing when he was a sophomore?”

“That was a prank. They’d sprayed Silly String on some statue, and the town had come down on them because they were from the private school.”

“Be that as it may, Deacon, he’s eighteen. He’s old enough to take responsibility for himself.”

“What if he won’t?” Deacon stood. “My parents never did. What if he’s got whatever they had inside them—and this is the beginning of the end for him?”

“All the more reason you need to step back and let him stand on his own.”

“You know what he’ll do? He’ll find someone in town to give him a cushy job and he’ll live here in our cushy place. How will that change him?”

“What are you going to do? Put him into some hard-labor camp?”

“I don’t know.”

Victor said, “Any chance he could work for a literacy group?”

Deacon’s ears went hot with shame. Victor knew he hated to talk about this. “He’s not a teacher.”

“You’re twenty-eight years old, D. You’ve got years ahead of you to find a girlfriend, maybe have a kid or two, be an uncle to Wes’s kids and godfather to mine if I can ever find a woman with taste impeccable enough to marry me.” Vic held the eye contact. “Maybe you can do all that and keep up the lies about your reading, but it’ll be hard. A part of you will always be off-limits. Is that what you want?”

“Wes doesn’t have to know.” And if Vic didn’t shut up about it pretty quick, Deacon was going to hit him.

“I’m not trying to be a jerk, D, but you’re making a mistake. When he was younger, just out of foster care, he needed you to be the adult. I respect the hell out of you for what you did, and you know it. But he’s an adult now, or as good as. Might be nice to lean on him for some of this stuff.”

“Are you telling me you don’t want to help me out?”

“Don’t be a jackass. I’m just saying maybe he’d like to know you’ve struggled with stuff.”

Deacon felt sick at the thought of telling Wes. He couldn’t bear to see the look on his brother’s face if he found out he couldn’t read. “He’s so damn smart, Vic. He reads all the time. I know he’s in college, but I’m still the only person he’s got to steer him straight. If I tell him I was passed through school with fewer skills than an eight-year-old, he might stop listening to me altogether. How would he ever respect me again?”

“I respect you.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“You don’t depend on me.”

“Maybe it’s time for Wes to quit depending on you. You’ve been carrying him a long while. He might be glad to know he can do something for you.”

“I don’t think that would be helpful, Vic. But thank you for the suggestion.”

Victor shrugged. “No need to go all Ms. Manners on me, Deacon. I knew you wouldn’t want to hear it, but I had to say it. Honesty, that’s why you pay me the big bucks.”

Deacon nodded. “Well, honesty is annoying.”

“So is stubbornness,” Victor said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

They walked together to the side door.

Deacon said, “Honesty isn’t annoying, Vic. I just can’t tell him about this.”

“You can tell him. You don’t want to.”

“And now we’re back to annoying.”

They shook hands. Deacon locked the door behind Victor, then picked up the ball. He spun it on his index finger, then gave it a bounce and spun it on his middle finger before tossing it in front of him and then in one smooth move scooping it up, passing it behind his back and tossing it into the basket. Two points. No sweat. There wasn’t a thing in the world he couldn’t do. Except order off a menu, pick out a birthday card or read the freaking letter when his brother got suspended from college.

* * *

WHEN THE PHONE rang an hour or so later, he was in his room, trying unsuccessfully to nap. He rolled off the bed to grab it, desperate for a distraction.

“May I speak to Deacon Fallon?”

“This is Deacon.”

The pause that followed went on a little too long. “Sorry. I wasn’t expecting you to answer the phone.”

Must be a reporter. He didn’t get as many calls as he used to, but when basketball season started, he usually received a few requests for information. Draft season never passed without a half-dozen calls from reporters looking for a quote.

He wasn’t in the mood to talk about basketball and he almost hung up. But this woman’s caller ID had a Milton area code and he was curious. He grabbed his glasses before he plugged in the earpiece for his phone, then tucked the phone in his pocket. He walked out of the bedroom and down the long hallway to the great room.

“Deacon, this is Julia Bradley,” she said as if she thought he’d recognize her name.

“Uh, hi,” he said, stalling for time and hoping she’d give him some clue about how he knew her. The remote was stuffed between two cushions on the couch and he fished it out to flick ESPN on.

“I was your guidance counselor at Milton High School. Ms. Bradley?”

Ms. Bradley. He wouldn’t have put that together—he’d never called her Julia in his life. She’d been serious, he remembered. Tried like hell to get him to stay in school. She’d jabbed her finger at his coach’s chest during one tense conversation. He’d been half afraid his coach would slap her. He hadn’t thought about that in years, but the scene was still vivid in his memory.

She’d been new to Milton and hadn’t understood how things worked there. He’d been terrified someone might listen to her and upset his plan to turn pro. Everything back then had been so touch-and-go—he sometimes thought he’d held his breath his entire senior year.

A scene from shop class came back to him. The guys had spent most of one period debating whether the new guidance counselor was wearing a thong under her dress at the student awards assembly. Just like that, the image of her at the podium, the light from the back of the stage outlining her legs and the curve of her hips under her skirt, returned as fresh as if it had happened that morning, not ten years ago.

“Ms. Bradley,” he choked out. “Good to see you. I mean, hear from you.” He clicked the remote again, shutting off the TV.

“Well, I hope you’ll still feel that way when you find out I’m asking for a favor.”

“What do you need?” Maybe a signed jersey or a ball. People phoned every once in a while asking for stuff to raffle off.

“I need a basketball coach. A reputable, skilled basketball coach who’s willing to work for nothing. The athletic budget has been cut to the bone.”

“A coach for the Tigers?”

“Yes.”

“They let Coach Simon go? That’s…unbelievable.”

“Times are hard. The school board budget proposal didn’t pass with the voters, so we’ve been forced into an austerity budget. The state sets spending levels.” She rattled off the facts, but her voice had lost its warmth. He imagined she was trying to hold back her opinion of this financial state of affairs.

“Anyway, I don’t want to take up any more of your time. The reason I called is that even though I realize you don’t get back here very much, I’d hoped you might know someone who would be interested in helping out as coach, or maybe you wouldn’t mind sending a donation to help me pay someone.”

Things must have changed in Milton since he’d been there, because no way the town he remembered would have let the team go. Man.

His mouth went dry. Milton needed a volunteer coach.

When he’d told Victor he didn’t want Wes to do easy community service, he’d meant it. He wanted Wes to see what his life could have been like and could still be if he didn’t start to focus. Where better to bring that lesson home than in Milton? He and Wes would both be there still if not for basketball.

On a selfish level, if Wes worked out with the Tigers, that might give him an extra bump when it came time for the university to review his case. If he’d put the time in to stay in shape, would that show his coach he was serious about playing ball?

“You need a coach now?”

“Practice starts in two days.”

“Say I can find someone. Would you be willing to write a letter of recommendation afterward?”

“For a coaching job?”

“For college.”

“Guidance counselors love to write recommendations. If you know someone who’d be willing to help, I’d be more than happy to write a letter.”

He didn’t need to tell anyone about the suspension right away. He’d be able to keep the details quiet while Wes did his work—he could tell Ms. Bradley what she needed to know when they were done.

“Okay. I know someone.”

“Thanks so much, Deacon. I mean, I’m phoning you out of the blue, and it’s just so generous of you to help me out. Would it be out of line for me to ask who you have in mind?”

“Me. Well, me and my brother.”

“You hate Milton.” He heard what sounded like a muffled curse, and she quickly added, “Well, not hate, but you don’t come home and I’ve heard—”

“My business is flexible, so I can work from Milton.” He made the next part sound like an afterthought. “I’ll bring my brother. He’s the one who can use the college letter.”

“So your brother is thinking about college? Good for him!”

Her tone of voice set him on edge. It was that fake-supportive thing teachers always did when they were giving an order but wanted you to believe you were making a choice. Did she think that just because he didn’t go to college he wouldn’t send his brother?

He’d worked hard to get where he was—no shiny green suits hanging in his closet now. He wasn’t that kid with no options anymore, and high school guidance counselors certainly didn’t intimidate him anymore. Not even if they were drop-dead sexy standing at the podium during assembly in a thong. He snapped out, “Of course he’s going to college. Why wouldn’t he?”

“No reason,” she said. “I’ll look forward to meeting him.”

“Why are you helping out the basketball team, anyway? You weren’t too supportive of the Tigers when I was playing.”

“The details are different in this case,” she said. “You never answered why you said yes to this, either.”

Her words held a challenge, but he didn’t owe her anything. He wasn’t about to be baited into spilling his guts about Wes.

“Times change,” he said.

“Well, even though it doesn’t seem like enough, you have my gratitude.”

“Go, Tigers,” he said.

“Go, Tigers,” she echoed.

* * *

HE FINALLY TRACKED Wes down in the gym. His brother was leaning against the wall, his eyes unfocused as he concentrated on the conversation he was having on the phone.

“Call me as soon as you hear,” he said. “The minute you find out.” He listened for a few more seconds and then hung up.

“Hey,” he said to Deacon.

“You want to shoot around?”

Wes shrugged. “I guess.”

Deacon tossed a ball onto the floor. “Want the music on?”

Wes caught the ball, but held it. “No.” He jogged a few feet toward the foul line, then turned and bounced the ball back to Deacon. “We’ll play to twenty. Win by two?”

Deacon didn’t play against Wes. He used to when Wes was much younger. They’d played a lot. But Deacon had always held back, making sure his brother won. With ten years between them, there’d been no way to make the contest even close to fair. When Wes was about eight, he realized Deacon was letting him win. He’d pitched a fit, and when Deacon wouldn’t agree to play him “like a man” in Wes’s words, the boy had stormed off the court. After that, they’d shoot around, run drills, mess with tricks, but they didn’t play games.

“I’m not playing you, Wes.”

“Why not? I thought you’d be happy I’m trying to stay in shape so I’ll be fighting fit when they decide I’ve learned my lesson and can be allowed back on campus.”

“Who was on the phone?”

“Oliver.”

He’d met Oliver during the move-in weekend. At first he’d assumed he was on the team because he was rooming with Wes, plus he was tall and well built. He looked like the other guys on the floor, but then the kid opened his mouth. Oliver was brilliant, no doubt about it, but he was pretty far off the beaten path, maybe far off the planet. At one point he’d spoken what Deacon assumed was Arabic because it sounded exactly that complicated and hard to learn, but Wes told him later it was Elvish.

There’d been a mix-up in the housing office, and somehow Oliver had been assigned to Wes’s room even though he wasn’t on the team and shouldn’t have been on the basketball floor at the dorm.

“He has to have a second hearing. They decided there’s enough evidence he was involved to suspend him, too.”

“He cheated and he helped you steal a car.”

“The cheating thing was a joke. Nobody would have cared about any of it if we hadn’t moved that car. Coach got pissed off because we embarrassed him. He’s been on me since— He’s just been on me. If we hadn’t touched his car, they’d have ignored everything, even the bar thing.”

Deacon felt his skin go cold. Wes really didn’t see why people were mad about what he’d done.

His brother went on. “Maybe I’ll just drop out. I don’t need college. You never went. I should skip the whole thing and get a job.”

“Where? In the fast-food industry?”

“Bill Gates dropped out. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out.”

“So what? You invented some new Internet technology and you’ve been keeping it quiet until you can drop out of school and start minting money in the stock market?”

“No, Deacon. You don’t have to be a jerk,” Wes said. “College is pointless. Like I said, you didn’t go.”

He heard Victor’s voice in his mind. Tell him. Tell Wes. He’ll never know how much his education means if you don’t let him see all the problems you have without it. He told Vic to shut it.

“I couldn’t go. There’s a difference. Unless, that is, you’re actually living in poverty and supporting your kid brother and have interest from NBA scouts, to boot.”

His brother scowled at him.

“I lined up your community service. You’re going to have an immersion course in real life for real people.”

“What does that mean?”

“Look around, Wes.” Deacon swept his arms out to encompass the indoor basketball court, the climate control, the sound system, the entire existence he’d built for them. “You have a sweet life. This is special and you treat it like it’s nothing. Like you’re owed this life. I’m done watching you screw around with this, when it’s a gift.”

“So you’re sending me to some developing country where I can see how hard life is without indoor plumbing?”

“It’s taking indoor basketball courts for granted that’s the problem. We’re going to Milton.”

“Milton? Like our hometown Milton?”

“Exactly.”

“Milton where you said you never wanted to put your foot again? Milton where you’ve never visited since the day we moved away? Milton where the boosters club sends you letters every year to attend the sports banquet to hand out the trophy named for you and you throw the letters in the garbage every time?”

“For Pete’s sake, Wes. Yes. That Milton.”

“Well, don’t act like I’m crazy for asking. You never… Why? Why now?”

“We’re going to coach basketball.”

“What?”

“The Tigers need a coach—some budget crisis or something. My old guidance counselor offered us the job.”

“You and I are going to coach? Together? Why?” Wes asked, sounding genuinely shocked.

This was the closest Deacon had come to getting his brother to pay attention to him since the whole suspension issue had started. Maybe, for the first time in his life, Milton would be the solution instead of the problem.

“Because you, my brother, need three hundred hours of community service.” Deacon tossed the ball through the hoop, admiring the perfect swish. “And Ms. Julia Bradley needs a coach. It’s a perfect fit.”