Bad Shot Read online

  Bad Shot

  Sylvia Taekema

  James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Publishers

  Toronto

  For Dan, who once told me there could never be enough books about basketball.

  1

  On the Court

  Cody Wallace snatched the ball off the bounce.

  He eyed up the hoop. His friends had gone home an hour ago. Talal’s dad had stopped by on his way home in his delivery truck to pick up Talal and Charlie.

  But Cody stayed out to play a little longer. Cody loved basketball and never got tired of it. He loved the feel of the ball in his hands, the trickle of sweat on his forehead. He loved the feel of his blood pumping as he went up for the shot, the swish as the toss swept through the mesh. He imagined the sound of the buzzer

  closing down the win after a big game, the roar of the crowd calling his name. He could feel the thumps as his teammates pounded his back.

  But all he heard now was the thunk of his threadbare ball on the cement pad in front of the garage. Under the yellow wash of the yard light, he studied the ragged net. The post leaned slightly sideways. He took aim. In. Again. In.

  The screen door squeaked open. “Cody?”

  “Coming.”

  “You said that a half hour ago,” his mother teased. She walked out to the sagging garage and pulled her sweater more tightly around her. “It’s getting cold out here.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “You’d play basketball if there were icicles hanging off the mesh. Did they call for tryouts yet?”

  “Not yet.” Every day that week, Cody had checked for a sign-up sheet for the grade seven and eight team. There was nothing yet, but he would keep looking.

  “Soon, I’ll bet,” his mom said. “It’s November after all. Come on inside, now. I don’t think this old hoop can stand much more tonight.”

  Cody put the ball back in the garage and pulled the door closed.

  “Are you finished your homework?” his mom asked.

  “Mostly.”

  She shook her head and ruffled Cody’s sweaty hair. “You know you’re supposed to do that before you pick up that ball.”

  “I just need to run through my presentation once more. I don’t think I have the ending quite right.”

  “Better get to it then. Did you do lots of research?”

  Cody gave his mother a look.

  “Right, right,” she said. “It’s on basketball. You have it all in your head.”

  “I even put together some slides. It’s going to

  be cool.”

  “I bet it is. I don’t know anybody who’s as serious about basketball as you.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Cody practiced the final line of his speech over and over again. “And that’s what I love about basketball. And that’s what I love about basketball. And that’s what I love about basketball. And that’s what I love about basketball.” Hmmm. He tried it out while he looked for a shirt in the pile of clean laundry on his floor. He tried it out in front of the bathroom mirror as he used his hands to flatten his ears against his head. (This was something he’d done every morning since a girl in his class had told him that they stuck out.)

  He tried it out while he waited for his toast to pop up at breakfast and again while he delivered the Daily News. He practiced it until it was perfect.

  “Ready?” asked his mother as he headed out the door.

  “I think so.” Cody’s stomach felt a little pinched.

  “Go for the slam dunk, Cody. You’ll be great.”

  When he walked into the classroom, Cody could tell he wasn’t the only one feeling nervous. Many of the students were running lines or flipping through cue cards. Cody made his way to his desk and found his friends there waiting for him. Talal was sitting on top of the desk, skinny legs dangling. He was pulling at the threads around a hole in his jeans. Charlie stood beside him, carefully cleaning his glasses with the

  untucked end of his plaid shirt. One of the arms

  on the glasses had broken and been re-attached with duct tape.

  “Hey,” Cody greeted them. “Ready to give your speech?”

  “Sure,” said Charlie, putting his glasses back on. He did not sound very convincing.

  Talal looked up, alarmed. “The speeches are today?”

  Cody rolled his eyes. The class had been talking about this for weeks.

  “Good morning, everyone,” called Mr. Mendoza. Their teacher rubbed his hands together as he walked into the room. “I can see you’re all very excited.

  I am too. You’ve done a lot of work to prepare and I can’t wait to hear what you have to say. Remember, I’m going to be choosing one of you to represent our school at the regional speech competition in January. Are we ready to go?”

  “Mr. Mendoza, who’s going first?” Allison Arnold had a panicked look on her face. “Are we going by the class list?” Since Aarush Ahluwali had moved away when his dad’s job got transferred to Texas, Allison was now first on the A-to-Z list. Cody’s name was near the end, just ahead of Jamie Yeong’s. He wasn’t worried. He’d have lots of time to get in the zone.

  “Well —” began Mr. Mendoza.

  Yeo-Jin Lee cut in. She was always fixing things. Her dad was Chatham’s chief of police. Her older brother was on the force too. Clearly, the Lees were good at being in charge. Whatever it took, Yeo-Jin would have things started, organized, fixed or finished in no time. She was never without a pen, a web link, a cell phone or a solution. Just like the headband she wore in her long, black hair, Yeo-Jin Lee kept

  everything in place.

  “How about this, Mr. Mendoza?” suggested Yeo-Jin. “We’ll all put our names in a hat. You pull out a name and it will be that person’s turn first. Then that student will pull out another name for the next person. And so on and so on until we’re done. What do you think?”

  Mr. Mendoza looked around. Students were nodding in agreement, especially Allison. “Brilliant, Yeo-Jin, but I don’t have a hat.”

  “How about this?” Yeo-Jin held up the box the new light for the fish aquarium had come in.

  Mr. Mendoza gave each student a piece of paper to write their name on. Then Yeo-Jin came by with the box and they all dropped the folded slips of paper into it. Cody’s was one of the first to go in the box.

  My name’s buried on the bottom, he thought, so it won’t be my turn for quite a while. He hoped Talal would be lucky that way too. Talal needed time to put together something to talk about before his name was called.

  As he settled into his seat to wait, Cody saw a lot of his classmates holding their breath while

  Mr. Mendoza shook the box vigorously.

  He drew out the first name, read the slip of

  paper, then looked up. “First up to bat . . .” He smiled. “Or should I say, starting on the court, is . . .” He cupped his hands around his mouth and, in a loud, slow

  announcer’s voice, drawled out the name he’d pulled out of the box. “Cody Wallace!”

  2

  Under Pressure

  Cody gulped. A wave of heat washed over him. First? Him? No sweat. He was ready. He might as well get it over with. Then he could enjoy listening to everybody else. Piece of cake.

  It was game time. Cody walked to the front of the classroom. He tried to take a deep breath. There didn’t seem to be enough air in the room. He stared down at his cue cards. The words were floating all around on them.

  “Cody? You okay?” Mr. Mendoza’s voice sounded muffled and far away.

  Cody nodded.

  “Start whenever you’re ready.”

  Cody felt like two dozen sets of la
ser eyes were burning into him. He cleared his throat. “Umm,” he began. His voice cracked. Yeo-Jin rolled her eyes. Mitchell yawned. “Basketball —”

  “Hang on,” said Mr. Mendoza. “Sorry for the

  interruption, but didn’t you mention you had pictures?”

  “Oh! Oh, yeah.” Cody fished around in his pocket for his flash drive. He dropped it twice trying to plug it in and had to crawl around under Mr. Mendoza’s desk to find it.

  “I’ve got it!” he announced after the second time. He smacked his head against the desk as he got up again. Once the little stars had stopped dancing around in front of his eyes, Cody was able to get his slides up on the screen. Mr. Mendoza handed him his cue cards in place of the spelling tests Cody had mistakenly picked up off the desk. Yeo-Jin turned off the lights and stuck the remote in Cody’s hand so he could advance his slides. Cody turned to stare at his classmates once again.

  He wondered exactly what it was he was going to say to them. He raised his hand to consult his cue cards, but found he was holding a remote instead.

  “The other hand,” hissed Yeo-Jin.

  Cody looked around the room and felt his throat grow dry. He thought maybe he should sit down for a while. Then Charlie nodded and Talal gave him a thumbs-up and, just like that, Cody felt like he could breathe properly. He looked at his cue cards and saw that the words had stopped floating around and were back where they should be.

  “Basketball,” Cody began again. And this time he kept going. He talked about hang time and how and why some players could get more than others. He described alley-oops, windmills and the reverse tomahawk jam.

  A couple of times he forgot about using his slides, but then he got caught up again. He outlined some of

  history’s all-time greatest dunks, finishing, of course, with Vince Carter’s unbelievable Dunk of Death.

  It had happened during a game in the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, when Carter jumped right over a guy who was seven feet tall.

  Cody was pumped as he turned over his last cue card. He put his hand on his heart, adopted the wistful voice he had practiced, closed his eyes and finished off with “and that’s what I love about basketball!” Only it came out “ruv.” “That’s what I ruv about basketball.”

  Ruv? Who invited Scooby Doo? Oops. Cody felt his ears heat up and knew they were redder than the jerseys the Raptors wore to their away games. “Er, love, I meant love. Of course I meant love, with an L. Love is what it’s all about. Er, for basketball, I mean.

  I love it.” He could tell he was making it worse than if he’d just left things alone. And that’s what he hated about giving speeches.

  Cody sat down and plunked his head on his desk. That had been almost as bad as the time he’d thrown up in Grade One. All over his desk. And all over Yeo-Jin’s, who sat beside him. She’d never forgotten that. She probably never would.

  “Cody.”

  Cody heard a plink as Yeo-Jin laid his flash drive beside him on the desk. Go away, Yeo-Jin, he thought. It’s too late. You can’t fix this.

  “Co-dy.”

  Why couldn’t she leave him alone? He turned his head slightly and glared up at her with one eye.

  “You have to pick out the next name.” She shook the aquarium box next to his ear.

  Oh. Right. Cody fished out a scrap of paper and handed it to Yeo-Jin.

  “Charlie Gray,” she called.

  Charlie? He’d picked his friend’s name? At least it hadn’t been Talal’s. Cody sat up straight again and pasted on what he hoped was an encouraging smile. The last time Charlie spoke in front of the class,

  he kept saying the Nile Liver instead of the Nile River.

  “Are you ready for some trash talk?” Charlie asked. His speech was about garbage and recycling. Talal had suggested the opening line. It was meant to be a joke, but Charlie delivered it in his regular, serious Charlie voice. So, the students didn’t get it. They just looked puzzled. Charlie sighed.

  “Do you know each one of you generates about two kilograms of garbage every day?” Charlie went on. Only he didn’t make eye contact with any of his classmates. He kept looking at a spot by the door, like he was speaking to the fire extinguisher. “Do you know seventy per cent of that garbage can be reused or recycled? That it really isn’t that much work to do it? That there are actually families who only generate enough trash in a whole year to fill one pickle jar?” Charlie held up a pickle jar as he spoke. “Although it’s probably a bigger jar than this one.” He stuck his hand inside the jar to demonstrate its size. “This is the only one I had at home. We don’t eat that many pickles.”

  The jar got stuck on Charlie’s hand. He tried to pull it off, but it wouldn’t budge. Unfazed, Charlie put up a complicated slide full of images and arrows. “Mobile phones, computers and even used cars can be recycled,” he told the class, pointing at the screen with the pickle jar still on his hand. “Playground

  surfaces and sports tracks can be made out of recycled

  running shoes. Food waste can be dealt with by setting up a worm farm. I think our school should set one up.

  It would be easy.”

  “Ewww,” someone called out. “That’s disgusting.”

  But Mr. Mendoza’s eyes lit right up. “That’s a great idea,” he said.

  “Really?” Charlie beamed. “We could —”

  “Hang on. Finish your speech first. We’ll talk about the worms later.”

  Charlie launched into his conclusion. He reminded everyone how important it was to use recycling boxes to keep tin, plastic, cardboard and paper out of

  the landfills. He even talked about using green composting boxes, except he kept saying bloxes. Blue bloxes. Green bloxes. Blah, blah, blah. Aargh, thought Cody. Him and Charlie. Both of them turned to mush under pressure.

  “Great job,” said Cody when Charlie returned to his desk.

  “You’ve got my vote,” said Talal. He held up his hand and Charlie high-fived him with the pickle jar.

  Then Yeo-Jin came over and helped Charlie pull the jar off his hand.

  Once Allison stopped panicking, she charmed

  everybody with pictures and stories about her pet dog, a Yorkie named Cuddles. Mitchell talked about black holes.

  Yeo-Jin spoke on the wonders of Niagara Falls. “My family visited there at the end of this summer, just before school started,” she told them. Of course,

  Yeo-Jin didn’t make any mistakes or mess up her cue cards. She didn’t even use cue cards. She had the whole thing memorized. She didn’t drop her flash drive

  either. She showed pictures of the Maid of the Mist looking like a toy bathtub boat bobbing on the

  water, of her family wearing huge rain ponchos to go behind the Falls. She showed them the Skylon Tower and Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum. She talked about all the people who had tried to go over the Falls in

  barrels and other contraptions. She told them how much

  electricity the churning water generated. Yeo-Jin nailed it. No doubt she would be saying it all over again at the regional competition and showing her pictures there.

  There was one image in particular that struck Cody. It was a picture of the Falls in winter. All that power, all that potential was frozen. Stuck. Cody thought he knew how that felt. He’d just done that in his speech. He had seized up like a bolt in one of those rusty motors his brother, Kenny, was always working on. Practice, it seemed, didn’t always make perfect. It was a good thing that never happened when he played basketball.

  3

  New Kid in the Schoolyard

  When the bell finally rang for recess, Cody jumped up from his desk. He scooped a basketball from the box beside the classroom door and headed outside. The cold air stung his nose as he walked out of the building. It sure felt like basketball season. He looked around for someone to shoot hoops with. Talal had to spend his recess working on an outline for a
n actual speech. Mr. Mendoza had told him that his just-under-one-minute spiel on why Art’s Burger Barn had the best food in the world was not quite what he was looking for. Charlie was still in the classroom too. Mr. Mendoza had some questions about the worm farm idea.

  Right away, Cody noticed someone new in the schoolyard. The new kid was talking with one of the eighth graders, Darnell Davies. Cody sometimes played basketball with Darnell, a big guy with close cropped black hair and dark brown skin who said very little but played a lot of ball. Darnell was tall and tough to get around. The new guy was small with dark hair swooshed over to one side. He had a basketball tucked neatly under one arm. It looked really comfortable there, like it was part of him. The new guy had Jordan Super.Fly basketball shoes. Cody had been planning to put them on his birthday list, until he found out how much they cost. He was still wearing the shoes he got in the spring when track and field started. They were scuffed and the laces were frayed. They were starting to feel a little tight at the toes, but they would do for a while longer.

  Cody watched as the newcomer and Darnell walked over to one of the nets and began shooting. Cody could see that the new kid was good. Really good. He rarely missed. It’ll be sweet to shoot hoops with him, Cody thought, and he moved closer. When the ball bounced away after another shot went in, Cody grabbed it and walked over.

  “Hey, can I play?”

  The new guy smiled. “I don’t know. Can you?”

  That was what Mr. Mendoza said every time someone asked, “Can I go to the washroom?” and he wanted them to say, “May I.” Cody wasn’t sure if that was what this guy was getting at.

  Darnell joined them. “Wally, Nick Spinelli. Nick, Cody Wallace. Wally.”

  Cody winced at the nickname. Most of Cody’s classmates called him Wally. He didn’t mind when they called him that at school, even if it did make him think of a little chubby dude in overalls. At home, his brother still called him Toady sometimes. Since nothing good rhymed with Kenny, Cody never had a good comeback. On the court, though, Cody wanted to be the Wall, strong on offence, unbeatable on defence. Yeah, Cody Wallace, the Wall.