Fadeaway by E. Vickers (ebook smartphone TXT) 📗

go for some tests soon,” said Luke, looking proud to be the eleven-year-old with the information the whole varsity team was waiting for. “But you can stay until they take him.”

So we stayed until the nurse came. It was nice to see Jake finally laughing and joking with the guys. Maybe this would turn out to be a good thing.

But that night, when Seth and I went back to the hospital to check on Jake and give him the stats of the game, he didn’t exactly throw his arms open.

“ ‘Break a leg,’ ” he said as his eyes drilled into me. “That’s what you said before the game.”

“Come on, bro. Even you’re not superstitious enough to believe in that crap,” I said. “Besides, you didn’t break your leg. It’s not like I said ‘Tear an ACL, boys.’ ”

Jake smacked his hand on the hospital tray, and the whole thing shook like it wanted to shatter. “I’m in the hospital, and you can’t even take this seriously.”

“I’m serious as a heart attack.” I slapped my hands to my face. “Oh, shit, now you’re probably going to have a heart attack, and it’s all my fault.”

“This is my season. My future. Can you stop joking for once in your life?” He sat forward and gripped the side rails of the hospital bed. “Can you just say sorry and admit this is your fault?”

“I’m not joking. I’m straight-up telling you that this isn’t my fault. It’s your fault. You should have hung back to play D instead of trying to save the day with your crap rebounding skills. You want me to be serious? How’s this: stop trying to blame your problems on everybody else. Oh, and it’s not just your season. Did you even realize you said that?”

Jake looked like he might climb out of the bed and stab me in the face with his IV needle. Seth stepped between us, one hand on my chest and the other out toward Jake.

“Jake, I think we’d better let you get some rest,” he said. “We’d rather win that tournament with you, but we’ll go out there and win it for you instead.”

—

The crazy thing was, we did. We won that trophy two days later and delivered it to Jake the night before his surgery.

“Thanks, guys,” he told us, wearing the same goofy, drugged-up grin he’d had when we’d first seen him in the hospital. “I’ll see if I can smuggle it in under my gown.” He shoved it under his blanket, making it tent up in exactly the wrong place.

Jake laughed like he’d lost it. He was so proud of the joke, even though it wasn’t that funny, and I was sort of proud of him for letting go enough to joke about stuff as serious to him as basketball and surgery.

“Yeah,” he sighed. “This thing is definitely good luck.”

Good luck, bad luck. I’m still not sure I believe in either. But the next time we met in our own locker room, when we looked up at the rectangle on the wall where the paint hadn’t faded quite so much and realized Coach had left the HEAD HEART HANDS sign at the tournament a state away, you didn’t even have to be that superstitious to get the feeling our season was headed in the wrong direction.

Coach Braithwaite knew the hospital well. The official form always showed his full name, but even here nobody called him anything but Coach B.

He had never been in a hospital before the war, had counted himself too strong and healthy for any of that. But there was still shrapnel—even in his face—that nobody dared take out, so here he came every time he woke up with blood on his pillow to visit his friends in the ENT clinic and get his wounds cauterized before things opened up too wide.

Coach B had made peace with the nosebleeds and frequent visits. He’d even made peace with the shrapnel. There were certainly worse ways to carry the war with you for the rest of your life. He’d lost friends to some of them. To PTSD, most of all, and the ways people tried to silence it.

This day, though, he turned away from the ENT clinic and headed toward Med/Surg, where he’d visited friends and players recovering from all sorts of things. He carried a jar of daisies his wife had cut for Jake and, as he always did on one of these visits, a small envelope.

“Thanks,” Jake said, looking grateful even though he clearly wasn’t sure what to do with the flowers. “And tell Mrs. Braithwaite thanks too.” But his smile was dim, even under the fluorescent lights of the hospital room.

Maybe it’s the medication, Coach B thought. And there’s a mental trauma that goes along with an injury that’s every bit as great as the physical. Sometimes greater for a kid like Jake, who carries the weight of the world—or the team, at least—on his shoulders.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, knowing the answer, but also knowing the value of Jake putting his truth into his own words.

“Fine, sir. Really good. It was all pretty minor.”

Unfortunately, none of this was the truth.

In fifty-one years at the same school, Coach B had gotten to know a lot of young people. They graduated. They left town, or they stayed, or they left and then made their way back. They found true love or something like it, built careers, had kids. In a few cases, he’d even gotten to coach those kids. He’d had no regrets about walking away when the time came.

But, oh, he would have loved to coach Jake Foster. Not because of his ability to read the opponent or his accuracy and consistency as a shooter or even his sheer will to win, although those were the sorts of things you could build a championship team around. The boy was grateful and teachable and just plain hungry. He reminded Coach B of himself when he was younger, and Coach