At the Center Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

  Darby Creek

  A division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  241 First Avenue North

  Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA

  For reading levels and more information, look up this title at www.lernerbooks.com.

  Front cover: © istockphoto.com/MistikaS; Susan Rouleau-Fienhage (background).

  Main body text set in Janson Text LT Std 12/17.5. Typeface provided by Adobe Systems.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Jones, Patrick, 1961– author.

  Title: At the center / by Patrick Jones.

  Description: Minneapolis : Darby Creek, [2016] | Series: Bounce | Summary: “When an African American student transfers from an inner-city basketball team to the suburbs, tension among the players and the coach erupts along racial lines. To the anger of his teammates, the coach kicks him off the team after he gets into a fight. Can a social media movement get him back on the court?”— Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015041821| ISBN 9781512411225 (lb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781512412062 (pb : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Basketball—Fiction. | African Americans—Fiction. | Race relations—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.J7242 Atm 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041821

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 – SB – 7/15/16

  Thanks to the real Lucy for reading and recommending an earlier version, and to Judith Klein for her copyediting skills.

  1

  Friday night

  December 2

  Vestavia Hills (Alabama) High School gym

  Even sitting all comfy at the end of the bench, far away from the action, I hear the loud smack as Jayson’s fist smashes into the jaw of the big, white, doofus center from Mountain Brook High who’d been elbowing him all night. No doubt under Jayson’s number 45 uniform, his light brown skin is covered with dark blue bruises. The doofus gets not one, but two shots. Bam bam. So in addition to Jayson’s first-half triple-double, add another double: two fists to the face.

  The home crowd goes wild. It’s huge because there’s not much else to do in Vestavia Hills on a Friday night. Players from both teams converge on the fight. Bench-sitters like me leap off the pine like it’s on fire. Everybody’s man-on-man except the doofus, who is man-on-floor. It’s a crazy scene, and I jump into it with enthusiasm, which I have more of than basketball skills. Being on the court, like I am now, is something I’ve only experienced once—and only for two minutes—in our team’s first two games. Games we won easily because of Jayson “Dominator” Davis.

  Jayson stands over his fallen foe big as a house until our coach, blue eyes bulging and square jaw sticking out, grabs Jayson by the back of his jersey and spins him around. Coach gets in Jayson’s face, which means he needs to stand on his toes since Jayson is six ten and Coach isn’t even close. Coach gets up in his ears too. I can’t hear it, but I can see the pained expression on Jayson’s face. One part’s disappointment and the other part’s anger. Something you learn early in sports is that the coach is always right, even when he’s wrong. Jayson, my best friend on the team, has burned with anger toward Coach since transferring to Vestavia High at the start of the year. He’s a black barracuda in an ocean of whitefish.

  The refs blow their whistles like steam engines to calm things down. The players retreat to their benches so we can continue the game to the inevitable conclusion: another Vestavia Hills victory. Or maybe not, because I hear the ref with gray hair eject Jayson, but not the downed doofus-tree. I wait for Coach to argue it. Instead he pushes Jayson away from the floor—two hands hard on the number 45—except Jayson’s not moving. It’s one on one: two hundred–plus pounds of young muscle versus thirty years of old-school coaching. Who wins?

  “I’ve had it with your ghetto court crap!” Coach yells for the top row to hear. Coach might know basketball, but he doesn’t know anything about men. If he did, he wouldn’t treat Jayson, A.C., and Gerald like second-class citizens. I guess since I’m even lighter-skinned than the over-tanned white girls and since I run his stupid plays, unlike the three other black kids on the team, that’s why Coach isn’t on my case.

  Jayson doesn’t say much, as usual. His head’s down, his tense face filled with sweat, as he takes Coach’s verbal beat-down. It goes on and on until Coach calls Jayson “a thug.” Jayson’s head snaps up. “What’d you say?”

  Coach answers like he does almost all our questions: with stone-cold silence.

  Then Coach booms, “Say another word and you’re suspended for two games, not one. Got it?”

  Jayson drops his head, then scans the scene, measuring the team. He’s got some friends, like me, A.C., and Gerald, but more enemies, like Lex. Jayson lifts his head, winks, and says, “Word.”

  “That’s two. Want it to be three?”

  While I’ve never hit a three in my court career, I can stop one. I bound from the bench and wedge myself between Jayson and Coach. “Cool it, Dom.” I’m right in the center of it—the last place I ever want to be. End of the bench suits me fine.

  Jayson stares at Coach hard—a steely street stare he learned living in the Birmingham badlands—but says nothing. Then he bumps his chest against mine and heads for the locker room.

  “Baker, you’re in,” Coach says, loud enough so even though he’s walking away, Jayson can hear it. I glance at Jayson walking tall and proud, but then stare up at the scoreboard. With Lex Baker at center, the numbers on the home side will move like a tortoise and those for visitors like a hare. If I was in, I’d at least hit some free throws, but Coach treats me like I’m an invisible man.

  As the refs and coaches confer—because the adults need to decide everything—I tap A.C.’s leg. He’s next to me on the bench. He’s a tourist, not a resident like me. A.C. didn’t start because he broke one of Coach’s rules at practice (he dunked), and then when he played, he got pulled because he broke another rule (didn’t run Coach’s prehistoric plays). Last game, he got benched because he broke rule three: taking three-pointers. He made ’em, but that’s not how Coach plays the game. He plays “ball control offense” like he must have done it in the dinosaur days: slow and stupid.

  “What do you think?” I ask A.C. He’s the smartest person I know, other than my girl, Lucy. In front of us, Gerald sighs heavily. The game’s on his shoulders now. “So, A.C., what—”

  A.C. gives me a “Whatcha gonna do?” shrug and says nothing. As I watch the game slipping away, even though Gerald and the others are running Coach’s plays just like he put ’em on the blackboard, I wonder what’s gonna happen to Jayson, number 45, sitting for two games.

  At the half, we return to the locker room. Coach follows us, ranting and grumbling and not acknowledging the key player he just benched. Finally, I just ask, “When is Jayson coming back?”

  Coach stares me down, then clears his throat like it’s full of razor blades but doesn’t answer my question.

  “We’re in this together,” I whisper to A.C. and Gerald.

  “Like peas in a pod, Cody?” Gerald asks me.

  I cover my mouth with my hand, then mumble the answer: “Yeah, black-eyed peas.”

  Gerald snickers, which causes me to laugh, then A.C. busts
a gut instead of acting all sad because we’re losing a game that doesn’t really matter. Eyes flash red at us with anger. We’re in Alabama, but us three, we might as well be from another planet.

  2

  Monday Morning

  December 5

  Vestavia Hills High School

  “That doesn’t seem fair,” Danni says to Gerald. “He just defended himself.”

  Mostly everybody’s talking about Jayson getting bounced from the team. Like everything around Birmingham, it breaks down along black and white lines. This city is one big chessboard with no gray areas.

  Gerald agrees, but he’s so head-over-heels with Danni, he’d agree if she said the sun rose in the west and set in the east. They hold hands until the bell rings. People get quiet pretty quickly in this class, more so than in any other, since Mr. Austin actually holds our attention and respect.

  “Today we’re beginning a unit on civil disobedience, something close to my heart.”

  “That’s because you were a hippie!” Danni shouts.

  Mr. Austin shakes his head, laughs. “Danni, the only thing I was protesting in the days of the hippies was not getting more time for recess,” Mr. Austin says. “I didn’t grow up in the 1960s, but this country sure did.”

  “Especially here,” Danni adds. I nod in agreement. Birmingham was ground zero for the civil rights movement. A lot of good stuff happened here, like the Birmingham Children’s Crusade, but more bad, like those young girls getting killed in a church bombing on Christmas morning in 1963. I guess they needed both good and bad to make the movement work. Only thing is, all the stuff they protested against back in the day seems to me hasn’t changed much: the black people still live together without any money and mostly go to school together—just a few of us out on the other side of the mountain.

  Mr. Austin asks people what they know about civil disobedience. Danni and Gerald talk about Nelson Mandela, Dr. King, and Rosa Parks. “All Rosa Parks wanted was to sit down,” Danni says, showing off her smarts with pride. “Turns out she stood up.” Danni talks to Mr. Austin, but I feel her eyes on me, like I should be Amen-ing. In class, like on the court, I’m fine on the side, minding my own business.

  “And that spirit is still alive today.” Mr. Austin walks toward his desk and clicks on the smartboard. We watch YouTube clips of the Black Lives Matter marches, but also ones about something called Occupy Wall Street and protests at high schools about standardized testing.

  “I hope those students are protesting about something important,” Danni says.

  “Like how bad the food is in the school cafeteria,” I snap, to a few laughs.

  “You shouldn’t complain about something that’s free for you,” Lex growls. I feel eyes on me, waiting for a reaction. Lex is just angry that he’s here with the rest of us “regular folks” and not in AP classes like some of his friends. I wish my girl Lucy was here. She’d have cut him ear to ear with her sharp tongue, but she’s in those AP classes—not Lex. I look at Gerald and Danni. Are any of us going to say something?

  But we all just let it go, like we do almost every time something ignorant like that comes out of Lex’s mouth. Not Jayson, though: the second Coach dropped the “thug” bomb, he stood up tall. Maybe if I started at center instead of backing up the backup, I’d stand up too. At this high school, you’re only as smart as your minutes per game, batting average, or yards per carry.

  Somebody—I think Ashley—mentions protesting the Vietnam War.

  “The protest was not just against the killing in Vietnam, but also against young men being drafted here,” Mr. Austin says.

  “Drafted? What’s that?” Gerald asks.

  Lex and his friends create a soundtrack of sighs and stupid laughter. Mr. Austin starts to answer, but Ashley cuts him off. “Every male eighteen or older could be drafted into the military, meaning he didn’t have a choice but to serve. You had to go.”

  “Not necessarily, Ashley,” Mr. Austin corrects her, but in a gentle tone. “You could avoid the draft if you were in college, if you had connections, or if you had money.”

  “You mean if you were white,” I whisper to Gerald. He cracks and bumps me hard.

  Danni starts talking about MLK. Lex mutters something to his friends. They talk among themselves so we can’t hear what they’re saying, but it’s not like we don’t know what most of them really think.

  Mr. Austin stands there like he does, his arms crossed against his chest and his glasses resting on his balding head, but showing no emotion as he waits for the class to quiet down. I’ve seen him do this for up to ten minutes. But Ashley just tells Lex and his friends to shut up so Austin can talk.

  “One of the more famous protests against the war actually involved people your age,” Mr. Austin finally says. He goes old-school, writing on the blackboard: Tinker v. Des Moines. “So we’ll head down to the library where you’ll divide into groups of two and research this court case someplace other than Wikipedia. Next week you’ll present it to the class. One side will argue for Tinker, the student who protested, and the other side for the school district. And I’ll pick the partners.”

  Gerald gives me this big, bug-eyed look since we know Austin won’t let us pair up like normal. And if I pair up with Danni, Lucy’s not going to be happy about that.

  Austin starts reading off names, and I end up with Ashley. She’s the younger sister of Dylan, our senior shooting guard who Coach almost never lets shoot, especially threes. She’s smart and shoots off her mouth with the same skill that her brother shoots jumpers, except nobody applauds her talent.

  “Hey, Cody,” Ashley says as we walk toward the library with the rest of the class. She’s small, maybe not even five feet, so my six-five frame makes me feel like a gangly giraffe.

  “Hey, Ashley,” I say, always so clever.

  “Why do you put up with Lex’s crap?” she asks, all the while scrolling on her cell. I hear she’s a Twitter freak. “Lex is such a jerk.”

  Like with A.C. the other day on the bench, I’ve got no words, just a shoulder shrug.

  “Like that thing he said today,” Ashley says. “He assumed you get a free lunch just because—”

  “But I am on free lunch,” I say, not happy about it, but not ashamed either.

  “And so are me and Dylan. You should hear the things they say about you and Danni and—”

  “It isn’t anything I haven’t heard before.” I feel bad about lying. At Inglenook, the school I attended before, people talked trash about what you did, but not about who you were. “My mom told me I’d better get used to it because that’s how the world is. It’s one of the reasons she moved us to Hill Top.”

  “Then the world’s a messed-up place.” Ashley never just goes with the status quo. She doesn’t dress like most of the girls around here, trying to look hot. She has super-short brown hair and usually wears an oversize white T with big, black biker boots.

  “Mom says it’s all mind over matter,” I say. “If you don’t mind, then it doesn’t matter.” I open the library door for Ashley and she smiles.

  “Dylan told me about your coach kicking Jayson off the team. He said you stepped up and stopped it from being worse. That took some courage,” Ashley says.

  I shrug, embarrassed. “Maybe. You didn’t see the fight?” I throw two fake punches into the air. “Bam bam.”

  “Cody, I love my older brother but not enough to sit through a stupid basketball game.”

  We talk about nothing much else until we sit down at the computer, where she goes right to Wikipedia to look up Tinker v. Des Moines. That smile from earlier gets bigger as she reads about the case. I read over her shoulder about these kids who protested the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands to school.

  “So who do you want to be?” I ask, passing the ball her way.

  “Tinker.” Like Lucy and like Jayson, Ashley enjoys the center spotlight. I’m content on the bench just belonging. For some, the game’s about showing off and showing you’re bette
r than others. I’m just happy to be part of something that isn’t broken. “You okay with that, Cody?”

  I nod my head, but my eyes are on my phone as I text Lucy, the center of my attention.

  3

  Monday after school

  December 5

  Vestavia Hills High School gym

  “Call you after practice,” I tell Lucy, like I do every day at this time. She answers with a kiss to my cheek. She’s on tiptoe. What she lacks in size, she makes up for in spunk. She dyes her short hair red, keeps a gold locket I gave her around her neck, and like Ashley, always has her pink phone in hand. She takes a pic of us, then posts it, as if the world needs more C & L photos.

  “You have to study for Austin’s civics test, so don’t be—” she starts, but I cut her off with a kiss of my own. No cheek, full court lip press. We get a few “get a room” catcalls from guys on the team going into the locker room. Truth is, with Lucy, I’d rather study her anatomy than civics, algebra, or whatever. “Later, Co,” she whispers, and then she walks away. I watch her go, enjoying the view.

  “Spend more time on ball and less on booty,” Lex says. A slap to the back of my head serves as an exclamation point. He laughs. His spit falls like rain on my neck.

  I head into the locker room and change into my practice uniform. I look across at Jayson’s locker. Everybody has decorated their locker with stupid stuff, except Jayson, who just has a handwritten Post-It note that says “Jayson Davis #45.” The locker seems lonely, as if it misses him.

  As we head toward the court, Lex pushes past me. “Out of the way, Domino.”

  “What did he call you?” A.C. asks from two steps behind.

  I watch Lex’s $300 Jordans smack against the floor. “I don’t want to talk about it.” A.C.’s skin is dark like Gerald’s, darker than Jayson’s, but I’m so light that people might not even guess that my mom is black.