Toni 4, p.1
Toni #4, page 1
To Freedom Fighters everywhere—LA
GROSSET & DUNLAP
Penguin Young Readers Group
An Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Text copyright © 2017 by Penguin Random House LLC. Cover illustration copyright © 2017 by Raul Allen. All rights reserved. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Printed in the USA.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 9781101995686 (paperback)
ISBN 9780515158014 (library binding)
ISBN 9781101995693 (ebook)
Version_1
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Copyright
Chapter 1: Salty Coach, Sour Pickles
Chapter 2: More Friends, More Problems
Chapter 3: When Your Heroes Can't Save You
Chapter 4: Leave Me Alone, or Else
Chapter 5: One Step Forward, One Hundred Steps Back
Chapter 6: Why The Past Can't Stay Put
Chapter 7: No Hope
Chapter 8: Blood and Boogers
Chapter 9: Fresh Start, Part I
Chapter 10: An Unexpected Reunion
Chapter 11: A Midsummer Night's Scheme
Chapter 12: Fresh Start, Part Ii
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
SALTY COACH, SOUR PICKLES
No lie, Coach Wise even yells at me in my dreams. Which is not to say my dreams are edge-of-your-seat thrillers. I’m not one of those kids who spends all night riding on the backs of flying tarantulas. I never fall off seaside cliffs or wake up in a cold sweat, afraid of shadowy things lurking under my bed. I got enough problems as is; I don’t have time to invent more for myself. Besides, you only find that kind of magical stuff in books with talking dogs or time-traveling closets. I don’t even have a regular closet. Me and my older brother Roddy keep our clothes on a broken bookshelf left behind by the last person who lived in our apartment.
Anyway—I was telling you about my dreams. Mostly I just kind of walk around my neighborhood, living my life, eating fried pickles, until Coach Wise pops out from behind a Dumpster or bumps into me in a crowd and starts talking trash.
“This is what you dream about?” he shouted last night. I dropped a letter I was holding into a sewer. He has this voice, growling and deep, that makes me think of empty stomachs. “Running errands? Where’s your generation’s imagination?”
Every time I think about Coach Wise, I shudder. Not a practice goes by without him chasing me around the court, whistle propped threateningly in the corner of his mouth, ready to tear me to shreds. Toni, go faster! Toni, you’re killing us! Toni, why in God’s name did you do that? When things get really bad, he suggests cutting up my jersey, making scissors out of his fingers with childlike glee. I don’t know why I make him so mad, but the one thing I do know is that you can’t go through life letting people talk to you any kind of way. Doesn’t matter who they are. Even Roddy has to ask nicely when it’s my turn to do the dishes. Sometimes I forget or I just don’t feel like it and I can sense him getting worked up, but if he says even a word, he knows I’ll stick a foot so far up his angelic little— What I’m saying is that you get to a point when you got to stand up for yourself. You got to let people know you’re not one to be played with. And Lord knows there’s no reason to be scared of Coach Wise. His truck has not one, but two of those COEXIST bumper stickers. His forearm hair is thin and limp. When he thinks no one’s looking, he rubs behind his ears and sniffs his fingers.
“Coach Wise,” I tell him after practice today, “we gotta talk.”
He squints unhappily in my direction. “Yes, Toni,” he grumbles. It kills him to even say my name, I can tell. His arms are crossed security-guard style in front of him.
“I don’t appreciate how you always yelling at me.”
“Some people call that motivation, Toni. I’m a coach. I motivate.” For some reason he opens an imaginary book, licks his finger, and pretends to flip a few pages. He points to his palm. “Coach. Definition: a person who helps others through sustained encouragement.” He closes the book by slapping his palms.
Something strange and hot rises in my throat. Sometimes I have too many things to say and the words get so jammed before they get to my mouth that I end up sounding stupid. “So that means, like, what? So you think you’re— So you gotta yell?”
A corner of his mouth twitches. He rolls his neck long and slowly rubs his temples. He says I make his brain hurt. He says he’s never had a player so unwilling to follow directions. He asks if I think his instructions are just suggestions, open to any old interpretation. He wants to know why, for example, I get rebounds and dribble the ball up even though I know I’m supposed to pass outlets to Frank or Adrian.
“Yeah, well, I figured it’d just be better if I did it myself.”
“But you always throw the ball out of bounds.”
My face gets hot. I don’t like to admit when I’m wrong, so I just stand there, silent and embarrassed.
“Toni, you’re smart. Super smart. But you have a problem with authority. You think you know better than everybody.”
“Says who?”
Coach Wise laughs. Did I remember the last game? When he asked me to pass the ball to Janae for the last shot? Do I remember what happened?
“You just stood there,” he snorts before I can respond. Which is not exactly how it went down. What actually happened was that I got distracted by a fight on a far court. Two teams were pushing and shoving, and parents were coming down from the stands to break things up. An old lady got pushed to the ground and someone held up her wig on a stick triumphantly. JamLand is a facility with zero tolerance for fighting. You fight, you’re out. By the time I’d turned my head around, the buzzer had sounded.
Of course he would bring that up. I can never win with Coach Wise. My eyes fill with water and start to sting. I open my mouth but nothing comes out.
“I want you to listen,” he says, yawning. “I want you to trust your teammates.”
He’s so calm that I suddenly want to piss him off. He needs to feel the helpless, shipwrecked anxiety that I’m feeling. I picture myself grabbing Coach Wise by the ankles and holding him upside down, cartoon bully–style. I imagine secretly shaking a soda and watching him open it.
Instead, I just stare at him really hard. “You’ll be sorry if I quit,” I say. But I’m not even sure that’s true. An embarrassed breath catches in my throat. I start to jog away before I can hear his answer.
In a cramped booth at Nation’s, I trust my teammates to be as fed up with Coach Wise as I am. Justin and Janae sit across from me and make walrus faces with straws. Frank asks Adrian to poke an almost-crusted scab as he winces and proclaims his imperviousness to pain. My battles with Coach Wise are nothing new to them, old stories with the same beginning and end, the same hero and villain. I decide to amp things up a little. I tell them that Coach Wise said he didn’t want me on the team (maybe he didn’t say that exactly, but he didn’t not say it, either). I make his voice sound mean, snorting, Darth Vader–like. I use the salt and pepper shakers to show a few plays I’ve learned from TV, hoping someone will suggest that Coach Wise’s plays are silly and outdated. I get myself so worked up, Frank stops slapping his scab to put a hand on my shoulder.
“It’s okay, guys,” I tell them, nodding reassuringly. I look down at the menu and spot the fried pickles. There isn’t a better fried pickle in the world, if you ask me. When I die, I hope they put pickles over my eyes and bury me in a pickle field. No—I hope they pickle me. I’ll have to remember to tell Roddy that tonight: If I die, I want to be pickled. I’m a regular, so the waitress has already scribbled down my order by the time she comes over.
“And the rest of y’all?” she asks.
Frank doesn’t want anything, and neither do Justin and Janae. Adrian and White Mike wave their hands.
“You guys don’t want anything?” I ask.
“Not really,” Janae says.
“Get them some pickles, too. You guys’ll love the pickles. You’ll be hungry by the time they come out.”
I force a laugh, but everyone looks into their glasses.
“Anyway,” I say. “I mean, do we even really need a coach? I mean, I just think we’re smart enough to do stuff on our own.”
Janae looks up and tries to smile. “I don’t know,” she says. She’s smiling so hard, it looks like it hurts. “We kind of like Coach Wise.”
The pickles come out in a big pile, steaming and crispy and sour-smelling. But by the time I’m down to the last couple, I look around the table and realize I’m the
CHAPTER 2
MORE FRIENDS, MORE PROBLEMS
Frank didn’t wave to me when I got on the bus. Frank always cups his hand and waves to me real slow, like I’m a doomed passenger on the deck of the Titanic. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, but it sends Frank into such crazy fits of laughter that I can’t help laughing, too. For the twenty-minute ride home I secretly pretend I’m at a swanky party on a boat sailing toward an icy grave. That lady asleep in her Walgreens uniform, she’s a flapper; that guy taking up three seats with his gym bag, he’s a tuba player. You’re going down with the boat, buddy! At my stop I jump to safety, from the last step on the bus to my life raft, er, the sidewalk. But today Frank just walked away with everybody else, no wave, no nothing.
That probably doesn’t mean anything, right? It’s probably nothing to read into, but all afternoon I’ve been lying in bed, counting the rotations of the ceiling fan, trying to figure out what happened. Thin bands of yellow light filter through the blinds, cutting my body into strips. It’s so hot, little beads of water drip down the walls. Hot air stings my throat and I occasionally bend my knees so that I don’t feel so buried alive. I ask myself over and over and over why Frank didn’t wave. Hours pass; I watch the threads of light move off my body and onto the walls. I’ve got four ideas: (1) Frank hates and/or is embarrassed by me because of that Coach Wise rant and now the rest of the team hates me, too, or (2) everyone’s mad at me for eating all of the fried pickles and now they all hate me, or (3) they hate me because I missed every shot at practice, or (4) they hate me for reasons I don’t know and won’t ever be able to figure out.
If I said this to Frank, he’d call me crazy. We love you, he’d say. No matter what. He’d remind me that everyone is grateful for my job as the team’s enforcer. Any time someone gets in Justin’s face or steps on Janae’s ankle, I jump in to make things right. Even Coach Wise marvels at the way I lustily pinch or elbow or otherwise punish our opponents under the referees’ noses. I always get away with it; no boy’s going to complain to the ref that he got hurt by a girl. White Mike says I’m like a kind of South American ant known for throwing itself into the mouth of an anteater to protect the nest.
“One tough-ass chick,” Janae once said. “We needed someone like you.”
I’ve heard other teams call us spoiled and arrogant and mean, but they don’t know us from the inside. My teammates sit around and admire my crappy sketches of snails and turtles, like I’m some kind of big-time artist. They listen—they really listen—when I go on and on about how hard it is to draw realistic hands, how hard it is to get the nails right. When my brother Roddy works late, Janae comes over to play video games so that I won’t be alone. Never once has she said anything about the linoleum pulling up in the corners or the mildewy smell Roddy and I have been trying to scrub out since we moved in. Over in the closet are the new Nikes the team pitched in to get me after I kept slipping and falling in Roddy’s old cross-trainers. With the team, I always forget that I’ve spent my whole life learning to trust no one except myself, that the cartoons I draw know more about me than most people. With the team, food tastes better and the sun shines brighter and sweat smells sweeter and stupid jokes sound funnier and I feel about ten feet taller and nothing else matters, not the past or the future, only the just-tickled feeling I get when—
As usual, the more I think about how awesome Team Blacktop is, the more afraid it makes me. They’re all so sweet and nice and good that I’m sure I stand out in some awful way, like a smudge on glass. Some nights I can’t sleep because I’m sure that I’ve messed things up without even knowing it. Or I stay up wondering if the next morning is the one when they’ll all wake up and realize that I’m not one of them, that I’m not the person they think I am. Maybe they’ll finally see that my nose is too big or that my hair was dyed with the cheapo stuff they won’t sell in a regular store.
Plus I’ve never been good at stuff like this—keeping friends and everything. Once I used a big plastic candy box as a snail farm. I called it Snail-o-Rama. I found snails right in the middle of the sidewalk and shuttled them to safety. Each one I named after a famous artist. I went out to the thicket behind our apartment and braved the thorns and spiders to get different kinds of grass and leaves, just to give the snails a little variety. That night I put the lid on tight. The next morning I popped the lid off and a smell like the worst kind of sewage hit me in the face. Rivera and Basquiat and Kahlo were all dead. I’d suffocated them.
I sit up, my arms and legs suddenly feeling tingly and restless. I open the window, and a blast of hot air rushes in.
Don’t mess this up, Toni. Whatever you do, don’t mess this up.
Frank forgot to bring his water to practice today. I watch him suck his teeth as he digs into the corners of his backpack, pulling out his comic books, his sweatshirt, his mints. His lips look shriveled, like they’ve been left out in the sun too long. Poor Frank. I hustle over and toss him my bottle, hoping to make amends for whatever happened yesterday.
“Have some,” I say.
He squints at the bottle, then shakes it. The water rattles weakly. There’s a sip left, if that. The water creeps from one side of the bottle to the other. Slimy bubbles stick to its sides.
“Uhhh,” he says. “I’m good.”
“You’re not thirsty?”
“That’s all backwash, man.”
I take the water bottle back and squeeze it in both of my hands. “I wasn’t trying to get you sick.” The plastic crinkles obnoxiously, and I realize that I was yelling. “Sorry.”
Frank stops looking through his bag and stands up. Even though he only comes up to my shoulder, I feel small under his gaze. A single bead of sweat drops down my forehead, over my nose, and into my mouth. I try to smile.
“You good?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say.
“You’re acting funny.”
“Funny how?”
He shrugs. “Just funny.”
I look him up and down, trying to figure out what’s changed. Hidden meanings sprout up all around us: the way he stands a little too far from me, the way he folds his arms over his chest. He glances at the ground, and I suddenly realize how giant my feet are, how clownish. Who would want to be friends with that?
After practice I get onto the bus slowly and head to my usual spot in the back. There’s the lady in her uniform, talking on the phone about how they should have a separate bus for smelly kids. I stop myself from looking out the window, holding out until the last second, until the bus jolts into gear and pulls away. Frank’s waving. His hand is cupped like a beauty queen’s, as usual, but I don’t feel better. Somehow he looks robotic, like he’s doing it only because he feels sorry for me.
We’ve got an off day today, so I ask Janae if she wants to get some ice cream. The sun is fat and yellow as it rolls up a cloudless sky, a glob of paint on a clean palette. At the Scoop-n-Serve there’s a line of munchkins out the door and around the corner. Kids love the Scoop-n-Serve. In their commercials, a group of deranged toddlers plot world domination until they eat a spoonful of Pickled Cherry and settle for opening a couple of Scoop-n-Serve franchises.
I’m not exactly sure what I want from Janae, except that I want to be close to her, want her to like me. We get in line near a shady spot next to some Dumpsters. I watch her out of the corner of my eye, noting the way she bites her nails and walks on her toes, hoping that info will be useful sometime in the future. In front of us, two kids with no shirts argue about the correct way to fight off a bear.
“You run away,” one kid says.
“Nah,” the other kid says, “you’re supposed to stand up to it and get big. Scares it off.”
“Okay. You stand and I’ll run.”
Their bony shoulder blades flex as they slap at each other.
Janae practices her jumper in place. She catches an imaginary ball, sets her feet and rises, over and over.
“Jumper wasn’t feeling good today,” she says. “Felt a little flat.”
