True Legend by Mike Lupica

Author:Mike Lupica
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

Drew felt sick.

Of all the things you could fault him on in basketball, for all the times people had a right to say he was hogging the ball—at least before he made one of his no-look, highlight-reel passes—nobody had ever once faulted him on effort.

No one had ever said he didn’t give 100 percent.

I should’ve gone for that ball, he thought.

I should have been the one laying out for the ball the way the kid from Conejo Valley did.

I should never have put us in a position where the other team had the ball in the air at the end with a chance to beat us.

Drew stood there watching the players from the other team celebrating their Hollywood ending, his eyes still seeing everything at once.

He saw Callie turn away when she spotted him looking at her. She was too good a player herself not to know what she’d just seen.

Drew saw Coach D’s back as he headed quickly toward the locker room.

He couldn’t find his mom. If she was still at her seat, she was being hidden by the Conejo Valley Cats.

Now he started walking slowly toward the locker room, a forty-point game having turned to mud. As he did, his eyes once again took him to the top of the Gilbert Athletic Center, way up in the far corner.

Same corner as before.

Somehow he knew that Donald was up there before he even saw him.

And he was looking even more disgusted than after the Park Prep game, shaking his head slowly from side to side. When he saw Drew staring up at him, he stopped shaking his head, put his hands out in front of him like an umpire making the “safe” sign in baseball.

He was right, of course.

Drew had played it safe.

Never again, he told himself.

Never again.

• • •

Drew was in and out of the locker room before Coach even came out of his office to give them his post-game thoughts, always delivered with a stat sheet in his hand, one he already seemed to have memorized by the time he started talking to them, win or lose.

Drew just threw on a warm-up jacket, pulled an old Mets cap over his eyes, stuffed his phone and his wallet into his pockets, left the jeans he’d worn to the game and his Rihanna T-shirt hanging in his locker.

He didn’t even take time to explain to Lee what he was doing or where he was going, just said, “I got to get out of here. Now.”

The way the game had ended, it was worse than if he’d choked by missing a wide-open shot or a free throw.

So Drew was on the move. Out into the parking lot, around to the front of the gym, where fans were still exiting. He pulled the Mets cap down even lower, hoping nobody would bother him as long as he just kept moving, stayed away from the crowd, most of whom were Oakley fans and wanted to get away from the gym as much as Drew did.

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