The Book of Joe

then swinging his arm around in a windmill and jamming the ball violently through the hoop.
    “So it’s not a confidence thing,” I say.
    “Not exactly,” he says sarcastically as the ball rolls slowly away from him and comes to rest at Wayne’s feet. “Every now and then Dugan still calls me into his office for his why-you-should-be-a-Cougar seminar.”
    “So, why not, then?”
    Jared scratches his head and looks at me. “You know in your book, how you wrote about not fitting in with my dad and Gramps because they were all about ball and you weren’t? Well, I was all about ball in junior high and when I first got here, on junior varsity. I was the best one on the team, and my father just loved it. But it got to the point where it was all he ever talked about with me, and it was non-stop, man, you know? I mean, my whole relationship with my father was just basketball. Anything else I did, anything else that I was interested in, he could care less. As long as I was the star of the team, that was all he gave a shit about.”
    Jared pauses and looks around self-consciously, suddenly aware that Carly, Wayne, and I are listening raptly. “Anyway,” he says, clearing his throat. “I decided that I didn’t want to be all about basketball anymore. There were other things I wanted to do with my time besides going to practice and hanging out with the jocks. I figured my dad would have to find something else in common with me, although that sort of backfired, because it turns out we have nothing else in common.”
    For a kid who speaks as little as Jared, this is practically a speech, and the rest of us greet it with respectful silence.
    Jared walks over to Wayne and reaches out for the ball. “And that’s my whole, sad story. Film at eleven.” He catches a toss from Wayne and dribbles it back and forth between his legs.
    “I guess I have more in common with you, Uncle Joe, than with my dad,” he says to me.
    “Except that you can actually play,” Wayne points out, much to everyone’s apparent amusement.
    “Fuck you,” I say good-naturedly while Jared and Carly snicker. “You want to go one-on-one right now?”
    Wayne smiles. “Them’s fighting words.” He throws off his overcoat dramatically and pulls himself carefully to his feet, extending his arms to Jared. “Give me that ball, Junior.”
    Just as Jared tosses him the basketball, there is a high-pitched whine of scraping metal and the creak of hinges. We all look toward the far wall of the gym, where one of the doors has suddenly swung open, casting a triangular shaft of light across the gym floor. Standing silhouetted in the light from his office is Coach Dugan. His features are obscured in the shadows, but there’s no mistaking his chiseled profile.
    “Who is that?” he says, stepping out onto the floor.
    “Busted,” Jared groans under his breath.
    “Hey, Coach,” Wayne says sheepishly. “How’s it going?”
    Dugan squints across the gym in his direction. “Who’s that, Hargrove?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “What the hell are you doing here, son?”
    “I just wanted to feel the old hardwood under my feet one more time.”
    Dugan looks around at the rest of us, his expression becoming particularly grim when he gets to me. He seems about to say something, but then he turns around and disappears back into his office, the steel door slamming solidly behind him.
    “Busted,” Jared says again, heading for the doors. “Big-time. He’s definitely calling the cops.”
    “What should we do?” Carly asks, giggling giddily in spite of herself. “Should we run?”
    I think about it for a second. “Let’s.”
    Wayne sits back down in his wheelchair, and we begin quickly heading for the exit doors when we’re stopped in our tracks by a loud clicking sound and the whir of unseen electricity. Seconds later, the gym’s sodium lights begin audibly popping on, row by row, their soft electric hum filling the room. We stand in their purple glow, gazing around incredulously in the growing illumination, and I see that Wayne is smiling. “Look!” Carly says, pointing upward.
    “Well, I’ll be damned,” Wayne says, his voice thick with emotion. At first I don’t understand what they’re talking about, but then I look a little higher and see the fiberglass backboards, the ones reserved for Cougars only, sliding slowly, almost majestically down in their grooved path until finally settling simultaneously into their game positions.
    Jared lets out