Quantum Touch Collection

Chapter 7

A FEW DAYS EARLIER, we"d hit the court. Ashley wore his Edgar Allen Poe tee, one of the great-authors shirts he had accumulated. I had worn whatever was at the top of the drawer. Ash had on his expensive hightops; I wore my cut-the-grass best. Rain had been falling for the previous few days. We expected more; it was April.

We have our own rules, and we play for a buck a point. We play GIRAFFE—HORSE with two extra shots. I always need to be ahead by the time I get to the first F because Ashley"s a sharpshooter from outside the three point line. He"s also four inches taller. We both missed the second F, so he was shooting again.

“I want your money,” he hissed at me as I badgered him to “shoot the ball, not the wise cracks.” He smiled at me, shot, and missed again.

“You"re getting old,” I said. “Not to mention grumpy.” Ashley, wise guy that he is, had once told me that RSVP meant repartee, s"il vous plait and that reparte is French for trash talk. I missed.

repartee, s"il vous plaitreparte“Speaking of old, we should quit soon. I have too many papers to grade even to be here,” he groused. I told him a war could end in the amount of time he talked between shots. I had white flags on my mind. His and the Confederacy"s. I"d done one of my exercises in kid-shock earlier that day when I pointed out to my class that the Civil War continued for seven months after Lee surrendered. He missed again.

Ash can talk history with me, discuss Ulysses with anyone, and opine about baseball and football like a sports radio host. That is, he"s right about what happens on the field no more often than he"s ridiculous. He teaches creative writing, recites Shakespeare to his English classes, and doesn"t bother to discard his slight New England accent when he says, “Wherefore art thou, Romeo.” My shot rolled around the rim and out.

I had been here a year when I met Ash, who"d been assigned a room down my hallway. When I stopped in to welcome him, I should never have asked why he"d come to Riverboro. “To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” he glared, “why else?” And then he laughed. We talked a lot in the few minutes between classes. I told him I had once planned to go to law school. “Me too,” he said. But, he added, he had decided to work in the Teach for America program first. “Me too,” I said.

“You should have seen my kids, Fritz. We put on a Shakespeare recital for the whole community. It sold out, even the SRO tickets.” His poetic soul, I have learned, is hidden in a dense fabric of wisecrackery. I told him I had been assigned to New York City, which had come with one benefit. I met Linda there. When I finished my two years, I took the job in Riverboro because it felt comfortable. I wanted out of the big city but not to be too far away.

Riverboro"s near Philadelphia and dates to the American Revolution. A volunteer tree commission keeps the old trees on every street healthy and safe and guarantees the perpetuation of summer shade and fall colors. Everyone tracks the fortunes of the high school teams. The town puts on a Halloween pageant, and Santa visits every Christmas on a fire truck. Last year, Ashley delivered the Declaration of Independence, in costume, to a Fourth of July crowd that was probably as large as the first one in 1776.

One of the things I like about Ashley is his quick grasp of so many ideas. He"s especially good to have around in difficult situations. Hidden behind his humor and sarcasm is a very intelligent, analytic man. And he can tell a joke. Even playing basketball, we laugh a lot. Linda likes Ashley too. They talk about books and movies, politics and government policy, and cooking. Sometimes I just listen. She says he"s “movie-star handsome.”

He hit F; I missed again. He made his shot for E, a flowing jump shot that sailed through the hoop without a sound. GIRAFFE was done. I was down $2.00, and we began the sweat session. He"s good, but I"m no pushover. Actually, he taught me. When we first started this ritual, he coached my footwork, showing me how to slide step, and he also taught me where to focus. This time he got the ball first. He faked right, took two steps to my left, spun, and took a sharpshooter jumper, his long hair flying. One to nothing. His second try was a left-handed layup, two slapping steps on the asphalt between bounces that splattered in small puddles, a sharp elbow to my shoulder, and it was two-zip.

He held the ball out to me, daring me to grab it. His brown eyes watched to see if I committed to his moves. My weight on my toes, I watched his chest, and as he slid left, I poked the ball away. Most of the time, I shoot long shots to keep him from blocking me. I lose money in the winter but make it back when we play golf. Before my turn, I gazed out over the athletic fields, their new green already muddy. The distinctive harmony of bat on ball turned my head. Batting practice. The boys" and girls" lacrosse teams ran up and down splattering watery dirt on their respective fields and shins. The track teams loosened up for their afternoon drills.

“Come on. Stop wasting time,” said Ash. He had bent over to catch his breath, sweat already dripping from his face, his shirt sweat-soaked at the neck.

I searched the sky to see how much time we had left. Gathering clouds had turned black and looked ready to unload. The gusty wind whipped our sweaty shirts. “What"s the hurry? You have a date?”

“Yeah. With twenty-seven hot … tenth grade essays.” When he laughed, I slid by him and tossed a layup that went in. 2-1.

“Okay. Lucky shot. I wasn"t paying attention.”

Before my next shot, I glanced through the chain link and nodded to Ash. We had drawn a crowd of teachers and students. I hadn"t heard them, but they were cheering. And laughing. When he was paying attention again, I dribbled the ball around, looking for an opening. When he put his hands down to block my fake, I shot a jumper that banged off the backboard and went in. 2-2. Still my shot. Not wasting time, I took one step forward. And the rain came. I put the ball down and headed for the door. Ash picked it up and shot. Swish. And he ran toward me. I held the door. Our shirts dripped as if we had been playing in a sauna.

Ash told me later lightning reached down, hit the school, and sent me flying. He said I floated about five feet through the air before I landed on my back like a slab of sidewalk. I hit my head. Hard. He said he tried to catch me, but he was too far, and I hit full force. “Splat,” he told me later. He called 9-1-1. Our remaining spectators climbed the fence, but Ash was already at work. When he realized my heart had stopped, he pumped it for me. The EMTs arrived in about seven minutes, he said, and took over. One unpacked a defibrillator; the other gave me a shot of epinephrine in the chest. When they had me breathing on my own, Ash called Linda to tell her what had happened and that he"d meet her at the hospital.