LITMIR.BIZ

      Out of the Game

      COACH STOVER’S FACE was as red as the Slimshine Urgent! lipstick that she wouldn’t let me wear on the court. Intense? Major. And believe me, red was not her most flattering shade.

      I mean, gimme a break. It wasn’t like we were playing in the WNBA finals, or even the Olympics, which was my goal five years down the line. No, this was girls’ basketball in suburban Montclair: Franklin D. Roosevelt Middle School against Benton Middle School. There were maybe thirty people in the stands, and they were barely paying attention. Plus, we were winning, 28–14, and there were only four minutes left in the game. We couldn’t lose, right?

      But Coach Stover was going on and on. This was our chance. Don’t let up. Stay aggressive on defense. Wait for the open shot. As she ranted, she kept jabbing her finger into the playbook. Bang, bang, bang. Mouth going a mile a minute.

      I looked up into the stands, but not for my folks. I had gotten beyond that disappointment long ago. Both my parents were lawyers, and they were both at their jobs. My mom was in Manhattan, some thirty miles away. She worked for the New York State Department of Finance, where she was deputy director of the trial division. My father worked for Citibank, in their international finance division. He was in Athens, Greece, toiling away on some kind of negotiations involving olive oil. I guess it was a pretty slippery deal.

      But two of my friends were in the stands watching the game, a girl and a boy from my group. We called ourselves the Magnificent Seven, or the Mag-7s for short. And while we weren’t exactly Alphas, we weren’t losers beyond repair. But contempt for the pecking order was our thing, anyway. We lived by the motto, “Individuality or death.” A bit on the dramatic side, true, but we were in eighth grade and it sounded pretty good at the time.

      The Bengali Rose, Jasmine Shekhar, saw me looking up and waved. Jasmine was the Mag-7s’ drama queen and a freak for vintage clothing. She spent at least one day every weekend with her older sister, Indira, wandering from thrift shop to thrift shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which they considered their stomping grounds. Most kids in our class still weren’t allowed to cross the Hudson River under any circumstances without their parents, except maybe for a supervised class trip.

      Next to her, Ken the Karate Kid looked up when he saw Jasmine wave. He appeared confused for a moment, like he usually did. Then he lifted his hand and grinned. Kenneth Herzog was born with one leg slightly longer than the other. Even with a built-up shoe, he had a slight limp. But his parents were great compensators. They enrolled him in martial arts classes when he was seven, and now he had a second-degree black belt.

      Bottom line? It was great for us. The Mag-7s were never bullied. Not even by the toughie wannabes.

      “Maddie? Are you with us?”

      Oops. That’s me, Madison Bergamo. I smiled an of-course-I’m-listening smile. “Yes, Coach?”

      “Why don’t you describe the play I just called?”

      This was a totally easy question. I mean, Coach Stover called the same play during every timeout. And she got just as crazy when she called it. I remember when I first made the team, how Coach gave us a little speech about everybody getting a chance to play, and being a good sport, and it was only a game, and blah, blah, blah.

      Meanwhile, we lost exactly one game the whole season and Coach Stover acted like we were responsible for global warming and international terrorism, with maybe world hunger thrown in. After the game, she wouldn’t even talk to us.

      But when you’re a kid, you’re a kid. You don’t have any control over the adults who run your life. If you got a psycho for a sixth grade teacher, like Mrs. Czernowitz, you just had to adapt. Same with Coach Stover. I was graduating from middle school that year. She would be at FDR forever. The thought didn’t exactly make me sad. Sayonara, Coach.

      “Cynthia brings the ball down court, then passes to me. I take the ball to the weak side. If I’m double-teamed, I find the open girl. If not, I take my defender down low.”

      Like I said, the same play every time. But I guess I made Coach happy because she clapped me on the back as the warning buzzer belched and the referee blew the whistle.

      “Let’s do this for Montclair,” she said.

      That’s Montclair, New Jersey, right? We should do it for the town? Meanwhile, our opponent, Benton Middle School, was also located in Montclair. So winning would be as much against Montclair as for it. But who was I to argue with the coach’s logic? I took the ball out, passed it to Cynthia, and trailed her down the court. When we crossed the half-court line, Cynthia flipped the ball back.

      Benton’s tallest player came out to meet me. She wore number 22 on her lime green uniform (much cooler than our tired out magenta togs) and she was maybe five-five. I was five-ten, not only the tallest girl but the tallest kid of either gender in the entire FDR Middle School—and that included a couple of teachers, too. Mostly, this was a source of embarrassment, as you might expect. I mean, gawky? Major. There were times I wanted to walk on my knees.

      But not on a basketball court. Not only was I taller than my defender, I was faster, too—Maddie the Montclair Flash. I smiled at number 22—sneered is more like it—then cut to the left, dribbled twice and—

      Fell flat on my face. That’s right. Ka-bam!

      A second later, both teams were headed back in the other direction. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t get my right leg to work. I mean my leg didn’t hurt or anything. In fact, it felt entirely normal. Except it wouldn’t do what I told it to. My mind was going, “C’mon, leg, get it together.” And my leg was going, “I can’t hearrrrrrrrrr you.” Now I know how my mom feels when she’s telling me to clean my room and I’m turning my iPod up louder.

      The referee blew the whistle at that point, and Coach Stover ran across the court. She yanked down my kneepad and started squeezing my knee and my ankle. “Does this hurt? Does this?”

      But there wasn’t any pain. My leg wasn’t even numb, like when you sit with your leg tucked under you for too long. No, what I mostly felt was embarrassed. I mean, omigosh, I’m the star of the team and I can’t even stand on my own two feet. Puh-leeeze. I just sat there on the floor—I mean, where was I going to go?—and slowly died of embarrassment while waiting for the leg thing to pass. But it didn’t.

      That’s when Coach Stover made it ten times worse. She told Cynthia

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