Peter DeMarco
Pass the ball, Adam screamed.
We were teammates on a seventh-grade recreational basketball team. We weren’t friends. He was the star and I was the kid who rarely got in the game. Those were the days before equity and trophies for everyone. Your parents paid a fee and had to sit in the bleachers, powerless, while the coach played favorites.
We were undefeated. In the last game before the championship, the coach played me. A blocked shot bounced into my hands. The feel of the ball, in a real game, with my adrenalin flowing, gave me more of an edge than I felt in practice. I didn’t want to give it up.
That’s when Adam screamed. We were winning by 10 points and he still wanted the ball. He always wanted the ball.
I dribbled to the basket. The ball was stolen.
You suck, he said.
On the drive home, my father tapped my knee. You finally got the ball, he said.
I didn’t have it very long.
At least you were being aggressive.
I didn’t want Adam to get it again, I said.
Those words turned out to be prophetic. Adam would never touch a basketball again.
Adam was shot on his driveway the following day by a 9-year-old neighbor playing with his father’s rifle. Adam was always shooting baskets on his driveway. In the summer or winter, it didn’t matter, you’d drive or bike by his house and he was out there. He was a short stocky kid who drove to the basket as if there were five invisible defenders in front of him.
In the days after he was killed, parents in carpools and teachers in school talked about those memories of him on the driveway, and said to pray for him in church, and pray for his poor family. It was hard to pray for someone who once beat me up on a short cut home through the woods because I wouldn’t let him copy my answers on a test, for someone who embarrassed me every day in class, making fun of my Billy the Kid jeans. Faggot jeans, he called them, because of the childish-sounding brand name. The irony was lost on everyone, including me, since Billy the Kid was an outlaw.
The day after Adam was shot on his driveway, I biked by his house. A basketball sat on the front lawn. I imagined it rolling there after he fell and thought I saw a smear of blood on the rubber. I wondered if he’d reappear from this surreal scenario and show up in class with that stupid smirk on his face, ready to embarrass me again, because tragedies like this only happened on those afterschool TV specials. I wondered if he read comic books or liked James Bond movies, and in later years, when I’d drive by his house, I’d wonder if he was just a regular kid behind a bully facade that he got from being the youngest of five brothers.
There was one more thing I wondered about. Would God punish me for feeling free of Adam?
In school Adam’s friends looked insignificant now, like phantoms, pushing their pencils around in a purposeless way, and I almost felt sorry for them, their leader gone, no one to entertain them with derisive taunts.
There was talk of the trophy everyone would receive if we won the championship. With Adam gone, our chances were slim. Some of my friends had trophies for Little League baseball but my teams always finished last. I was ambivalent about my desire for a trophy since I had not contributed, but without Adam there might be chances for the substitutes.
The night of the championship game the coach assembled us in a circle. He pointed upward. Adam’s watching, he said. Let’s win it for him.
The trophies were lined up in a corner, mini-Gods, the gym lights casting them with a sacred sheen.
The coach played everyone. We struggled without Adam, but somehow, with ten seconds left, we were only down by a point. Our tallest kid blocked a shot. The ball flew into my hands.
I froze.
Pass the ball, I heard Adam scream, but there was no Adam. As I dribbled down the court at full speed, I sensed the thrill of winning the game and getting my first trophy, or of missing and getting the perverse pleasure of not letting Adam have the satisfaction of looking down and thinking we had won it for him.
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Peter DeMarco published a New York Times “Modern Love” essay about becoming a New York City high school English teacher and meeting his wife. Before teaching, Peter had a career in book publishing, and spent a considerable amount of time acting in regional theater and attempting to be funny on the amateur stand-up comedy circuit in New York City. Other writing credits include pieces in Monkeybicycle, Hippocampus, Prime Number Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Cleaver, Unleash Lit, Flash Fiction Magazine, and The Palisades Review.