Hot Hand Read online

  He should have known better than to ask Lenny DiNardo. Lenny was always going to take his side, no matter what. “I’ve got your back even when you’re facing me” was the way Lenny liked to put it.

  At least somebody still had his back these days.

  It was when they started cutting across the yard to the basketball court after four-square that they saw Zeke Mills, the worst guy in the whole school, pulling Ben Raynor’s hoodie over his head and spinning Ben around like they were playing blindman’s bluff.

  He was known in fifth grade as Zeke the Geek, though never to his face.

  His real first name was Zechariah. And he was the biggest bully at West.

  Zeke the Geek didn’t just terrorize kids in the fifth grade, he did it to kids in all the grades.

  “C’mon,” Billy said to Lenny now, pulling him along, toward where Zeke and Ben were near the playground monkey bars.

  “Aw, dude,” Lenny said, making “dude” sound like the saddest word in the world, the way he could sometimes. “I want to make it to seventh grade alive.”

  Billy didn’t say anything back because he didn’t have time, because he was already running ahead of Lenny. He knew Zeke never needed a good reason to pick on someone. Sometimes all you had to do was make eye contact with him. Or just be one spot ahead of him in the lunch line in the cafeteria.

  Billy didn’t care why it was happening now, just that it was happening to his brother.

  Ben was on the ground when Billy got to him, having fallen over when Zeke spun him around. He was trying in vain to get his head out from under his sweatshirt so he could see.

  Billy gave a quick look around, hoping a teacher might be somewhere in the area. But the closest one was Mrs. Ray, back over by the four-square court.

  Zeke and the only two friends he had, the Ratner twins, were laughing at Ben as he kept getting more and more tangled in his sweatshirt.

  “When you can dress yourself,” Zeke said to Ben, “then you can sing us a song.”

  The Ratner twins started laughing all over again, as if a dumb remark like that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

  “Ben, it’s me,” Billy said as he reached down and untangled Ben’s hood. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Ben said.

  “Why don’t you go find your buds?” Billy said, grabbing him by his arm and pulling him up, the way you did when a guy got knocked down in basketball.

  “Hold on, Raynor,” Zeke said to Billy. “Not till he sings me a song.” Zeke turned to the Ratner twins, whose faces always reminded Billy of pug dogs, and said, “A rap-type song maybe. So’s I don’t have to rap him again.”

  All three of them laughed again. Billy had always thought the Ratner twins were dumber than dirt, anyway.

  “He doesn’t sing, Zeke,” Billy said. “He plays the piano. Even you know that.”

  “Was I talking to you?” Zeke said.

  Zeke was looking at Billy like a fly he was about to swat.

  “I thought you were,” Billy said. “My mistake.”

  Lenny said, “C’mon, Zeke. This is no biggie. Why don’t you just drop it?”

  Zeke said to Lenny, “Was I talking to you DiNerdo?”

  “Good one, Zeke, no kidding,” Billy said. “You’ve got a real way with words.”

  It was a miracle, Billy thought, though probably not the kind you heard about in church, that he’d managed to be at West School as long as he had and never officially had a beef with this jerk.

  But Billy knew he had one now.

  Behind Zeke and the Ratner twins he could see a small crowd forming, though it didn’t seem to have attracted the attention of Mrs. Ray or the other teachers in the yard.

  The one time he needed a teacher, and he couldn’t find one.

  With this many kids watching, Billy knew he couldn’t back down.

  Not even with Zeke the Geek.

  “You making fun of me, Raynor?”

  “I’ve got no problem with you, Zeke. I just want you to stop picking on my brother.”

  “Not until he sings.”

  “Ben,” Billy said, “you go ahead back inside. Recess has gotta be over soon.”

  “He’s not going anywhere,” Zeke said.

  “Go ahead, Ben.”

  His kid brother was the nicest person Billy Raynor knew, grown-up or kid, a sweet kid Billy had never seen be mean to anybody. Now Ben looked up at Billy, asking him with his eyes what he should do, really.

  Then Ben looked at Zeke.

  Still frozen to the spot he’d been standing on since Billy helped him up.

  “It’s okay,” Billy said, in the same voice he’d use when he was showing Ben how to do something new, whether it was a racing dive into their pool in summer or helping him learn to ride a bike when Ben didn’t want to wait for their dad to come home from work, running alongside Ben with his hand lightly touching his shoulder.

  Ben gave Billy one last look, nodded, put his head down, started to walk away.

  Zeke took a fast step, reached out and grabbed him by the arm, then slid his hand down so he had Ben’s right hand. The one Billy would watch when Ben played the piano, that hand acting like it had a mind of its own sometimes as it moved back and forth across the keys.

  Billy could see from Zeke Mills’s face how hard he was squeezing one of his kid brother’s piano hands.

  Knowing that telling him to stop wasn’t going to do any good, Billy stepped forward and chopped down on Zeke’s wrist with all his might, like he was trying to pound a nail with his closed fist.

  Zeke didn’t let go.

  Ben wasn’t making a sound or begging Zeke to stop. But you could see it on his face, his eyes squeezed shut, how much Zeke was hurting him. Could see the tears starting somehow coming out of his closed eyes.

  Billy did something then he’d never done to another person in his life. He planted himself like he was swinging for the fences in baseball and slugged Zeke the Geek as hard as he could with a punch to his stomach, knocking the wind right out of him.

  Now Zeke let go, falling backward as he did, his face the color of the red jacket he was wearing, trying to catch his breath.

  But Billy knew a couple of things. One Zeke wasn’t going to be out of breath for long.

  Here was the other:

  Whatever happened next wasn’t going to be good.

  In the distance he could hear a woman, probably Mrs. Ray, yelling for them to stop.

  “Zeke,” Billy said, “I’m not looking to fight with you.”

  “You should’ve thought of that before, Raynor.”

  Zeke charged him then.

  Billy didn’t know whether he planned to tackle him or punch him or both, but decided he couldn’t wait to find out. So he closed his eyes, got down as low as he could, got his arms around him like it was a game of tackle football in the yard.

  And was the most surprised kid at West School when both of them went down.

  SEVEN

  They both got suspended.

  Lenny told Mrs. Marion, the school principal, what he’d seen. So did Ben. But so many other kids at West School were afraid of Zeke Mills they all said what he told them to say, which was that Billy was the one who started it.

  Mrs. Marion said she didn’t really care who started it, that fighting was never an option at her school, and that both Billy and Zeke were getting suspended for the rest of today and all of tomorrow.

  When his father got to school—Mom, as it turned out, was on a big conference call at her office—Billy had to sit there while Mrs. Marion told both versions of the fight. First Billy’s, then Zeke’s. When she was finished, Joe Raynor told her that she had no choice but to suspend him, even if Billy was defending his brother, and that something like this would never happen again, she could count on that.

  When they got in the car, Billy said to his dad, “Do you even care what really happened?”

  “Ben already told me,” his father said.

  “You’re saying I
shouldn’t have stuck up for him?”

  “I’m saying that there’s better ways to handle stuff like this than fighting in the middle of recess.”

  “You weren’t there,” Billy said.

  He pictured Zeke squeezing Ben’s hand again, pictured Ben starting to cry, wondered if Ben had told his dad that Zeke had made him cry.

  Just because no guy ever wanted to admit that, especially to his dad.

  “Did Ben even tell you—”

  “Tell me what? That you weren’t thinking? That you don’t know actions have consequences?”

  “Never mind,” Billy said.

  “Even in the schoolyard,” his dad said, “when you want to take a shot, you do.”

  Then he told Billy he wasn’t allowed to practice with the Magic the next night. And on Joe Raynor’s teams, everybody knew the rule: If you didn’t practice—unless you were sick—you didn’t get to play the next game.

  “It’s not fair,” Billy said when his mom got home and he had told her his side of things.

  “Getting suspended from school,” she asked, “or having to miss the game on Saturday?”

  “Both,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “You ended up getting socked twice.”

  “So you agree with me,” he said.

  “Not about the fighting,” she said. “Even if you were sticking up for Ben.”

  He was under the covers. She was sitting at the end of his bed, the way she still did sometimes, though not as often as she had before she got this busy.

  “Mom,” Billy said, sitting up now, his back against the headboard, “that jerk was hurting Ben’s hand. I couldn’t let somebody do that, even if it was Zeke the Geek.”

  “I’m glad you were there,” she said. “I know Ben was glad you were there. But the law’s the law. Isn’t there some rule in basketball that if you even try to throw a punch, you get suspended for a game?”

  “The NBA,” Billy said, then he said, “Wait, you know that?”

  “I was . . . I’m married to your father,” she said. “I had to pick up a few sports things along the way.”

  “Why is Dad acting like this?” Billy said. “It’s like nothing I do is right anymore.”

  She said, “Your father likes order in his life. You know that about him, right? Like his tools in the garage, everything in its place.”

  “Now stuff is out of place.”

  “Big-time,” his mom said.

  “But I’m not the one who left,” Billy said. “He did.”

  “One more thing that’s out of order,” she said. “Like we say in court.”

  She reached forward and took his hand, rubbed his arm the way she used to when he was little and she wanted to help him get to sleep.

  Billy let her.

  “I’m sorry I messed up, Mom,” Billy said. “At school, I mean.”

  “Sometimes we all do that,” she said. “Even with the best of intentions.” She winked at him and said, “How come you think lawyers like me stay so busy?”

  “Maybe I needed a lawyer,” Billy said.

  She smiled. He smiled. Sometimes Billy felt like he’d been missing his mom even more than his dad, even though she was the parent still living in the house.

  His dad called on Saturday morning and said Billy could come to the game if he wanted to, support the team from the bench, be sort of like an assistant coach. Billy thought it might be some kind of Dad test, maybe a way for him to prove that he could somehow be a better team player by not playing.

  Billy didn’t care, not today.

  He knew that as much as it was going to kill him to miss the game, it would be much worse having to sit there at the Y and watch. And he still thought it was wrong that he wasn’t getting to play against the Nuggets, who weren’t one of the better teams in their league but who were good enough to beat the Magic with him out of the lineup.

  He told his dad on the phone that he didn’t feel like it, he was going to stay home and work on some stuff he needed to work on, which was technically true, even though in his mind he was only talking about Xbox 360 and NCAA Live.

  “Your call,” his dad said.

  “Yup.”

  “I’d like to have you there as my assistant coach,” his dad said.

  “Would you?” Billy said, not even caring if it came out sarcastic. Then he said he had to go, that Mom was calling him.

  It was him, Ben, Eliza, Mom and Peg for breakfast. Peg was cooking up one of her specialties, even though she called just about everything she cooked one of her specialties. Today it was waffles. Somehow when Peg made them, they came out of the waffle iron bigger and fatter than anybody else’s.

  Eliza had been talking about some party for the high school basketball team she’d been to the night before, as if anybody else at the table besides Mom cared. Billy stopped listening about the time she said the captain of the team had given her and her friend Maggie rides home. Billy was thinking about his own team, about the gym and the Y on Saturday mornings, how the best part of his whole week was walking through those double doors, usually seeing another game ending when he got inside, hearing the whistles and the cheers of the parents and coaches and the horn sounding when somebody would make a sub.

  He could practically hear all that sitting at his own kitchen table better than he could hear what his own sister was saying.

  He just wanted it to be eleven o’clock, when he knew the game would be over.

  Eliza’s cell phone started playing whatever new annoying song she had on it. The phone, as usual, was on the table next to her plate. She grabbed it right away, checked to see the number that was calling her like she always did, then put it right to her ear and said, “Tell me everything he said after he dropped me off.”

  “Well,” Lynn Raynor said, watching Eliza disappear toward the living room, “this has been more restful than breakfast in bed.”

  Peg was bringing Billy and Ben seconds. As she put the new waffles on their plates, she said, “Don’t worry, boys, you’ll get to talk when Liza’s in college.”

  Billy’s mom smiled. “Are you sure, Peg? I love my daughter to death, but I picture her still talking to us on speaker phone.”

  Not even worrying that Eliza might hear, just because Peg could say pretty much anything she wanted and get away with it, Peg said, “That girl can talk the way birds in the morning can sing.”

  Billy had no idea how old Peg was. She wouldn’t tell and neither would his mom. She had curly hair that seemed to be somewhere between red and brown, a round face, the same round glasses she’d always worn. To Billy, it was like she had stayed the same age from the first time he remembered her being around.

  And he couldn’t remember a time in his life when she wasn’t around.

  “Ben Raynor,” she said now, “you eat up now. You need to get to piano.”

  His mouth full of waffles, Ben said something that Billy was pretty sure was “yes, Peg.”

  Peg said, “Then get busy with that toothbrush of yours, which felt drier than dirt to me this morning.”

  Ben mumbled out an answer that seemed to include “brushed.”

  “We know you brushed, Benjamin Raynor,” Peg said. “Question is, when?”

  Ben swallowed the rest of his waffle and smiled at her then.

  “You know I brushed,” he said.

  “I do,” Peg said, smiling back. “But I got to test you now and then.”

  When nobody else in the family could get a smile out of him, Peg could, even when she was busting him the way she was right now.

  “Billy,” his mom said, “are you sure you don’t want to go to the game? I could drop you on my way to the office.”

  He wasn’t even surprised anymore when she worked on a Saturday. His mom told him all the time how she had worked seven days a week to get herself a scholarship to Harvard and then worked even harder than that to put herself through Harvard Law, which made Billy wonder if they had somehow added days of the week when she was in la
w school.

  Lately she liked to say that she wasn’t going to stop working now, with the finish line in sight.

  Even though she never really explained where the finish line was.

  She kissed Billy and Ben, saying Eliza would be heading over to Maggie’s later for a sleepover and that she’d be home from work in time to take Billy and Ben out for burgers at The 1770 House, which they all knew was the best burger in town.

  “Last chance on the game,” she said at the back door. “Going once, going twice—”

  Billy looked at her and said, “Mom, I don’t want to see dad today.”

  His mom started to say something but didn’t, just came back across the room, leaned down and hugged him. Then she was out the door, calling over her shoulder that it was pretty cold out today and Peg could drive Ben to piano, even though Mrs. Grace, his piano teacher, only lived two blocks away. And it wasn’t really two blocks if Ben cut through some backyards.

  “I want to walk,” Ben said.

  “It’s no bother, little guy,” Peg said.

  “I’m not little!” Ben said. “I’m nine years old!”

  Peg went over and put a hand on his shoulder. As soon as she did, it was like she’d thrown some kind of switch and Ben wasn’t mad anymore.

  “My bad, big boy,” she said. “You’re not only nine, you’re a lot older than that some of the time. Now eat up so you won’t be late for your lesson. We’re moving up on that recital of yours. After that, look out, Carnegie Hall.”

  Peg was from Brooklyn, New York City, and had explained to them that Carnegie Hall was this place in New York where the best piano players in the whole world got to play.

  Billy and Ben finished their breakfast without either one of them talking. With Eliza gone, the kitchen seemed as quiet as the school library. It was like that a lot, Billy feeling as if he and Ben were alone, even when they were in a room together. He was thinking about the game he was missing, getting ready to start in about a half hour. Maybe Ben was thinking about piano.

  Most of the time, Billy had no idea what his brother, who could be harder to read than a school-book, was thinking.