ONE ON ONE Read online

  Table of Contents

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  1

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  3

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  5

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  43

  EPILOGUE

  AFTERWORD

  ONE ON ONE

  Tabitha King

  This is for my home team

  who coached me and ran the plays with me

  and for

  my sister Marcella Spruce.

  Several people made huge contributions to the published form of this novel. They include my agent, Chuck Verrill, and my editor, Audrey LaFehr. I had terrific copyediting from Barbara Ferris. My first readers, Stephen, Naomi, Joe Hill, and Owen, did more than offer editorial advice; their commentary in the margins of the original manuscript constitute a conversation I cherish. My sister Marcella shared observations and memories of her experiences as a teacher. And the prank on the roof really did happen on Penneseewasee Lake in Norway, Maine, some years ago, but since I do not know the identities of the mischief-makers, I can only gratefully acknowledge their inspiration.

  What’sa matter, buddy, ain’t you hearda my school? It’s number one in the state…

  —“Be True to Your School”, Brian Wilson

  I wanna shoot one in from downtown to end the double overtime… I wanna do the Victory Dance…

  —“Victory Dance” John Cafferty

  PROLOGUE

  An iridescent confetti of snow tarnished by sodium arc light sifts from the void over the glowing horizontal bulk of Greenspark Academy. It is 1:40 a.m. of a Sunday morning in early March. On the school’s front lawn, the letterboard spells out:

  1990

  STATE CLASS A CHAMPS

  WESTERN MAINE CHAMPS

  1990

  Underneath, smaller type declares Winter Carnival Week.

  A garden of ice sculpture enlivens the school grounds. One is a rendition of the bust of the warrior chief on the Indian head penny, wearing Walkman headphones. There is a rampant bear, a Big Bird, a Bart Simpson. Monumental sports gear—a football helmet big enough for a small child to hide inside, a hockey mask accessorized with a chain saw, and a baseball and Louisville Slugger—is strewn about as if some giant high school jock has emptied his closet. In their midst stands a ten-foot-tall hoops trophy—a basketball on a plinth—inscribed Western Maine Champions ‘90. The smooth surfaces of the various sculptures are frosted by the precipitation. It filigrees the diamonds of the hurricane fence enclosing the basketball courts near the gym and the bare rims of the hoops.

  Despite the day and hour, Greenspark Academy is burning every light and the parking lot is full. The gymnasium currently holds more people than actually live within the limits of the small town of Greenspark. A live-TV van with an enormous thick pole antenna erect on its roof idles between the parking lot and the double doors of the gym.

  The noise of the mob inside the gym resembles a distant rumorous surf. With a rain of sighs, the needle snow isolates the thud of a basketball on one of the outdoor courts. The shuddering beat of the cold ball on snow-streaked pavement is driven by the rubbery creak of a pair of high-tops, the snap of a loose lace and the open-mouthed breathing of slightly congested lungs. Snow glistens wetly in eyelash, in the arc of eyebrow and a cockscomb of spiked hair. It gleams on the taut skin of a narrow, raised face and silvers the curve of gold in the lobe of the nose.

  Momentum claws back the flapping skirts of an unbuttoned man’s overcoat on the scarecrow figure. From the tips of chapped fingers the ball flies in a long, sweet hook. The whicker of its fall through the rim is lost in the whisper of wind-driven precipitate. Catching the ball as it bounces up, the shooter stops to knuckle a wet upper lip and snorkle back mucus.

  With an exhuberant whoop and burble, police sirens implode the silvery hush and red and blue lights pulse on the main road. The gym doors are thrown open explosively and a cheering crowd spills into the net of the blinding TV lights. Manic and colorful as a troop of Shriner clowns, Greenspark’s five police cruisers sweep up the school’s curving drive, leading two yellow school buses and behind them, a parade of honking vehicles.

  The kids on the buses begin to hoot and bellow from every window at the first sight of the school. Some of them jam head and shoulders through the opened windows and are held back from falling out by others clutching them at hip and waist.

  “Check it out,” one of the celebrants of the first bus calls out. “Look who’s getting the edge on next season.”

  The ripple of laughter at the lone shooter on the snow-riven court is immediately drowned by crowd-roar greeting the buses.

  A gauntlet of students forms to welcome the Greenspark Academy Indians, for almost five hours now the Class A Schoolboy Basketball Champions of the State of Maine—and for the third consecutive year. First to emerge from the bus into camera flash and TV spotlight is Coach, with a looted net around his neck. He is followed by the two assistant coaches and the team managers. They trot the short parade line to the open doors of the gym, to be taken up by welcoming dignitaries. The second bus empties simultaneously and its passengers—cheerleaders and band members—are absorbed into the crowd.

  As Coach disappears into the gym, there is a sudden blossom of bottles and cans from under jackets and out of pockets into the hands of the impromptu honor guard. The team members descend from the bus into a popping fusillade of tabs and caps and duck through sprays of beer and sparkling cider. Each of the boys who exits the bus receives a rousing welcome but the last boy off, the biggest one, is greeted longest and loudest. Someone thrusts a bottle of beer into his hand. Sam Styles upends it, aiming it at his mouth, and manages to get most of it down in one swallow—an act that raises another cheer.

  Sam blinks sticky cider from his lashes and shakes his head. His ponytail whips from left to right, scattering droplets that halo in the saturated air. At the edge of his vision he glimpses the solitary shooter on the basketball court. For an instant, their eyes meet. The noise of celebration is, for that moment, as insubstantial as the light precipitation. Silently, the shooter on the court raises both middle fingers in sardonic salute.

  One of the other boys, looking back, sees what Sam sees and laughs. “Check it out,” he says and those team members who hear him turn and look. And laugh.

  “Come on, Sambo,” another boy urges, yanking at Sam’s sleeve.

  The shooter on the court picks up the ball and backs casually toward the hoop. Effortlessly the ball leaves her fingertips, rises and falls behind her, through the basket.

  Sam whoops and cocks a spatulate thumb high in approbation.

  The mohawked girl on the court pivots away to catch the ball.

  Inside, the hastily reassembled and owl-eyed Greenspark Academy Band greets the championship team with a nearly recognizable version of “We Are the Champions.” This year the band is a little drum-heavy, with ten kids on sticks.

  Despite the hour, the gym is packed with parents and grandparents and siblings and schoolmates, with teachers and administrators and town officials, and with hundreds of citizens of the school administrative district which Greenspark Academy serves, sharing the team’s victory. The players are engulfed by the folks who already mobbed them on the floor of the Portland Civic Center in the delirium after the buzzer. Gradually the boys grope their way to the center of the gymnasium. Again they hold aloft the trophy gold ball, in a fireworks of camera flashes from dozens of snapshot cameras recording the event for family albums. The powers-that-be voice the clichés that on this occasion are perhaps more true than usual.

  Scattered among the students are the members of the girls’ basketball team, also called the Indians, whose season ended in the Western semifinals. They had a chance at a state title too until their point guard, Gauthier, got her skinny ass kicked out of the game against Breckenfield for diving into the bleachers to punch out an abusive fan. They couldn’t quite do it without her, which didn’t make her any more popular with anybody.

  The co-captains of the victorious boys’ team, junior center-forward Sam Styles and a senior guard named Scott Cosgrove, are called out. Scottie makes brief appropriate remarks and then it is Sam’s turn.

  Sam easily picks his father out of the crowd. Reuben’s breadth and height make room for the woman in front of him, Sam’s heavily pregnant stepmother. She leans into Reuben to ease her back and smiles at Sam, a slow and tired two-in-the-morning smile.

  From the mass of faces, another suddenly emerges; the shooter has come in from the cold. She stands against the doors, watching.

  Sam blinks and gropes at the microphone Scottie has stuck in his hand and manages to make it shriek. While everyone laughs, he touches the trophy briefly and applause erupts.

  “Next year,” he says, and the applause sw
ells as the crowd assumes he is about to promise next year’s title. But he goes them one better. “Next year,” he repeats, “the girls are going to bring one home too.”

  The response from the crowd is deafening. The astonished principal shakes Sam’s hand and the girls’ coach does the same. The members of the girls’ team are pushed forward to join the boys at the center of the gym. Except for the mohawked Gauthier. The doors whisper she was there.

  A couple of hours later, Greenspark Academy is dark against the curdled sky. The snow has stopped and the wind come up a little more so it is miserably raw. The parking lot is empty except for the rows of yellow buses stitching its northern edge. Though one is tracked with frozen sneaker prints, the basketball courts are now abandoned.

  A ten-year-old Ford van riding heavy in the back slews from the main road onto the drive. Bouncing around to the rear of the school, it comes to a skidding stop. The five boys inside fortify themselves from a bottle of rum.

  The parents of four of them believe—maybe—that their sons are at a chaperoned party at the home of the firm, Scott Cosgrove. Scottie’s parents subscribe to the theory that the kids are going to booze anyway so the smart thing to do is provide the liquor in the safe environment of their home. Having invited the entire team and their female attachments, if any, to celebrate in their basement rec room, the Cosgroves have gone to bed after consuming quite a lot more California champagne than was wise.

  Scott is driving—having promised to stay sober enough to take the wheel. He isn’t but he’s not quite as loaded as the others. Last out of the van, Sam Styles wraps a paw over the roof and hauls himself out of the backseat. The van rises on its springs. He gets a lungful of raw wet air. Unsurprisingly, it makes him dizzy. He’s not used to drinking and it hits him hard. He blinks into the cutting wind. The others—Scottie, another senior guard named Josh Caron, and Todd Gramolini and Rick Woods, both juniors like Sam—have stumbled to the rear of the van to open its doors.

  “Come on, Samson,” Woods shouts.

  In the back of the van, cradled on a nest of rope and tackle, is a cylindrical bundle about eight feet in length. Its circumference is difficult to judge in its canvas shroud but looks to be something under two feet. Sam gets a grip on one end. They all lend their strength to extract the massive thing and lower it to the ground. The others stand around and watch Sam lay out ropes and tackle on the ground and then they all roll the thing onto the ropes and he finishes rigging it.

  Sam tosses another line with a grapple on it to the school’s roof. Gramolini scrambles up the line and secures it for heavier freight. Sam and Scottie use it to go hand over hand after Gramolini. It takes considerable snickering and obscenities and an occasional burst of uncontrollable merriment to get them up there. Once on the roof, they hoist the thing, guided from the ground by Woods and Caron. When the thing thumps onto the roof, the ground crew comes up the rope, bringing additional tools inside their jackets.

  Sheltering behind a ventilation shaft, they pause for another round from the bottle. The darkness is beginning to thin along the eastern horizon. Todd squats to undo Sam’s rigging and then unwrap it. He works with the concentration of an old-fashioned obstetrician gently bringing a breech baby to a more favorable presentation. The others keep an eye on the main road. They fall silent and then conversation breaks out again—the game, the season, the bus ride home, the party, how hammered they are and how bad their hangovers are going to be.

  The last flap of canvas thumps against the roof and Todd releases a huge relieved sigh. The others gather round solemnly. It is, they agree owlishly, awesome, and entirely undamaged in its transit from hiding in the fishing shack on the lake to the school. A work of art. They compliment Todd, the executor of the design for this particular ice sculpture, from an inspiration by Sam Styles, in conspiracy with the rest of them the previous Saturday after practice. The five of them roll it to the front edge of the roof.

  Below them are the double glass doors of the school’s main entrance. With much effort they raise the sculpture into position, jutting out from the flat roof. They adjust the angle to forty-five degrees and sweep up most of the snow on the roof to wedge it more securely. Then they pass the bottle again. It comes last to Sam. He empties it, then winds up and hurtles it toward the main road. It explodes on the centerline.

  Lonnie Woods wakes up for the second time in the kitchen, standing at the counter with the coffee scoop in his hand. He remembers he was filling the basket of the coffee machine but has lost track of the number of scoops. Dumping the grounds back into the can, he starts again. He took Saturday night off to go to Portland to watch Rick play in the championship game and had to take a Sunday shift in exchange. At least it would be quiet. Filling the pot at the sink, he nearly drops it.

  “Shit,” he mutters.

  His wife is still sleeping and he doesn’t want to wake her. But as he opens a cupboard, looking for a mug, he hears the shuffle of her slippers in the hallway upstairs and then the bathroom door closing behind her.

  Keyed up as they were from the big game, it’s a wonder either of them slept a minute. Worse is having Rick out all night. They had only agreed to the blowout at Cosgrove’s on Rick’s promise he wouldn’t get into an automobile to go anywhere for anything. If he wanted to come home, he was supposed to call for a ride. But he hasn’t called and they have spent hours staring at the ceiling, wondering if they did the right thing. Wishing he had a cigarette, Lonnie shaves in the downstairs bathroom. By the time he’s finished, the coffee is ready and Fern is sitting at the table, warming her hands around her cup. She raises a blank face for a kiss and exchanges a mumbled ‘morning with him. She has taken the chair that will give her a view of the back door. He reaches to squeeze her hand. As she glances over his shoulder, her eyes widen and she jumps up.

  Rick is coming up the path with Sam Styles in tow. Looking very young and half-grown with their beard stubble and red eyes, both boys move as if their bodies were clothing bought several sizes too large.

  Lonnie opens the door for them.

  “What a sight for sore eyes,” Fern exclaims.

  Rick sweeps his mother up and whirls her around the kitchen.

  Laughing with undisguised relief, she scolds him. “You bad boy, you’re trying to jolly me.”

  “Right,” Rick admits cheerfully.

  “You boys had enough celebrating?” Lonnie asks Sam.

  Hangdog and bleary, Sam blinks and shuffles his feet and nods shyly.

  The phone rings. They all fall silent as Lonnie picks it up. Fern tenses with long experience of early-morning weekend calls, thinking of all those kids out partying last night. The two boys sneak glances at each other.

  Lonnie hangs up and buttons his shirt collar. He reaches for his uniform tie, dangling from the back of his chair.

  “Somebody,” he says, raising an eyebrow at the two boys, as he knots the tie, “pulled some numb stunt at the high school. Dispatcher thought the first call was a prank but now she’s gotten two more say the same thing.”

  He checks himself in the mirror by the door—straightens his SGT WOODS nametag—and Fern hands him his jacket and hat.

  “You two heroes, if this is for real, you’ll want to have a look at it. Come on.”

  Sam and Rick look at each other. Rick shrugs.

  “Come on,” Lonnie repeats a little impatiently. “You got all day to sleep it off.”

  When the high school comes into sight, Lonnie breaks up. Like the figurehead on the prow of a ship, eight feet of tumescent penis sculpted in ice thrusts out from the building’s roof over the main entrance doors. Someone has troubled to detail it with meticulous accuracy. “Damn.” The cop grins. “Talk about morning stiffies.”

  In the backseat of his cruiser, Rick and Sam struggle briefly to keep their composure and then lose it. They laugh until they are weeping and they clutch their aching stomachs and squirm like a couple of little kids.

  Along the main road, passing traffic has slowed to look and some vehicles have pulled over and parked. A few people have gotten out to stand by the side of the road with their hands on their hips, the better to gawk. Phones are ringing all over a hundred-mile radius of Greenspark Academy.