Night Hoops

Free Night Hoops by Carl Deuker Page B

Book: Night Hoops by Carl Deuker Read Free Book Online
Authors: Carl Deuker
shaking his head back and forth vigorously. Both Luke and I stopped and stared. Coach O'Leary caught us staring, which immediately made us hustle out the door.
"I wonder what that was all about?" Luke murmured once we were outside.

    When I reached home, there was more. "You missed all the excitement," Scott said as soon as I stepped inside.
    "What are you talking about?"
    "Zack Dawson. Two police cars came roaring up our block about an hour ago. It was quite a scene. One cop went around the back. The other knocked on the front door. They were inside for about ten minutes, then they led Zack away—in handcuffs. Mrs. Dawson was screaming at them from the front porch, calling them every name in the book. I'm telling you, it was something."
    As he spoke I felt myself going pale. "What did he do?"
    Scott shrugged. "How should I know? Stole something, probably. Or drugs. There are about a million things he could have done." He stopped, then looked at me. "What's wrong with you?"
    "Nothing's wrong with me," I snapped, suddenly angry. "But there's something wrong with you. You act happy to see Zack get arrested."
    His back stiffened. "Since when have you been big buddies with Zack Dawson? It seems to me a couple months ago he almost killed you."
    "I'm not big buddies with Zack Dawson, or with Trent. But it doesn't make me happy to see them get in trouble. And I don't see why it should make you happy either."
    I pushed past him and went to the kitchen, pulling the door closed behind me. I grabbed some Oreos and milk from the refrigerator, and then sat down and ate.
    In eighth grade our class had gone on a field trip to the juvenile detention center. Before we'd gone, I'd figured the place would be a dump, with busted toilets and graffiti on the walls, like something from an old movie. But it was the opposite—spotlessly clean and modern, with a nice basketball court, a computer lab, a big library.

    That was the first shock. The second was that the kids locked up in there didn't look that different from me. They were a little older, but not much. They wore orange jumpsuits and laughed loudly with one another as they moved from one room to the next. You could have told yourself they were having fun if it weren't for the double set of doors that locked them in and the guards that stood at those doors. Before we left the guides showed us the rooms the kids slept in. They were tiny little rooms, bare and cold. It spooked me to think that Zack was in one of those rooms.
    I had to do something, so I went out to the basketball court. It felt good to pick up the basketball, to eye the hoop. I knocked down a three-pointer, retrieved the ball, and knocked down another one. That was more like it. I worked the ball between my legs, behind my back, controlling it as though it were a yo-yo on a string. I blocked out everything except the season coming up, the game on Thursday, and the minutes I was going to play.
    After dinner I sat at my desk. Instead of doing my homework, I put my pencil down and listened to the sounds of the night. A car on 104th. A fire truck somewhere far off. Another car. Some dog, barking his fool head off. Something felt wrong.
    Then it hit me. It wasn't any new sound that had thrown me off; it was a missing sound. Trent wasn't practicing with Steve Clay.

    The Dawson house was shut up tight the next morning, and Trent wasn't at school either. Rumors floated around. Someone said Zack and Trent had been shooting a gun down by the trail. Somebody else said that they'd stolen a bunch of guitars from Mills Music. There was talk of broken windows at the school district offices, and swastikas painted on the outside of a synagogue in Redmond.
    At practice Coach O'Leary stayed in his office while we ran through warm-ups. We could see him in there talking on the phone. When he finally came out, he called us together. "What do you bet Trent Dawson's no longer on this team?" Carver whispered as we shuffled over to

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