Free Stealing the Game by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Page B

Laubaugh. He walked over to my desk, stared at me a long (reallllly long) moment, then smiled and handed me the DVD. “Nicely done, Chris.”
    The class erupted in chatter. I heard a “Way to go, Chris” and “Yay, Chris.” Someone called me “the Nerd-Slayer,” referring to Theo and Brooke. Theo grinned
and gave me a thumbs-up.
    Brooke raised her hand and waved it. “That’s not fair, Mr. Laubaugh. You told us there would be math. That answer didn’t require any math.”
    “Yes, it did,” he replied. “It required that you ignore math and think outside the parallelogram. Right, Chris?”
    I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing.
    “Let’s take out our copies of
The Catcher in the Rye
and see what our old pal Holden’s been up to,” Mr. Laubaugh said.
    “Now,
there’s
a basket case,” Clancy said.
    I was relieved to start discussing Holden’s problems so I could forget about my own.

SOME SERIOUS BALL
    “ YOU ready to play some serious ball?” Jax asked. He was smiling but seemed jittery, which was not like him.
    “I don’t know how serious it will be,” I said, “but we’ll give them a good game.”
    “Yeah, that’s fine. But can you beat them?” He gripped my arm a little too hard.
    I yanked my arm away. “What’s wrong with you, dude?”
    He took a step back, as if he’d just realized what he’d done. “Nothing. Sorry, Chris. I just hate owing this guy.” He leaned closer to me and lowered his voice, even
though we were the only two people on the court. “I’d
really, really
like you to beat this guy. You know, just to make a point.”
    “What point?”
    “You know, that he’s not all that. Not as cool as he thinks.” He shrugged. “It would mean a lot to me.”
    I didn’t know what to say to that. It wasn’t like Jax to get all worked up about a bunch of middle school kids playing basketball in the park. But then almost nothing Jax was doing
lately seemed like his old self. I hoped Theo was having luck with his phone calls to Stanford.
    “Dudenheimer,” Roger said, pulling up on his bike. “Where are the unfortunate victims of our superior basketball skills?”
    “Coming,” Jax said, nervously checking his phone. “Be here any minute.”
    The rest of my team arrived during the next ten minutes: Rain, Tom, and Gee Hernandez. Gee’s real name was Jesus (pronounced Hay-zeus), but people teased him by using the Christian
pronunciation, so he shortened “Jesus” to “Gee.” He wasn’t on the school team, but I’d played with him before at the park and he was scrappy and fearless.
I’d seen him dive on the pavement for a loose ball and come up with the ball, bloody elbows, and a big grin.
    “Gee!” Rain said with a smile. “I didn’t know you were playing.”
    “Chris said your team needed a little salsa flavoring,” Gee said, exaggerating a Mexican accent he normally didn’t have.
    Rain laughed. “I’m the hummus, you’re the salsa, what’s Roger?”
    “Good ol’ all-American burger,” he said. “With fries.”
    Gee nodded at Roger’s big belly. “And a milk shake.”
    Roger laughed and patted his stomach. “You know it, bro.”
    Tom pointed at Rain’s T-shirt. It was white with the word FOREIGN in small black letters. The word was so small you could barely read it. “What’s that
supposed to mean?” he asked.
    Rain made her own T-shirts with what she called “one-word poems” on them. I never really got them, but I thought it was cool that she did it.
    “Why’s the lettering so small?” Roger said. “At first I thought it said ‘forgotten.’”
    Rain said, “That’s a good one. I’ll do that next.”
    “But what’s it mean?” Tom asked again.
    “An artist doesn’t explain her art. That would defeat its purpose, which is to make you think about what it means.”
    “Man, I hate that explanation,” Tom said. “Same crap we get in class. Just tell us, okay?”
    I could see Tom was getting a little agitated. He was a