Fearless by Annie Jocoby Page A

ultimately inconsequential to my life as basketball.
    A short bus ride later, and I was on the court with Jake. He looked like he wasn’t having that great of day. His hair, which was normally a nicely combed dark wavy brown, was going in every direction. He had bags under his eyes, and he looked like he hadn’t slept for quite awhile.
    He said that he was just dumped, but, from the looks of it, it seemed as if it had been com ing for a long time.
    The yard was deserted, as it was still in the middle of the day, so he saw me and nodded, and I tossed the ball in the air. Both of us leaped up to gain control of the ball, with Jake getting the ball and he immediately started dribbling down the court.
    For the next half hour or so, we played a rough and tumble game. I was better at defense than he was, and he was clearly better at shooting. As I was only marginally better on defense than him, he usually was able to school me on the court. But he didn’t on that day. I was getting into better shape all the time, as I had taken up running and lifting weights, so I was able to keep up with him, shot for shot.
    We finally quit the game to take a break, with him leading me by a basket. We sat down and got a drink of water, both of us out of breath and sweating. Jake playfully shook his head, the sweat beads flying through the air and landing on my shirt.
    “Gross, dude,” I said, and then tried to do the same to him, but not quite managing it. My hair was just too short for that, I guess, although I certainly didn’t have a buzz cut. If anything, I think that I was overdue for a haircut.
    He tossed the ball at me, and we got up another game. He started a conversation while we played. “So,” he said, while he dribbled the ball as I tried to get it away from him. “Belinda called me today to tell me that things just weren’t working out. For whatever reason. I don’t know, bro, I thought things were going okay. Not sure what I was missing.”
    “Sometimes it happens that way,” I said. I, of all my buddies, was often the one who was called upon to size up romantic issues, simply because I was known as the ‘sensitive’ one of the bunch. In other words, I understood women much better than did any of them, which wasn’t saying a whole lot. “Women put out a lot of non-verbal cues. We just have to get better at picking up on them.”
    “Yeah?” he said. “Like what?”
    “I don’t know what,” I said. “It’s like porn. I know ‘em when I see ‘em.” I was paraphrasing Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, in a pornography case, where he wrote that famous line regarding how to tell if something is pornographic. I thought the same thing about the intangibles like the non-verbal cues that women give off when they’re ready to jump. I was never wrong about it, either. I was always astounded that my buddies couldn’t pick up on the same things, though. What was always obvious to me, somehow never was to them.
    “Shit, dude, you’re going to have to do better than that.”
    As I dribbled the ball, I thought of an example. “Okay,” I said. “Remember that one girl that you hit up at the bar about a month ago or so. Right before you met Belinda?”
    “Narrow it down, bro, I hit up a lot of girls in the bar.” There was a bar that Jake and I went to that never carded anybody, and was constantly getting shut down because of it. But that place made so much money out of serving minors, it was well worth it to have to be shut down once in awhile.
    “Okay,” I said. “Actually, this is something that happens all the time. Don’t get me wrong, you’re a good-looking guy, but sometimes you get all up on some woman who clearly doesn’t want nothing to do with you.”
    He shot me a dirty look, and I shrugged. “It happens,” I said. “Anyhow, I distinctly remember this one girl. You were talking to her, hanging on her, and she was all talking to her girlfriends while you were trying to get her attention. I