Ghost by Jason Reynolds

most amount of time spent in ice.”
    â€œIn ice?” my mother asked. Must’ve caught her at a boring part in the movie.
    â€œYep. In it. One hour and fifty-three minutes.”
    â€œPeople crazy,” she said, shaking her head. Then she held her hand out in front of me to let me know the boring part of the movie was now over—it was time for her to resume fanning the tears back every five minutes. Blah, blah, blah.
    â€œHey, you ever heard of Usain Bolt?” I asked her. “He holds the record for being the fastest man.”
    â€œCas, come on now,” she begged. “They getting ready to fall in love again. You know this my favorite part.”
    I just shook my head and kept on flipping. The good thing was she didn’t ask me about my new fancy shoes, but that’s just because she didn’t know about them. I changed them in Coach’s cab on the way home from practice. Coach, on the other hand, definitely asked about them.
    â€œWhere’d you get ’em? That’s all I wanna know,”Coach said. This came after he told me that he was proud of me for not quitting today. I told him that I had no idea why he loved to torture children so much.
    â€œDo you grill all the kids on the team like this? Or just me?” I replied, snappy.
    â€œJust you.” He slapped my arm.
    I told him that my mother had gotten them for me as a way to encourage me to do the right thing and stay out of trouble. Just saying it turned my stomach, because here I was, a boy who was suspended for busting somebody in the face at school one day, and skipped half the day the next because I was laughed at. Then I swiped shoes! I clearly wasn’t staying out of trouble. Matter fact, I was knee deep in it.
    â€œOh . . . okay,” Coach said, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. I wouldn’t have. He could probably see it on my face, especially since just like him, I didn’t have no hair on it to disguise it either. And honestly (yes, honestly), I couldn’t even believe that I had just lied like that. I wasn’t really the lying type. But I also wasn’t the stealing type until a few hours earlier. Altercations, altercations, altercations!

7
WORLD RECORD FOR THE BEST FRIDAY EVER AFTER THE WORST WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY
    FRIDAY MEANS TWO things. The first is that it’s the last day before I can take two days off school. I like to think of it as a non-altercation suspension. Plus the weekend was when me and Ma actually did stuff—and not just watch movies and avoid homework—because she didn’t work on weekends and took early morning online nursing classes to get them out of the way. And when she was done, we would clean the house (I was in charge of the living room), Ma would give me her version of a haircut (she always got most of it even), then give herself one, and then we would go over my aunt Sophie’s house. Aunt Sophie is my mom’s younger sister, and she’s like the coolest lady ever.She has a tattoo on her arm that says SWEETIE PIE that I never asked about, but always stared at just because I can’t wait to get one. But mine ain’t gonna say nothing like that. Mine’s is gonna say WORLD’S GREATEST or, of course, GHOST .
    Anyway, on the weekends, Aunt Sophie and my mom sit around and play cards and crack jokes and eat corn chips with cheese dip and drink beer, and sometimes they let me and King, Aunt Sophie’s son, sit with them and play. Yes, we can play. Me and King learned how to play spades and tonk when we were real young. It’s a thing in our family. A serious thing. And yes, his real name is King. I think the sisters just wanted to give us royal names. So, yeah. All I had to do was get through Friday without any problems, and I was good to go for the weekend.
    The other thing about Friday, which I didn’t know until Thursday, is that Coach gives everybody the day off. No practice. And then,