Summer Ball by Mike Lupica Page B

laughter, from what sounded like everybody in The House.
    All of them laughing at him.

10
    I F HE HAD BEEN BACK IN M IDDLETOWN, HE WOULD HAVE GONE OUTSIDE to the basket at the end of his driveway.
    Danny would have stayed out there all night if he had to, come up with a new move so that nobody would ever grab one of his shots like that ever again. He would have taught himself to stop when he got to the basket—“Stop on a dime, get nine cents change,” his dad would say sometimes, quoting some old comedian whose name Danny couldn’t remember—so that the defender would go flying past him.
    Or he would have practiced reverse layups, going underneath the hoop and then going left-handed, spinning the ball off the board, repeating the move a hundred times until he got it right.
    He would have figured something out, the way he always had with basketball things.
    Figure it out.
    Isn’t that what his dad had said about camp?
    Problem was, there was no basket at Right Way that belonged only to him, even at night. No place where Danny could be alone. It was something you learned pretty quickly at camp: You were hardly ever alone. There were always other guys around.
    He’d only been here a week, and already he knew that camp was pretty much the opposite of being alone.
    Oh, sure, there were courts and hoops everywhere you looked. But when you did get a hoop to yourself, that never lasted for long. As soon as somebody saw you, it would be like there was some big flashing sign at the top of the backboard: Please come shoot around with me.
    He and Will and Ty had joked about being famous when they got here, because of the way everybody wanted to talk to them about their travel team. Now he was famous at Right Way for something else, for being the first kid at camp to get laughed right out of the gym.
    Ollie came over to him after it happened and said, “Didn’t mean to show you up that way, little dude.”
    Danny had always prided himself on being a good loser. His dad always told him that if you didn’t know how to lose you’d never know how to win. But all he said to Ollie was, “No, nothing like that.”
    â€œBeing straight with you, little dude.”
    â€œHope you make SportsCenter ,” Danny said, and walked away.
    Outside, Will said to forget it, no biggie, it was just one stupid play. Tarik said the same thing. Danny told them he’d see them at the mess hall for dinner, he was just going to chill for a while.
    Telling your buds you needed to chill could get you out of almost anything, Danny knew by now.
    So he headed off in the direction of Gampel, wanting to be alone. Or maybe just not wanting to be here, not wanting one more person in the whole stupid state of Maine to tell him that it really wasn’t so bad, Ollie Grey giving him that kind of diss-down in front of what felt like half the camp.
    He passed Gampel, passed the court there, a bunch of eleven-and twelve-year-olds playing a pickup game the way they usually did at this time of day. He didn’t see Zach out there but didn’t look too closely, either. If he kept moving, nobody would talk to him between now and dinner.
    The next bunkhouse after his own was Staples. There was another court behind Staples, one Danny figured would be empty, because the league games, Danny’s and everybody else’s, had just ended.
    But as he came around the corner he heard the bounce of a single ball, then saw that this court was the private property of Lamar Parrish.
    Rasheed’s friend. The Kobe look-alike in the Kobe jersey who’d made fun of Danny and Zach that time. Danny knew his name now because everybody in camp did, because the consensus among the rest of the campers, no matter what age they were, was that if Rasheed didn’t have the most pure talent at Right Way, then Lamar did.
    Some other things Danny knew about him, mostly from Tarik: Lamar was supposed to have been on the Baltimore