Swagger by Carl Deuker Page B

an easy transition hoop. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Levi flying toward the hoop, about ten feet behind me. I pulled up, waited a beat, and then lobbed the ball up above the rim. Levi soared up, caught it, and jammed it down.
    Both my pass and his finish were fantastic, and guys on both teams were wide-eyed. I was grinning and so was Levi—until we heard Knecht’s whistle. The old man was up and out of his seat, energetic for the first time all day.
    â€œWhat are you doing, Levi?” Knecht demanded as he tottered over, his face bright red, onto the court. Levi hung his head as if he were a toddler who’d been caught crayoning a wall. “Just lay the ball off the backboard,” Knecht commanded, his voice stronger than it had been all day. “Just lay it off the glass and in. That’s all you need to do.”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    Hartwell caught my eye and then looked at the ceiling.

13
    T HE NEXT DAY KNECHT TOOK control. As Hartwell stood off to the side, Knecht called out the names of ten players he wanted at center court for a scrimmage. He sent me and the nine other guys over to a side court to shoot around.
    I panicked.
    The meaning was clear. I was in a battle with nine guys for one of the final two roster spots. If I had a bad practice—or if a couple of the other guys had a great practice—I wouldn’t even make my high school team. All hope of a scholarship would be gone.
    Hartwell saw the fear in my eyes and came over to me. “You’re okay, Jonas,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulder and giving me a shake of encouragement. “You’re number eleven on Knecht’s chart, and he doesn’t even have a number twelve. Once you make the team, he’ll see how good you are. You’ll get your chance.”
    His words were like the gift of a hunk of bread to a starving man. All that day, and all the subsequent days of the tryout, I played in-your-face defense, blocked out on defensive rebounds, made safe passes, and didn’t turn the ball over. Nothing I did was flashy or very fun, but on Friday, when Knecht posted the roster, my name was on it.
    In the locker room, the guys who made the team hung around for a while to celebrate. DeShawn wondered aloud whether the team’s style of play would change with Hartwell as an assistant. “Maybe he can drag Knecht into the twenty-first century.”
    â€œFirst he’ll have to drag him into the twentieth,” Cash said.
    Everybody laughed—even Brindle—everybody except Levi. “Come on, Double D, it’s just a joke,” Cash said. “Knecht’s not God.”
    Later, when I thought over what Cash had said, I realized how on the mark he’d been. People like Knecht and like Levi’s father—they were gods to Levi. He had them way up on a pedestal. I thought about my own father. He was a good guy, but he made mistakes, and I knew it. I was glad I didn’t think of him as a god, and I’m sure he was too.

14
    T HAT SUNDAY LEVI’S DAD’S CHURCH held its first services. Weeks earlier Levi had asked me to go, and I’d said yes. Now that the day had come, I was edgy. Was his father one of those crazy preachers who yelled about Satan and sin? And what about the people I’d be sitting with? Would they roll around in the aisles?
    The church still looked like a store from the outside, but what Levi and his father had done inside was amazing. Levi had mentioned getting wooden pews from a church that had merged with another congregation. I figured the pews would be old and ratty like something from Goodwill, but they’d been sanded and oiled so that they looked both brand-new and a hundred years old at the same time. The same thing was true of the wood floors, which gleamed in the golden light. The plain wooden altar in the front of the church was lit from above by a spotlight so perfectly positioned that the light seemed as if it