Break Point Read Online Free Page B

Too late, I looked up and saw that Rex had charged to the forecourt. My ball had barely cleared the net when he returned it with a volley at a sharp angle that even lightning-fast Bruno Chan couldn’t have reached. 15-0.
    Serve and volley? Serve and volley went out in the 1990s. No one played serve and volley anymore.
    Correction. Rex played serve and volley.
    He played it like he was on fire.
    The match went on like that. I blasted my hardest shots at him. Rex flitted around the court like it was his personal dance floor, hitting volleys, drop shots, dinks and slices. He had all the moves, and he was having a blast. I felt like a puny little kid trying to beat up on his big brother.
    When the smoke cleared, Rex had given me a whipping. I’d lost the first set 6-2 and the second set a miserable 6-1.
    Rex advanced to the finals. But I didn’t stay to watch him play. Instead, I slunk back to the Greyhound station for the long bus ride home.
    That night, I checked the results on the Internet. In the top spot, in bold type, stood the name of the new number-one kid in the province—Rex Hunter. I had to scroll way down to find my name—Connor Trent, ranked thirtieth.
    I should have been happy. I’d made the top thirty-two and qualified for the provincial championships. I tried to tell myself that I had achieved my goal for the weekend. But I knew I was still miles away from beating Rex.

chapter five
    It was 6:00 am the Monday after the Donalda tournament. I’d just finished the four-mile run from my house to the tennis club, and I was planning on grabbing the ball machine from the equipment room for an hour of practice before my shift started at seven. But as I entered the club, dripping with sweat, a noise from Mrs. Sharma’s office made me poke my head inside. Maddy was sitting at her mom’s desk, watching the security video from the night of the break-in.
    â€œHey, Connor. Look at this,” she said.
    I came closer, but not too close. I didn’t want to drip sweat all over her.
    â€œWhat about it?” I asked. I didn’t see anything different from the first time we had watched it—five guys in ski masks, swaggering across the little parking area in front of the club. They reached the chain-link fence, had some kind of a discussion, then one guy jumped on the fence and the others followed. They climbed over, and that’s where the security camera lost them.
    â€œLook,” Maddy said. She rewound the video to where the guys were crossing the parking lot. “Look at the kid at the back, on the left.”
    The guy was chubbier than the others, and now that she’d pointed him out, I could see that his walk was different too. He ambled along with a sort of lilt to his steps.
    â€œHe’s walking funny,” I said.
    She nodded. “Yeah. And look what he’s wearing.”
    I squinted at the tv. The video was blurry, so it was hard to make out details.
    â€œIs that a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt?” Weird , I thought.
    â€œYeah,” said Maddy. “I think I know that kid.”
    â€œSeriously?” I reached for the phone to call the cops, but Maddy stopped me.
    â€œHang on. I want to talk to him first.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œQuinte’s a little…different.”
    â€œSo what?”
    â€œYou’ll see when you meet him. Just trust me, okay?”
    The house Maddy took me to that afternoon was a droopy little bungalow half a block down from the nice two-storey brick house where Maddy and her family lived. The street was in an older neighborhood where lots of people had renovated their houses to make them bigger and swankier, adding things like sun decks or stone landscaping. Some houses had even been knocked down and replaced with tall, boxy duplexes squashed into tiny yards. But every once in a while, you found a house like this one. It was a sad little house, left behind by its neighbors, with peeling paint and a sagging