Night Hoops Read Online Free

my gut, trying to intimidate me. But I wasn't backing down.
    He crouched low. I swung the ball in front of him, tempting him. Finally he swiped at it, but his hands were too slow. As his body moved forward, I took two hard dribbles to the left. He was a half-step behind me, and when I pulled up for the jumper, he stumbled a little. I had a good look at the hoop, and knocked down a twelve-footer for the victory. "Yes!" I shouted, making a fist and pumping it. "Yes! Yes! Yes!"
    I'm not going to say I won every game after that. But I won more than my share. Sometimes down at Golden Gardens, you can actually see the tide come in, see each wave claiming more and more of the beach. I was like those waves. Every day I felt my game growing stronger. Scott could push me aside when his buddies arrived, but when tryouts came, there'd be no sending me to my room.

Chapter 7
    Then it was September and school. I thought I'd be going in with Scott, but he had band during zero period, and I didn't start until an hour after that. So I was on my own.
    My last year at Canyon Park Junior High I'd pretty much had the run of the school. All ninth graders did. We ate lunch up on a patch of grass that we called the ninth-grade island. Unless there was a fight or something, not even teachers ventured there. In the school hallways, the little seventh-grade girls looked up at us as if we were gods, while the seventh-grade boys—the "sevies"—cleared a path for us. If we barked at them even a little, a terror-stricken look would come to their faces as if they were afraid we were going to wait for them after school and then chop them up into little pieces with a hatchet.
    In the halls of Bothell High that first day, my world was suddenly upside-down. I was the little kid; the senior guys, especially the football players, towered over me. I found myself hugging the walls, nervously moving out of the way for them, praying that no linebacker would pick me out and start riding me the way some guys at Canyon Park had ridden seventh graders, making their lives hell for a year.

    It wasn't just fear of being tortured that made Bothell different. At the junior high most of the girls looked like little kids; here lots of them looked like grown women. And the school was huge compared to Canyon Park. I had a class in Room 303, then my next class was in 107, and I finished the day with geometry in 705—which turned out to be a portable behind the gym.
    Still, all that stuff was minor compared to the biggest problem: Trent Dawson. He was in my English class, my gym class, and my geometry class. We had the same lunch period, too. Every time I turned around, he was there.
    And he was no different. Nobody fools around on the first day at a new school. Nobody except Trent. He saved his best—or worst—for last. He was late for geometry, talked while Mrs. Glandon was giving us the rundown on her rules, and on his way to the water fountain in the back of the room, he knocked the books off three kids' desks. When Devin Klein told him to cut it out, Trent stuck his face right up in Devin's and sneered: "Yeah, and what are you going to do about it?"
    The walk home takes about thirty minutes. For the first fifteen I replayed the day in my mind. But once I reached my own block, my thoughts turned to basketball. I hoped I could get Scott to play, even if it was just horse. As I opened the front door I heard the trumpet coming from the downstairs den. I walked to the doorway. "You want to shoot some hoops?"
    "No," came the answer.
    "Why not?" I asked as I headed down, but before I reached the bottom step I knew the reason. Sitting next to Scott on the sofa, clarinet in hand, was Katya Ushakov, back from her summer vacation in Russia.

    Mom had met the Ushakovs at the grocery store a couple of years earlier. They'd come to America after the Soviet Union had broken up. Both of Katya's parents played for the Seattle Symphony. Every time you walked by their house,