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Jojo and Mike were the only white players, or bona fide players who were white, on the team this season. The three swimmies were white, making the squad five whites and nine blacks on paper, but they didn’t count. Mike’s real name was Frank Riotto. Mike was short for “Microwave.” One of the black players, Charles Bousquet, had come up with that nickname. By now it was hard to remember he had ever been called Frank.
The game was about to resume, and it was the Skins’ ball. Jojo was down inside, along with the center, Treyshawn Diggs. On the Dupont basketball team, Treyshawn was The Man. Everything on offense revolved around Treyshawn Diggs. Jojo glanced over at him to make sure of his position. Treyshawn was seven feet tall, agile, well coordinated, and nothing but muscles, a chocolate brown giant with a shaved head. A white player could be just as jacked as Treyshawn, but his light skin would make it all look flat. Not only was Jojo white, but he had very fair skin, and to make things worse, he was blond. That was why he had his hair cut so close on the sides and in back, practically shaved, leaving just that little blond flattop. He wished he could shave his whole head, the way Treyshawn, Charles, and practically all the black players did—excluding Congers—in imitation of the great Michael Jordan. It was an awesome look, an intimidating look, the look of not only Jordan but also one of those wrestlers who has built himself up into a brute of sheer muscle and testosterone—the shaved head, the powerful neck, the bulging shrink-wrapped traps, delts, pecs, lats, and the rest of it. But according to the unspoken protocol of basketball, it was a black thing, the shaved head was, and if you tried to imitate the black players, they lost respect for you, fast. So he had to keep the mesa of unfortunately blond hair on top.
The ball was back in play. Despite the noise of the crowd, Jojo could hear every shrill screech of the boys’ sneakers as they started, stopped, pivoted, changed direction. The point guard, Dashorn Tippet, fed the ball to the shooting guard, André Walker. The Shirts double-teamed André, so he bounced a pass inside to Jojo—and Congers was all over him again, practically lying on his back, pushing, elbowing, hacking, bumping him with his midsection, and going, “Now what the fuck you gon’ do, Tree? Caint jump, caint shoot, caint move, caint do shit, Tree.”
The sonofabitch wouldn’t stop! A freshman! Just got here! Made Jojo feel like a tree, rooted to the spot…
Cantrell Gwathmey and Charles, the Shirts guarding Walker, were pulling back toward Jojo, and he knew he should feed the ball back to Walker, who was open for one of his patented three-pointers, or to Treyshawn, who had muscled his way around Alan Robinson, the Shirt guarding him, but he wasn’t about to, not this time. At the Division I level, basketball players were like dogs. They could smell fear or nervousness, and Jojo knew that his young nemesis had picked up the scent. He steeled himself for what he had to do.
He glanced over his shoulder. He was looking for only one thing, Congers’s chest level. Now he had it. He pump faked, as if he were about to try a jump shot. Instead he rammed his elbow straight back, throwing all 250 pounds of himself into the thrust.
“Ooooooooof,” went Congers. Jojo pushed off, wheeled around him, drove straight to the basket and slam-dunked the ball as hard as he had ever slam-dunked a ball in his life—and held on to the rim of the basket with both hands and swung on it in a triumphant rimbo, as it was called. Bull’s-eye! He had elbowed the bastard right in the solar plexus! He had…kicked…his…fucking…ass.
A roar rose up from the crowd. That coup de grâce they couldn’t resist.
Play had stopped. Treyshawn and André were standing over Congers, who was bent double, both hands to his solar plexus, taking jerky little steps toward the sideline and going, “Uh uh uh uh.” Every time he went uh, the dreadlocks down the back of his neck lurched. He was only eighteen or nineteen, but he looked like an old man with a stroke, the disrespectful sonofabitch.
Jojo walked up and stood over him, too, and said, “Hey, man, you okay? Whyn’tchoo go over there and stretch out, man. Take a break.”
Congers looked up and gave Jojo a stare of pure old-fashioned hate, but he was speechless. He was still struggling to get his breath and his locomotion back.
Dis me? Fuck you! thought Jojo. The roar of the crowd! The rush of euphoria!
Mike came over with an expression appropriate in the wake of a team-mate’s injury. Jojo put on a long face, too.
“Yo, blood,” said Mike, who considered himself adept at imitating the black players’ fraternal lingo. “I take it all back. You’re one cool motherfucker, motherfucker. That was off the fucking chain.”
Jojo felt so exultant he could barely keep his voice down. “That dickhead…” He nodded in the general direction of the black players who were standing around. “Any’m say anything?”
“Nah. Coupl’m gave you a fu
The two white boys cut their eyes over toward the bench, where Congers was sitting with his head down between his knees. Treyshawn and André were still leaning over him.
“Don’t turn around,” said Mike, “but Coach’s standing up and looking down here. I bet if it wouldn’t look so fucking bad, he’d be ru
Jojo was dying to look, but he didn’t. The three te
“Hey, look what they’re doing,” said Mike. “You’ll like this. They’re bringing in one of the swimmies to take his place.”
Jojo glanced over. Sure enough, one of the three lanky white boys was up off the bench and hustling out onto the court to play for the Shirts. Charles had dreamed up “swimmies,” too, and now all the real players, black and white alike, called them that. All three swimmies had been excellent prep school players, but they didn’t measure up to Division I standards. On the other hand, they were awesome in the classroom. Under Conference regulations, each team—not each player but the team as a whole—was required to maintain a grade point average of 2.5, which was a C. The three prep school boys’ grade point averages were practically off the chart. They were like those inflated orange flotation devices parents put on young children before they let them go in the water: Swimmies. They were lifesavers, the three prep school boys were. They kept the whole team from drowning academically.
Charles came walking over to Jojo and Mike and said, “Hey, Jojo, what the fuck’d you do to my man Vernon?” But he was smiling.
Jojo kept a straight face. “Nothing. I guess he sorta lunged into my elbow.”
Charles let out a whoop, then turned his back to Congers and lowered his voice. “Sorta lunged into my elbow. I like that, Jojo. Sorta lunged into my elbow. Who says you white boys don’t know how to kick butt? Not me! You won’t catch me lunging into your elbow, man.”