Vanderkam Cortlandt Boys

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9862844-0-3
Verlag: Laura Vanderkam Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 350 Seiten

A small town high school basketball team wins the Pennsylvania state championship with an improbable last second three point shot. The Cortlandt Cavaliers celebrate their unlikely victory, but good fortune changes the boys' worlds in unpredictable ways. This story revisits the characters 10 and 20 years later as the ramifications of their youthful success play out over the course of their lives, forever linking them and the people around them to this little town that has its ways of not quite letting you go.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Vanderkam, Laura

Leseproben

Prologue

Max, 1993-1994

Everyone knew the Harrison Warriors were going to win that game.

They knew it. The Cortlandt Cavaliers knew it. The kids lined up begging for sold-out tickets to the boys state basketball championship at the Hershey Arena sure knew it, judging by the number of Harrison-green jerseys clothing the masses. The Hershey Patriot-News knew it, and blared its prediction from the newspaper boxes greeting the Cortlandt High School band bus as it splashed through an Exxon parking lot. “March Massacre in the Making,” said the headline. No one could stop Harrison’s Brock Brown. Coached by his father, who’d once played in the NBA, he was Pennsylvania’s MVP and set to enroll at Penn State, delighting the commonwealth’s sports pundits. The Cortlandt Cavs, on the other hand, had squeaked through the semifinals past an unusually error-prone Pittsburgh squad. The Cavs had no players like Brock, just a pair of 6’6” twin guards, James and Mickey O’Riley, and three other solid players to round out the starting line-up. Even though they’d landed in the championship game, the state coaches’ poll still ranked them 17th.

As if to magnify the gloom, the gray March clouds dumped so many buckets of rain onto I-81 as the caravan from Cortlandt headed southwest that the band bus’s windshield wipers couldn’t keep up. Maxine Wozniak, star reporter for the high school newspaper, star trumpet player, and star student, whose brash braininess endeared her to her classmates about as much as you’d imagine, sat in her assigned seat next to the silent mascot Moe Cox. Everyone in Cortlandt was obsessed with basketball, particularly with the boys headed to the championship, but Moe wore his Cavalier costume daily, whether there was a game or not. No one had seen the cartwheeling giant without the headpiece since he showed up as a mute transfer student three years before. For all her inquisitive nature, Max had no idea why Moe didn’t speak. She called his parents for a newspaper profile. She grilled the beleaguered principal about why Moe didn’t have to adhere to the no-hats dress code like everyone else. No luck. She did know that his costume took up his whole seat and half of hers, but at least his dependable quiet let her mull how she’d spin the impending defeat for the newspaper’s front page.

The bus careened across three lanes, nearly missing the exit to the Hershey Center because the driver couldn’t see the sign. When Max climbed down the bus stairs into the parking lot, her umbrella wouldn’t open and the NPR stickers on her trumpet case bled onto her coat. It was a dreary day for underdogs. Even the brave daffodils trying to bud by the sidewalks drooped as low as the Cavaliers would soon be hanging their heads.

The gym was hot. The floor squeaked. Max set her case on a chair, pulled out her trumpet and played the first notes of the Cortlandt fight song, just to hear how they sounded in the yawningly vast arena. The fanfare blasted to the ceiling. The building manager jumped at the noise and hustled the band toward a drafty room beside concession stand 2B to practice. The Harrison Warriors were about to warm up. No one could bother Pennsylvania’s favorite squad.

As the percussion section tried to angle their drums through the practice room door, the tuba player backed against the wall and whispered to the third chair trumpet. Max looked where he pointed. It was the O’Riley twins’ girlfriends. Raina Walker, the frizzy-blonde editor-in-chief of the school paper (much to Max’s chagrin), wore an “I love Mickey” button on her oversized flannel shirt. Max’s hand flew, by instinct, to her mangled right ear. When the girls were eight, back when the social stratification of their small town wasn’t so fundamentalist, Raina got the brilliant idea at a slumber party that they should pierce their ears with the automatic hole punch they were using for crafts. Why did Max go first? She was the only one bold enough to go for it. Raina’s aim, though, was suspect. Even nine years later, when the bloody splash on the Walkers’ row house carpet, the other girls’ shrieks, and Max’s trip to the emergency room were just wincing memories, she still wore her brown hair long enough to hide her half-missing ear lobe.

Gracie Kean, James’s girlfriend, was too pageant-polished to try Raina’s grunge look. She was too cool for big buttons. She had, however, used a glitter pen to paint James’s name onto her lavender fingernails. The lavender was a shade from Paris, she told anyone who’d listen. It was a gift from her absentee mother, sent when Gracie won the Miss Pocono Teen competition earlier that year. The woman seemed to lead a glamorous life, judging by the presents she mailed to Gracie at her grandparents’ house in decidedly less glamorous Cortlandt, though no one could be sure. She hadn’t been seen in that town in years. The girl spread her fingers out before her. Then she dug her make-up mirror out of her purse to be sure the rain hadn’t consigned her hair to the same frizzy fate as Raina’s. It hadn’t; whatever hair spray she was using seemed to guard against the messiness of rainy days and, in her mind, life in general.

And then they appeared: the boys. They wore their purple warm-up suits and shiny Nikes like they were there for a parade and not the drubbing even their fans expected. James nodded his red-haired head in time with the tunes seeping from the concession stand’s CD player. He took in the scene, this day that would color the rest of their lives, but he wasn’t one to ruminate on the magnitude of things. Instead, he just winked at Gracie. Mickey, equally red-headed, waved at Raina. Leroy, the Cavs’ outgoing point guard, who fancied himself resembling a young Isiah Thomas, had shaved the Detroit Piston’s #11 onto the left side of his head. KC, the center, lumbered behind him. He was 250 pounds of massive, mannish creature stuck with a baby face. You couldn’t look at him without thinking “teddy bear” though he tried to look intimidating. He even enlisted his grandmother in the effort. She’d been spotted buzzing lightning bolts into his hair at her beauty parlor by the Burger Barn, rolling her eyes the whole time.

Lawrence came last, as usual, lagging enough steps behind that you knew he was doing it on purpose. He was the smoothest of the starting line-up, and the best-looking of the crew. He knew it and he knew that he was inspiring fantasies whenever he walked down the halls of Cortlandt High School, including some from Max, his chemistry lab partner. He chose her because she’d boost his grades with minimal effort on his part. Max was fully aware of that reality. She didn’t care. It was a chance to hang out with him, an excuse to meet up on weekends. How many other girls at CHS had that? He moved his slim frame down the hall in a way that took up more space than he needed, that made you press against the wall so you wouldn’t get in the way. He surveyed the brass section still out in the corridor. “You all play loud, right?” he said. “Make us win this game.” Then he ran his fingers through his too-long-for basketball black hair and laughed. One could never be sure at what. His easy smile made you think you stood a chance of being as cool as he was.

He straightened a bit as Coach Dryden met them coming the other way. James and Mickey snapped to attention. KC shuffled up to Leroy and slapped his back. “To the floor, boys,” the old coach said, like a general sending his troops over the top of the trenches. The casualties could be atrocious. But you couldn’t think of these things now. The boys obeyed, cramming back into the locker room. The tuba players watched in awe, then followed the drums into the practice room. “Come on Max,” the third chair trumpet yelled. “We gotta start!”

“Coming,” she shouted, but she stayed in the hall, studying the tiles and listening to the buzzing lights. Something about the day felt electric, humming and buzzing and pulsing with energy. It felt like she should remember small details for reasons beyond what she’d write in the next week’s newspaper: the poster advertising a teen ministry revival to be held in the center later that spring, the crushed Coke can resting atop a two-month-old Sports magazine on a folding chair nearby, even a photo of Brock up on the wall. Some days, you suspect, will burn on your brain. You try to imagine yourself ten, twenty years hence, looking back on these days like you’re flipping through a scrapbook. You ponder a time when hopefully you’ve grown accustomed to many things you can only dream of now. But it is hard to see yourself then. At age 17 you grasp at big thoughts, but you can only start to imagine a real life, a life beyond the world of jeans, bells, whispered gossip at your locker, and the plodding routine of a small town. You can’t see beyond your little home at the edge of the Poconos which, only 90 minutes from the Philly suburbs, was still far enough away to hold little of consequence. So you smell the bleach and listen to the lights and trust there’s more to the world than this. You tell yourself over and over again that this chapter is prologue. At least Max wanted it to be prologue. The Cortlandt Boys, on the other hand, were beaming for the present and not the future. This was their world. This, to them, was all there was. Their sweet anticipation was not yet muddied by reality. They could linger in the moment, in that pulsing...