Making the Team

The Cut

Darius didn't look at the list.

He didn't have to. He could tell by the way Coach Hendricks wouldn't meet his eyes when he said, "The roster's posted outside the gym, gentlemen. Thank you all for a great week of tryouts."

Thank you all for a great week of tryouts. Like it was a birthday party. Like they'd all had a wonderful time.

Darius had not had a wonderful time.

He'd had a week of showing up early, staying late, doing every drill until his legs burned and his lungs felt like crumpled paper bags. A week of diving for loose balls on a gym floor that squeaked and bit into his knees. A week of telling himself, You belong here. You can do this.

But he could tell by the way Coach Hendricks looked at a spot just above his head — like Darius was a window and Coach was checking the weather outside — that his name was not on that list.

Still, the other boys rushed toward the gym doors in a thundering herd, and Darius let himself get carried along. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he'd read Coach's face all wrong. People were bad at reading faces; he'd learned that in science class. The brain sees what it expects to see.

Maybe.

The crowd pressed against the wall where a single white sheet of paper hung behind a plastic sleeve. Darius was tall enough to read over most of their heads, which had always been one of his advantages on the court — his height. You're built for this, his older brother Keion always said.

His eyes scanned the list.

Abrams, T. Coletti, R. Dominguez, P. Franklin, J.

The names jumped from D to F. No Ellington. He checked again, slower, running his finger along an invisible line in the air, name by name from top to bottom.

No Darius Ellington.

A boy named Marcus Park whooped and chest-bumped the kid next to him. Somebody else groaned and kicked the wall, and a teacher poked her head out of a classroom to say, "Hey! Walls are not for kicking!" and someone laughed, and the whole hallway was a noisy mess of feelings exploding in every direction.

Darius turned around and walked the other way.

He went to his locker. He put his binder in his backpack. He zipped his jacket all the way to his chin, even though it wasn't that cold. He pushed through the double doors and stepped outside into the gray October afternoon, and he started walking home.

The walk was eleven blocks.

He usually liked it. He usually popped in his earbuds and listened to music or a podcast about weird animal facts. Did you know a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance? Darius knew that. He knew a lot of things like that. But none of those things helped you make a basketball team.

Today he didn't put in his earbuds. He just walked.

The first three blocks were lined with houses that had small, tidy yards. A woman was raking leaves into a pile, and a little kid — maybe four years old — kept jumping into the pile and scattering them. The woman would rake them back. The kid would jump again. The woman didn't seem mad. She was laughing.

Darius thought about how when you're four, nobody cuts you from anything. You just jump in leaves and people clap.

Block four had the big oak tree with the root that buckled the sidewalk. He usually jumped over it. Today he just stepped around it, hands deep in his pockets.

Fourteen kids tried out. They kept ten.

That meant four boys got cut. Darius wondered who the other three were. He wondered if they were walking home right now, too, on their own eleven-block walks, feeling like the sky was a ceiling pressing down.

He passed the convenience store on the corner of Maple and Seventh. Mr. Kim was outside, sweeping the sidewalk like he did every single afternoon. "Hey, young man," Mr. Kim called out. "No basketball today?"

Darius almost kept walking. But Mr. Kim was always nice to him, always asked about his games, always let him fill his water bottle from the cooler inside without buying anything.

"Nah," Darius said. "Not today."

"You okay?"

"Yeah. Just heading home."

Mr. Kim nodded slowly, the way grown-ups do when they can see you're not okay but decide not to push it. "Well," he said, "tell your mother I got those plantain chips she likes. Just came in."

"Yes sir."

Darius walked on.

The thing that bothered him — the thing that sat in his chest like a rock with sharp edges — wasn't just that he didn't make it. It was that he'd told people. He'd told his mom, who'd rearranged her work schedule so she could pick him up late from tryouts every day that week. He'd told Keion, who was away at college and had texted him a fire emoji and GO GET IT LIL BRO every morning. He'd told his two best friends, Amari and Soo-jin, who didn't even play basketball but had said, "Yo, you're gonna make it easy."

He'd told Mr. Kim, apparently, since Mr. Kim knew about it.

He'd basically told the whole world, and now the whole world would know he wasn't good enough.

At the intersection of Fifth and Cedar, he waited for the light. A city bus sighed to a stop beside him, and for one wild second he thought about getting on it. Just riding it to wherever it went. Disappearing for a while. Becoming a mysterious kid on a bus who didn't have to explain anything to anybody.

The bus doors opened. The driver looked at him.

Darius shook his head and stayed on the curb.

He crossed the street and kept walking.

On block eight, he passed the little park with the rusty basketball hoop — the one with no net, where the backboard was a faded square of wood bolted to a metal pole. He and Keion used to play here when they were younger, before Keion got good enough for the high school team and then the college team, back when they were just two kids shooting on a hoop that was slightly crooked, arguing about who fouled who.

Darius stopped walking.

He stared at the hoop. It looked sad and bent, like it was also having a bad day.

He set his backpack down on the bench. He didn't have a ball. He just stood at what would be the free-throw line if anyone had ever bothered to paint one, and he mimed a shot. Bent his knees. Flicked his wrist. Followed through with his fingers, the way Keion taught him.

Swish. In his mind, it went in.

He did it again.

Swish.

He stood there, shooting invisible free throws in an empty park on an October afternoon, and something shifted in his chest. The rock with sharp edges didn't disappear. But it moved a little. Made room for something else — something he couldn't name yet.

He picked up his backpack and walked the last three blocks.

When he got home, his mom's car was already in the driveway. She must have left work early. He stood on the porch for a moment, hand on the door handle. He could hear her inside, moving around the kitchen, a pan clinking against the stove.

He went in.

She was making rice and beans — the good kind, with sofrito, the kind she made when she somehow knew a day needed it. She turned around and looked at him, and she didn't ask. She just looked at him the way Mr. Kim had, except she did push it, because she was his mom and that was her job.

"Didn't make it?" she said softly.

Darius shook his head.

She turned off the burner, crossed the kitchen, and wrapped her arms around him. He was almost as tall as her now, which felt strange — being almost as tall as your mom and also wanting to cry into her shoulder like you're six.

"I practiced so hard," he said. His voice cracked right down the middle of the word hard.

"I know you did, baby."

"I did everything right."

"I know."

"It's not fair."

She didn't say anything to that. She just held on.

After a minute, he pulled away and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "Keion's gonna be disappointed."

"Keion's gonna be your brother no matter what. You know that."

Darius slumped into a kitchen chair. His mom went back to the stove and turned the burner on again. The kitchen filled with the warm smell of garlic and peppers, and for a few minutes neither of them said anything, which was okay. Sometimes quiet is its own kind of conversation.

His phone buzzed. Then again. Then three times fast. Amari and Soo-jin in the group chat.

yo D, how'd it go did u make it??? TELL US

He stared at the screen. His thumb hovered. Then he typed:

Nah. Got cut.

The three dots appeared immediately. Then:

that's so dumb, u were the best one out there

Darius huffed a small, tired laugh. Amari had never watched a single tryout.

you ok? That was Soo-jin.

Darius thought about it. The walk home. The leaves and the bus and the crooked hoop and the invisible free throws. The rock in his chest that was still there but had shifted just enough for him to breathe around it.

Not really, he typed. But yeah. I'll be ok.

His mom set a plate in front of him. Rice and beans, a few slices of plantain on the side, golden and sweet.

"Eat," she said.

And so Darius ate.

Outside, the October sky was going purple at the edges, and the streetlights were blinking on one by one, like the neighborhood was slowly opening its eyes. Tomorrow he would wake up and not be on the basketball team, and that would hurt. It might hurt for a while.

But right now there was rice and beans. There were friends blowing up his phone. There was a mom who left work early and knew what kind of day it was before he walked through the door.

Darius took another bite and felt the warmth of it all the way down.