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his feet shouting, Ana no exception. Even the foiled guard grinned and slapped
Jason's shoulder as they jogged back up the court.
Jason heard none of it. A glance at the man was his only acknowledgment of
anyone outside his own skin, although he was quite obviously aware at any
given moment just where his teammates and his opponents were on the court.
So it went for the whole game. Other players laughed, grimaced, raised a fist
in a victory punch; Jason did his job, scored his points, and turned his focus
onto what came next.
It was a shortened game, four ten-minute quarters, and from the first play,
Ana could not take her eyes off Jason.
He was a superb player, shambling along in that deceptive way like an
elongated chimpanzee and then suddenly shifting gears to streak through the
crush near the basket, fast and slippery and untouchable, rising up free of
the guards to nudge the ball in with his fingertips. Time and again he did
this, and the men in green seemed unable to come up with a strategy to
counteract him.
He was no team player. He hunted up and down the back of the court like a
lone wolf until he either saw an opportunity to snatch the ball from a green
player or until one of his teammates could get free to pass to him, then he
was off. Only once did he voluntarily relinquish possession of the ball, when
he was trapped in the corner and time was running out before the half was
called. The pass he made, a single bounce beneath the flailing arms of the
tallest man, was successful, but the boy he passed it to, the lanky blond kid
who had jumped at the game's opening, took three steps and had it snatched in
mid-dribble. The only emotion Ana saw him show the whole game was right then:
a twist of irritation passed over Jason's face, more at himself, Ana thought,
than at his teammate, and then he was back to his normal unruffled, ruthlessly
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focused self.
After halftime a pattern began to develop out on the court, or perhaps Ana
was only now beginning to see it. The blond kid, whose name was Tony, had
apparently had enough of Jason's successes and decided to start keeping the
ball to himself. Four times in the third quarter he ignored obvious
opportunities to pass to Jason for an easy score. Twice his strategy
succeeded. The third time an opposing player snatched the ball from midair and
barreled down the court to score. The fourth time, with Jason, two other
players, and most of the audience screaming "Pass it!" Tony chose for a long
shot, with the same result. Most of the audience was watching the middle-aged
English teacher take off down the court for his two points, but Ana glanced
over at Jason and saw the narrowed eyes of a pure, cold rage, so instantly
wiped away that she had to wonder if she had actually seen it.
She leaned over to ask the woman on the other side of Dulcie the question
that had been puzzling her all afternoon. "Do you by any chance know how old
the boy Jason is?"
"Fourteen," she said promptly.
"Fourteen?No."
The woman shrugged and went back to her conversation with her neighbor.
Dulcie took her eyes off the game long enough to tell Ana, "He had his
birthday just before we came here."
Good Lord.
Jason now had the ball and he was moving back and forth outside the key,
watching and waiting for the opening he needed. He had taken the ball from
Tony (whom Ana could easily imagine behind the wheels of a series of stolen
cars, grinning in the pleasure of the joyride) and was waiting for the stocky
kid to delay one of the guards and open the key. (That boy, on the other hand,
had a mean streak, and used his elbows when the ref wasn't watching. He would
be the perpetrator of harsher crimes, and on his way to being a career
criminal.) Jason would be too serious to joyride, too cautious to commit the
obvious crimes.
Perhaps, she speculated, it would be that brief, white-hot rage that was
Jason's downfall, a sudden and disastrous loss of control resulting in a
vicious and no doubt very efficient act of violence, instantly over,
constantly guarded against. Would he regret it? Perhaps, perhaps not, but
certainly he feared it. Clearly, too, Carla and the other women were a little
bit intimidated by him, Carla with her loud and uncomfortable laugh when Ana
had suggested that Jason might be her son, the dryness in Dominique's voice
when she spoke of him. The only person Ana had met who did not seem slightly
uncomfortable around the boy was Dulcie, and Dulcie, Ana felt sure, need never
fear her brother's anger.
Yes, a person could tell a lot about the players by watching a game.
Fourteen years old; the phrase kept running through Ana's head as she left
the impromptu gymnasium and walked through the cold night to her room.
Fourteen years old, with the angular face of a man five or six years older and
the ropy muscles of a laborer under his sweat-soaked yellow jersey, walking
across the court with the wary self-confidence of a felon and the unconscious
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