Boot(s)

2-Boots

Bobby O'Callahan

I was thirteen. My mom had just died of breast cancer. I just moved to Atlanta, to be closer to my grandparents, dad said. I couldn't blame him. Every time he looked at me, he saw her. Who would want to be around a living reminder of your dead wife all the time? Pawning me off to grandma's for half the week was easy for pop. It helped him, that first year after she passed. It got easier, though, with time.

I was thirteen and I was going to a private high school—prep, everyone called it. You knew it was fancy because they let the seventh and eighth graders have their classrooms there too. I was wearing a brand new blue polo and my trusty khaki pants. It was the first day of eighth grade. It was my first day of school without my mom. It was my first day in the South (I was born in Missouri, and no Missouri is not the south.)

I retucked my polo into my pants for the ninth time that day and continued on my walk. Grandma dropped me a few blocks away from prep so I had enough time to wipe her lipstick clean off my cheeks before I got into first period.

Except I wasn't all that sure where I was going, and I got sucked into some backstreets following kids who looked my age, but they definitely weren't wearing polos or khakis. I followed them anyway.

They took me back towards a park that was more a sleeping ground and dealing ground than a park. But as I gripped my bookbag tighter to my shoulders, I heard the sound of some high-pitched laughter and the scream of a basketball against pavement. When I finally reached the court, isolated from the park by tall chain-link fences, I stopped.

There were four or five older black kids, and a scrawny white boy who looked my age, give or take a year. He was mainly watching the older kids as they shot, shot, and shot, and laughed, and pushed each other and high-fived each other, and picked each other up off the asphalt. But every once in a while, they'd toss him a ball. He'd make it every time. And, unlike the older boys in their fancy Nike basketball shoes, this kid was in a pair of old, gnarly, paint-covered Timberland boots.

As soon as they caught me staring—hands curled up against the chain-link fence—I busted my ass and got out of the park and safely made it to prep, with minutes to spare.

The next day after grandma dropped me off, I followed the same route I did the day before. And as I had hoped, there they were. I watched them for a few minutes, studying the way they made the sport look like an art form—then headed down to school.

I did this for a week. It was on that Friday that someone finally decided to acknowledge I had been observing them play for five days. It was the scrawny white boy.

A basketball had rolled up to the fence I was leaning up against. It landed right between my two feet. The boy looked both ways, as if someone was going to catch him, then jogged over to where the basketball lay in front of me. He stopped a foot away from me.

Like his Timberlands, his plain white t-shirt was stained with sweat and was very well worn. His old black basketball shorts told me he went to public. One of his socks came higher than the other, which didn't even show above his boot.

"Hey," he leaned down to pick up the ball. As he stood up, he met me in the eyes. His face was tanned and freckled and he had a swoop of blonde hair coming off his forehead that I imagined was a lot cooler looking than my average, clean-cut brown waves that grandma styled every morning.

"Hey," I said.

He had the basketball in his hands now. He was tossing it between his fingers.

"You play ball?"

I shook my head. "Never." I had played baseball growing up, like my pop.

All he did was tilt his head towards the gate, the entrance to the court, around the corner from where we stood. "C'mon."

I wasted no time. I dumped my bookbag, quickly untucked the white polo from my jeans, and followed him into the court.

He told me to ignore the heckling of the older boys—who had resorted to lounging on the asphalt instead of shooting—and handed me a ball.

"Whas your name kid?" he asked me. If his shorts didn't give him away, he had an accent that told me he definitely didn't go to prep.

"Bo O'Callahan," I told him. He brought the ball to his chest, then tossed it at me. I caught it. "You?"

He smirked, then stared down at his Timbs. He knocked his heels together three times, like Dorothy. No place like home. He looked back up at me, his green eyes grinning more than his lips. "They call me Boots." He paused to grin. "Let's see what you got."

Turns out, I had quite a bit. I was a lanky motherfucker with limbs for days. I had a jump that rivaled some of the older boys'.

"Dayum!" Noah, one of the high school boys who had deemed me worthy of getting his ass up from the asphalt, tossed me a basketball again. "Further this time."

I stepped further from the net. I dribbled the ball like I watched Noah and Elijah doing all week. Then I drained another.

I had to get to class, I told them, but Boots was so amazed that he had "taught me such good ball by doing nothin at all" that he tossed his arm around my shoulder and followed me out the court and towards prep.

"So," he dropped his arm from my shoulder, turning to face me so I could see his abnormally widened eyes. "Prep, eh? How's it goin? Make any friends? In that outfit?"

I smiled, rolling my eyes. This felt so damn normal.

"Yeah, I guess. I met this girl. Jessie."

Boots laughed, his high-pitched, contagious, hands slapping his legs laugh. "Ain't that right, Bo. There is always a girl."

He tossed his arm around my shoulders again.