Fairway Phenom Read Free

just kept screaming, making him deaf as he carried her to the bathroom and sat her down on the edge of the tub. “Here,
     let me clean you off.”
    The cuts weren’t too bad, and, luckily, there didn’t seem to be any shards of glass in Keisha’s foot. Malik cleaned off the
     wounds, Keisha screaming as he applied the alcohol. Then he bandaged them up and carried Keisha back to bed. He gave her a
     lollipop to suck on, so she’d quiet down and maybe even go back to sleep.
    Malik needed to think. His mom would be back from work soon, and he knew his story was going to have to be extra good this
     time. Forget about any baby-sitting money she might have given him. No matter what, this was his fault, and he knew his mama
     would see it that way, too.
    Those stupid golf clubs — it was the Shut-Up Man’s ghost getting revenge on him, he just knew it! Those clubs had a whammy
     on them. He told himself he ought to get rid of them before something else bad happened.
    But he didn’t. Not just then. He decided to stuff them back in their hiding place till later, when he could figure out what
     to do. Then he went back into the living room and started sweeping up the mess.
    His mom returned from work shortly after five. “Mama,” Malik said after she’d kissed him hello, “the ceiling lamp broke.”
    “It did?” she asked, concerned but not angry. “How did that happen?”
    “I don’t know, Mama. I was just sitting there watching TV, and it went
kapow!,
and there was glass all over the place, and Keisha cut herself—”
    “Keisha
what?!”
His mom was off and running now, headed for Keisha’s bedroom. “My baby! Are you all right? What happened?”
    “Malik broke the light!” Keisha said, ignoring the threatening gestures Malik was making at her from behind their mother’s
     back. “And he was mean to me!”
    “Oh, he was, was he?”
    “No, Mama!” Malik protested. “She was so tired she doesn’t remember. I told her not to come in the living room, but she didn’t
     listen, and —”
    “Never mind,” his mom said, cutting him off. “You were baby-sitting, and your sister’s well-being was your responsibility.”
    “You gonna punish me, Ma?” Malik asked, the corners of his mouth curling down and tears filling his eyes.
    His mother sighed. “I want you to tell me the truth, Malik,” she said, sitting him down beside her on Keisha’s bed. “The whole
     story.”
    “Okay, Mama,” Malik said. He looked up at her with as much sincerity as he could muster. “See, a big bird flew in the window…”
    In the end, she only grounded Malik for the rest of the evening. “School’s starting tomorrow,” she said, “and I’m going to
     let you start off with a clean slate. But you stay in your room after supper, you hear? Don’t you go out in the street to
     play with the other kids.”
    Alone in his room, Malik took out the clubs again and examined them more closely. Three of them had those big, wooden heads.
     They had numbers on the bottom — 1,3, and 4. Six clubs had flat metal heads and were shorter in length. They were marked3, 5, 7, 9, PW, and SW. Malik wondered what the initials stood for. Also in the bag was a putter — like they gave you at the
     miniature-golf course. This one, Malik knew how to use.
    Inside the zippered pocket of the old bag were four yellowed, scarred golf balls. Also some wooden toothpick-like thingies,
     whose purpose Malik couldn’t figure out, and a couple of little round disks — purpose also unknown.
    Malik took out the balls and lined them up on the floor. He got his plastic cup from the bathroom and put it on the floor,
     so that the open top faced him. Then he started practicing putting the balls over the worn carpet, to see how many in a row
     he could make.
    This entertained him for about half an hour, but then it got boring. Malik started thinking back to his first swing of the
     wooden-headed club, the one that had smashed the light. He wondered if it