Hot Hand Read Free Page A

thought.
    “You played good the last couple of minutes after he let you back in,” Lenny said.
    “He must’ve told you that afterward,” Billy said, “because he sure didn’t tell me.”
    “Trust me,” Lenny said.
    “How do you know?”
    “I know things,” Lenny said. Then in one of his deep voices, like the cartoon voice of Batman, he said, “Deep and mysterious things.”
    Lenny knocked the ball out of Billy’s hands, dribbled in, made a reverse layup with his left hand, made that look as easy as eating ice cream.
    “And now,” Lenny said, “I am going to give you such a good beatdown in one-on-one that you’re going to want to take yourself out of the game.”
    “In your dreams,” Billy said.
    “Shoot for it,” Lenny said, flipping him the ball.
    “Play till ten baskets?”
    “Till dark!” Lenny said.
    “If we play winners, it might take you that long just to get on offense,” Billy said.
    “In your dreams,” Lenny said.
    Billy stepped to their chalk free throw line, drained another shot. “My ball,” he said, then handed it to Lenny and said, “Check.”
    They played one-on-one in Billy’s driveway then, played till dark, going after each other the way they always did, shoving and laughing and trash-talking. They hooped it up as hard as they could, so wrapped up in basketball and playing against each other that neither one of them noticed Ben Raynor watching them from his bedroom window, watching them the whole time.
    Crying.

FIVE
    Once his mom came back from Boston, things started to feel normal.
    Not great. Definitely not great.
    Just more normal.
    It was like a math problem, Billy would think sometimes. The family they used to have, minus one.
    One night, after an extra Magic practice, his dad picked up him and Eliza and Ben and took them out for burgers, saying they were going to start doing this at least once a week. Eliza talked even more than she usually did, which was saying something. Even on a slow day she talked so much Billy would stare at her sometimes like she was a science project, waiting to see if she ever actually took a breath.
    Sometimes Billy thought that Ben not talking very much made Eliza think that meant more time for her.
    Like it was her job to pick up the slack even more.
    The weird part of that night came after dinner, when their dad dropped them off at the house without even coming inside.
    “Tell your mom I’ll give her a call tomorrow, maybe set something up for the weekend,” Joe Raynor said before they got out of the car.
    Billy wanted to tell him to come inside and tell her himself—she was just on the other side of the front door—but he didn’t.
    “Love you guys,” his dad said, and Eliza said “love you, too” for all of them. They walked up the front walk and through the door themselves, Ben coming in last, watching the car until it disappeared around the corner.
    Eliza went straight upstairs and in less than a minute, Billy could hear her talking away on her cell phone, probably getting ready to instant-message all her other friends.
    “Feel like watching a game with me?” Billy said to Ben.
    But Ben shook his head and said he was going to finish watching a movie on his computer, then went upstairs to his own room and shut the door, the way he had pretty much every single night since their dad had left.
    Billy poked his head into the dining room, where his mom was working away at her computer, papers spread out all around her on the dining room table.
    “Hey,” he said.
    “Hey, pal, how’d it go?”
    “Fine.”
    “Did your brother eat?”
    “Half his burger.”
    His mom said, “Better than nothing.” Then she said, “I’m almost done here.” Billy said it was all good, there was a game he wanted to watch.
    “When isn’t there?” she said, and went back to work.
    Billy went into the den, turned on the TV, found the Suns-Cavaliers. It had just started, which meant he could probably watch the whole first half before bed. The