Summer Ball Read Free Page A

did.”
    â€œI knew it!” Will said.
    â€œIf you don’t think you belong, why don’t you stay home, then?” Danny said.
    â€œAnd mow lawns in our neighborhood like my parents want me to?” Will said. “I’d rather miss jump shots for a month.”
    â€œIn the place known as Will World,” Ty said, “I guess that’s what passes for a shooter’s mentality.”
    Will ignored Ty and said to Danny, “You’re not hacked off because you have to go up to Maine and kick butt, by the way. Oh, no, no, no. You, my friend, are hacked off because you’re having trouble with your main squeeze. ”
    Meaning Tess Hewitt.
    Will looked at Ty for approval, which is what he did when he wasn’t looking to Danny for approval after he got off what he considered to be a good line. The three of them were lying in the grass after a couple of hours of made-up shooting drills on the outdoor court at McFeeley, the best in Middletown. “Get it?” Will said. “Maine? Main squeeze? Gimme some love.”
    Ty lazily raised his right arm, got it close enough to Will that they could give each other high fives.
    â€œTess is not my main squeeze,” Danny said. “And on what planet, by the way, do they still even talk like that?”
    â€œShe is, and you know it. Everybody knows it.”
    Louder than he intended, Danny said, “She is not!”
    â€œWhich happens to be the problem,” Will said, “even if you are too terminally dense to see that.”
    â€œIf there is a problem,” Danny said, “it’s her problem, wanting to hang out with him rather than do what she’s always done and hang around with us.”
    Him was Scott Welles. Will called him Scooter, even though nobody else did. He had moved to Middletown halfway through the school year from Tampa, where he’d been about half a tennis prodigy at the Harry Hopman Tennis Academy, a place a lot of famous tennis players had passed through on their way to the pros. But his father was a doctor and had gotten a big offer from the North Shore Medical Center, not too far from Middletown. So the family had moved north and his parents had enrolled Scott for second semester at St. Patrick’s.
    As soon as he joined the tennis team at St. Patrick’s, he proceeded to win every singles and doubles match he played all year.
    He also won the occasional mixed doubles match he played with Tess Hewitt, who had taken lessons all winter, really concentrated on tennis for the first time in her life, and turned out to have a better forehand than Maria Sharapova’s.
    In addition to being the tennis star of the whole county and probably all of Long Island, Scott Welles proved to be one of the smartest kids in their class and looked like he ought to be starring in one of those nighttime shows like One Tree Hill.
    And he was tall.
    Taller than Ty and Will, even.
    When Danny walked next to Tess, something that was happening less and less, he still looked like her little brother. When Scott Welles walked next to her, or stood next to her on a tennis court, he looked like a guy in basketball who’d gotten a good mismatch for himself in the low post.
    Now that it was summer, the two of them were the best players on the town tennis team at the Middletown Field Club. Danny asked Tess one time near the end of school what had happened to photography and the way she loved to take pictures, and she joked, “You worried that I might get as good at tennis as you are at basketball?”
    Town tennis in summer was sort of like travel basketball had been. They had started right in as soon as school let out and had played three or four matches against other towns already. All of a sudden, if Tess wasn’t playing a match somewhere, she was practicing.
    Mostly with Scott Welles.
    Danny hardly saw her at all anymore, unless he happened to ride his bike past the field club or the tennis courts at