True Legend Read Free Page B

so that’s it?” he said. “Not doing your civic duty, just lookin’ for a piece of the boy?”
    Officer Archey asked if Drew wanted a lift home.
    Drew laughed. “Are you buggin’?” he said. “Next thing we all know, there’d be a picture of me on somebody’s cell, getting into the back of a police car.”
    â€œBut there’s nobody else around,” Archey said.
    Drew said, “You sure?”
    Delano said, “You see somebody?”
    Maybe it was the way Drew had said it. Maybe cops were trained to hear things when nobody else did, even when you hadn’t said anything. But Delano stepped away from the car now, looked around.
    Just doing his job.
    â€œNo, sir,” Drew said.
    Not feeling like he was lying to the police—he still wasn’t positive that he
had
seen anything more than a ghost tonight at Morrison.

FOUR
    T he next day, he was going to take the bus over to Mr. Gilbert’s house in Thousand Oaks, just to hang before practice.
    Mr. Gilbert said he never had to call first, just show up, bring friends if he wanted to, but they both knew that just meant the friend Drew needed to drive him there.
    But Drew
always
called first, minding his manners the way his mom told him to. She never came out and said it, but she especially meant grown-ups who could help him.
    Or maybe Drew just wanted to make sure Mr. Gilbert
thought
he was minding his manners. Even with people he liked, and he liked Mr. Gilbert, it was just part of being True Robinson. Putting moves on people out of force of habit.
    So when he woke up he called and asked if he could come over later, watch a movie in the screening room or just play video games on the big screen in there, a kind of screen Drew had never seen outside a movie theater. You killed aliens on that sucker, you felt like you were in an action movie yourself.
    â€œMi casa es su casa,”
Mr. Gilbert said on the phone.
    â€œGotta tell you about something weird I saw last night that sketched me out,” Drew said.
    â€œTell me when you get here,” Mr. Gilbert said. That meant he was on another call—Drew could always tell. “I’m in the middle of some deep commerce here.”
    Meaning business. In Mr. Gilbert-speak.
    Before he hung up, Mr. Gilbert said, “How you getting here? Lee bringing you?”
    â€œHe’s at the dentist’s today,” Drew said. “I was gonna take the bus.”
    â€œBus?” Seth Gilbert said. “My man True on a bus? I’ll have Eddie come get you.”
    Eddie was Mr. Gilbert’s all-around guy, who lived in his gatehouse, drove him when he didn’t feel like driving, sometimes acted like a bodyguard.
    â€œYou don’t have to,” Drew said.
    â€œI know,” Mr. Gilbert said.
    Then he hung up.
    Drew wasn’t clear how Seth Gilbert had made all his money. Just that he’d made the kind of money in his life that Drew hoped to make off playing ball eventually.
    Seth Gilbert had made so much money that he and a couple of other rich-guy friends had put up the money to start Oakley Academy on about twenty acres of land in Westlake Village. The other guys, Drew had learned from Mr. Gilbert, wanted to build a high-end, college-prep-type school their kids could go to. Seth Gilbert was sending his son, Robbie, there, too, but he didn’t care as much about education, Robbie’s or anybody else’s, as much as this:
    He wanted to build one of the best basketball programs in the state.
    The gym at Oakley was even called the Henry Gilbert Athletic Center. It had been paid for by Mr. Gilbert alone and was named after his father.
    As far as Drew could tell, Mr. Gilbert was obsessed with two things: making more money than he already had and basketball. He bragged all the time about the kids he’d sent to big colleges from some of the AAU teams he used to run. Only these days, he had nothing to do with AAU teams, just the