The Basket Counts

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1968, 1991 by Matt Christopher Royalties, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10017

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  Little, Brown Books for Young Readers is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First eBook Edition: December 2009

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Matt Christopher® is a registered trademark of Matt Christopher Royalties, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-09590-7

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Matt Christopher®

  THE #1 SPORTS SERIES FOR KIDS: MATT CHRISTOPHER®

  To

  Patrick

  1

  Here!” Mel Jensen shouted from the corner of the court.

  Earl Stone glanced at him, then passed the ball quickly to Caskie Bennett running up behind him. Earl, or Stoney as the kids called him, screened for Caskie. Caskie shot. The ball arced toward the basket, hit the far side of the rim, and bounced off.

  Mel fumed as he rushed in for the rebound. That was the second time he was in the clear and Stoney didn’t pass to him.

  Mel leaped. Several other pairs of arms stretched up, too. Dutch Fullmer, Quincy’s tall center, reached higher than the others, pulled down the ball, whipped it out of Titan hands, then passed to a Quint in the corner. The Quint dribbled to the center line, passed to another Quint beelining toward the Titans’ basket. All five Titans rushed after him but he was too far in the lead. He leaped and laid the ball up against the boards. The big orange sphere wobbled through the net for two more points.

  Mel glanced at the scoreboard. VISITORS — 6; HOME - 7. It could have been VISITORS — 4 and HOME - 9 if Stoney had thrown him the ball.

  Mel looked at Coach Tom Thorpe sitting next to the other Hillcrest Titans. Didn’t Coach see Stoney purposely ignoring him? Or didn’t he care?

  Mr. Corbin, Hillcrest’s junior varsity coach, was refereeing this practice game between the Hillcrest Titans and the Quincy Quints. He handed the ball to Rick Longfoot, the Titans’ right guard, gave a blast on his whistle, and the game resumed.

  Rick tossed to Caskie. Caskie dribbled the ball up to the center line, crossed it, then bounced a pass to Skeet Robinson. Skeet feinted out a Quint guard, dribbled toward the keyhole, then stopped and took a quick look over his shoulder.

  “Here!” shouted Mel as he ran up behind him.

  Skeet passed to him and Mel dribbled to the corner. He started to take a set shot, but a Quint popped up in front of him. Mel pivoted so that his back was to the guard and passed to Rick. Rick drove in, leaped. … A Quint leaped at the same time, pressed his hand on the ball, and the whistle shrilled.

  “Jump ball!” yelled Mr. Corbin.

  Rick tapped to Caskie. Caskie passed to Skeet, Skeet to Stoney. Mel ran down along the sideline, his right arm raised. He was in the clear. Stoney could pass him the ball if he wanted to. The nearest Quint to Mel was at least twenty feet away.

  But again Stoney didn’t pass to him. He passed to Caskie instead. Caskie stopped abruptly some ten feet from the basket and shot. The ball struck the far side of the ring, bounced high, then came down again, struck the front side of the ring, and bounced off toward the keyhole.

  A flock of green uniforms, the Titans, and black-striped gold uniforms, the Quints, scrambled after the ball. A Titan got it. Mel Jensen.

  He yanked the ball away from stubborn hands, drove in hard, laid it up. The ball arced, brushed against the boards, slipped through the net.

  “Way to go, Mel!” yelled a high-pitched voice from the bench.

  Mel grinned and waved to his buddy, Darryl Brady, sitting on the bench. He’d recognize Darryl’s voice anywhere. Both Mel and Darryl were new in the Hillcrest School this year. Their families had moved this past summer into a section of Trexton where only one other black family lived. Mel’s father was a dentist and Darryl’s father was an electronics engineer.

  Some neighbors had welcomed the new families warmly. Others had not.

  “Don’t worry,” Dad had said after the first few days. “They’ll get used to us and we’ll get used to them. We sleep the same way, eat the same food, breathe the same air. They’ll learn that nothing is different between us, black or white.”

  “It isn’t all the whites, Dad,” Mel said. “It’s just a few.”

  He was thinking of Stoney and Caskie, although he knew there were others, too.

  “I know,” said Dad.

  A horn sounded. Darryl and Pedro Dorigez ran onto the court. Darryl took Stoney’s place, Pedro took Mel’s.

  The quarter soon ended and the game went into the second period. Coach Thorpe put in Andy Head and Kim Nemeth, giving the whole team almost equal time on the court.

  Resentment flashed through Mel when he saw that both Stoney and Caskie were ignoring Darryl, too. More than twice they could have passed the ball to Darryl. He had been in the clear, in a good spot to shoot. But they had ignored him, just as they had ignored Mel.

  Darryl intercepted a pass from a Quint and dribbled the ball as hard as he could down the length of the court. Then he leaped, laid the ball up, and sank it for two points!

  “All right!” yelled Darryl. “You don’t have to pass it, Cas! I’ll get that ball one way or another!”

  That Darryl. He didn’t care what he said or to whom he said it. Mel glanced at the coach. Coach Thorpe had cracked a grin. Mel was sure that there was very little that went unnoticed by the coach’s alert eyes, and wondered if he would say anything to Caskie and Stoney about not passing to Mel and Darryl. Guess I’ll just have to wait, Mel thought.

  The game went through the third and fourth quarters with the two coaches putting in all their players and playing both man-to-man and zone defense. The Quints won by a narrow margin, 38–35. It’s lucky, thought Mel, that it wasn’t a league game.

  The Titans and the Quints went to the locker rooms and showered. Mel was already under a shower, enjoying the cool, needlelike spray, when Darryl showed up and took another stall. Behind him came Caskie and the other members of the team.

  “Nice game, Mel!” yelled Rick Longfoot.

  “You, too, Rick!” said Mel with a laugh.

  Stoney and Caskie looked at him and Darryl briefly as they went by to another shower stall. Neither said anything.

  Mel was glad when he and Darryl were dressed and out of there. It was cold and wintry outside but more comfortable than being around Caskie Bennett and Stoney.

  2

  The next day was Thanksgiving. Mel thought he had never seen so much food on the table in his life. Right in the middle of it was a large, crisply cooked turkey. Mom and Dad sat at opposite ends of the table with Mel and Robby on one sid
e and Cindy and their big sister Ruth on the other.

  As was the Jensen tradition, each family member took a turn to say what he or she was thankful for. Everyone laughed when Cindy said she was thankful not to be sharing a bedroom with her big sister anymore. When it was his turn, Mel hesitated a bit. It didn’t make sense to be thankful for the way Caskie and Stoney treated him.

  But there were a lot of other things he was thankful for. Top of the list was having a place on the Titans.

  All four children climbed into the bus Monday morning after the long Thanksgiving weekend. Cindy got off at the elementary school, Robby and Mel at the middle school, and Ruth, a sophomore, continued on to the high school.

  Seeing Caskie and Stoney in his classes made Mel think of the ball game again. But it wasn’t until the next day that thinking about them really bothered him. He wished he were like Darryl Brady. Hardly anything bothered Darryl. But Mel got to thinking so much about Caskie’s and Stoney’s treatment of him and Darryl at the last ball game that he couldn’t think of geography in Ms. Agard’s class at all.

  Suddenly he realized that she was addressing him. “Melvin, I asked you a question. What is quebracho and what is made from it?”

  Mel remembered that the class was studying the country of Argentina. He remembered reading about quebracho, but for the life of him he couldn’t think of what it was and what was made from it.

  “Did you study this chapter, Melvin?” Ms. Agard asked, peering directly at him through her blue-rimmed glasses.

  “Yes, I did,” he answered truthfully.

  “Then why can’t you answer the question?”

  Mel shrugged. “I don’t know.” Quickly he took a stab at the answer. “It’s a kind of mineral, isn’t it?”

  A burst of laughter broke from the class. “No, it isn’t, Melvin.” Ms. Agard glanced over his head. “Can you answer the question, Caskie?”

  “It’s a tree from which the people get tannin, stuff used … I mean a product used in tanning hides,” answered Caskie.

  “That’s right,” said Ms. Agard. “Do you remember that now, Melvin?”

  Mel avoided her eyes. “Yes,” he said, embarrassed.

  It seemed hours before class was over. And all that time Ms. Agard didn’t ask him another question. “What’s the trouble, Melvin?” she asked quietly after the others had left the room. “You’ve always been prepared before. Why weren’t you today?”

  He shrugged again. “Just couldn’t remember,” he said.

  “But you did study the chapter on Argentina?”

  “Uh-huh. Yes.”

  Ms. Agard was quiet a moment. “You’re on the basketball team, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has that got anything to do with it? Or anyone on the team?”

  He looked at his fingernails. Somehow he felt she suspected. “Maybe.” Then he looked at her. “Please give me another chance, Ms. Agard. I’ll remember next time.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, Melvin. You may go.”

  “Thanks, Ms. Agard.”

  Of all his teachers he liked her the best. She seemed to understand him more than the others did. He was sorry he hadn’t remembered the answer to her question, and somehow felt that he had let her down.

  After school the Titans played their first league game. The Quincy Quints were their opponents. Caskie and Stoney started off in the forward positions, Mel and Rick Longfoot in the guard positions, and Skeet Robinson at center against Dutch Fullmer. Caskie scored the first basket from the corner, then Skeet laid one up and drew a foul at the same time.

  The ball went in, so Skeet was allowed only one shot. He took his time at the foul line, shot the ball from his chest, and made it.

  “Yea, Robinson!” shouted the Titan cheerleaders.

  The Quints took out the ball, moved it cautiously downcourt. Across the center line they passed it quickly and carefully among themselves, the sound of the ball a whispering thump as it moved from one pair of hands to another.

  Mel waited for a pass to be thrown to his man and saw it coming. He leaped in front of his opponent, grabbed the ball, and dribbled it hard upcourt. From the corner of his eye he saw a player, a player in a green uniform, running several feet to his left. Close behind him thundered another pair of running feet. But he was close to the basket now. He leaped and shot.

  The ball brushed against the backboard, rolled around the rim, and dropped off!

  “Yayeeeee!” screamed the Quints’ fans.

  “You … you … !” the boy in the green uniform glared at him. “Why didn’t you pass it to me?” It was Caskie Bennett.

  Mel said nothing. A Quint caught the rebound, dribbled it away from the basket, and passed to another Quint. Seconds later they scored.

  At the end of the first quarter it was a 13–13 tie. Pedro Dorigez and Kim took Mel’s and Skeet’s places in the second period. By the end of the half there was still little change. It was 21–20 in favor of the Hillcrest Titans.

  Darryl, in Stoney’s place when the second half started, sank a corner shot. A minute later he scored three more points on a layup that drew a foul.

  “Yea, Brady!” screamed the cheerleaders.

  The Quints came back within a point of tying the score again. Titans’ ball. Pedro Dorigez arced a pass to Mel. A Quint burst in, grabbed the pass, and dribbled downcourt for another two points that put them in the lead.

  “Pedro!” snarled Caskie. But Pedro paid no attention to him.

  The Titans caught up and by the fourth quarter they were leading 35-34. Mel caught a rebound, dribbled to the corner, and looked for someone to pass to. Stoney, back in the game, came running from the middle of the court, guarded closely by a Quint. The Quints were playing a man-to-man defense, sticking so close to their men it seemed as if they were glued together.

  Mel lobbed a pass to Stoney. Like a gold streak a Quint’s arm reached out and intercepted the ball. The Quint dribbled in toward the basket, laid it up. In!

  “Come on, will you?” Caskie snarled as he ran up close to Mel. “Look where you’re throwing!”

  Mel glared back at him and balled his fists. Darn that Caskie!

  Darryl Brady pulled on his arm for an instant, grinned at him. “Come on, Mel. Let’s play ball.”

  Mel relaxed his fists, took a deep breath, and ran down the court to cover his man.

  A minute later Andy Head took Mel’s place. “What went on out there, Mel?” asked Coach Tom Thorpe.

  “Nothing,” said Mel.

  “Nothing?”

  Mel shrugged. “It was nothing, Coach,” he repeated.

  The game ended with a squeaking win by the Titans, 48–47.

  In the locker room Mel said to Darryl, “Let’s get changed and take off”

  “You’re not going to shower?”

  “No.”

  “Oh yes you are,” said a new voice. Mel and Darryl looked up at Coach Thorpe who had just entered the room. “You’re not leaving here without a shower. Neither one of you.”

  Mel and Darryl took their showers together. In the next shower stall Skeet Robinson smiled at them through the spray. Skeet Robinson. Tall and skinny as a baseball bat. A kid everybody liked and who liked everybody. There was only one in a million like Skeet.

  A lucky kid, thought Mel.

  3

  Caskie wasn’t in school the next afternoon. Somehow, Mel was glad. That afternoon he felt more at ease than he had felt in a long time.

  Dad came home at six. Ordinarily he was happy and talkative, even though few dental patients went to him. They preferred Dr. Collins, whose office was next door in the same building. He was helping Dad get established.

  Dad often joked when he came home, but today he was less cheerful and unusually quiet.

  “Everything okay at the office, dear?” Mom asked.

  “Mostly. But something happened that upset me a little,” he admitted.

  The table was se
t. The family was already sitting around it, waiting to eat.

  “I’m starved,” said Cindy. “Let’s hurry up and eat!”

  “Yeah, let’s chow down!” said Robby.

  “All right, now. Behave,” said Mom, quietly but firmly.

  They said their thanks to God and began eating. Mel wondered what had happened at the office. But he didn’t question Dad, and neither did anyone else. Guess it was just for Mom’s ear to hear.

  Later that evening, Mel found his mother alone in the kitchen and asked her what had troubled Dad.

  “Caskie’s mother had an appointment for Caskie with Dr. Collins,” she explained. “But Dr. Collins was called away on an emergency and his patients are being sent to Daddy. When Mrs. Bennett walked into Daddy’s office and saw Daddy, she turned right around and went back out.”

  Mel asked, “Didn’t they know Dad is a dentist?”

  “I think they did. But perhaps Daddy’s name, Dr. Jensen, didn’t register until they saw him.”

  Anger gnawed at Mel as he walked to the kitchen door and looked out across the backyard and fence at the back of Caskie’s place. The Robinsons lived next door to Mel. Their backyard joined the Bennetts’ backyard. The lawns were practically burned to a crisp after a hot, dry summer.

  “I don’t know, Mom. I just don’t know,” he muttered, stuffing his hands hard into his pockets.

  “About the Bennetts, you mean?”

  “The Bennetts and anybody else who doesn’t want us around.”

  “You heard what Dad said. They’ll get used to us and we’ll get used to them. They’ve got some wrong ideas about blacks because they’ve never known any. They just have to get to know us.”

  Mel plunked himself into a chair. “All the same, I’m glad I’m black,” he said. “There’s been a lot of famous African Americans, Mom. George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, and Jackie Robinson —” His eyes lit up. “He was the first black player in the major leagues! And there’s Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson —”

  “I know, I know,” Mom interrupted, smiling. “Many more than you can count on those ten fingers of yours.” Then she patted Mel’s shoulder. “Don’t fret about this. Everything will be all right — just wait and see.”