Boy21 - By Matthew Quick Page 0,1

always outwork talent in the end.”

That’s Dad’s personal life motto, even though he ended up alone and working the night shift, collecting tolls at the bridge, where he needs neither talent nor a good work ethic.

Mostly because of Pop, my father’s life has been pretty dreary. But his eyes always seem hopeful when he says that I can outwork talent over the long haul, and so for him—and for me too—I try my best to do just that.

The nights Dad watches me play basketball, I truly believe that those are the best in his entire life. That’s one reason I love b-ball so much: for the opportunity to make Dad happy.

If I’ve had a good game, Dad’s eyes water when he says he’s proud of me, which makes my eyes water too.

When Pop sees us like that he calls us pansies.

“You ready?” Erin says to me.

Even though I don’t want to, when I look at her face and into her beautiful shamrock-green eyes, I think about kissing her later tonight, and I begin to stiffen, so I quickly wipe the thought out of my mind.

It’s not time for romance—it’s time to get strong, and basketball season’s only two months away.

2

SOMETHING YOU MAYBE NEED TO KNOW: People call me White Rabbit.

Whenever they serve cooked carrots in the lunchroom, Terrell Patterson sneaks up behind me and yells “Feed White Rabbit!” as he dumps his carrots on my plate as a joke, and then everyone follows his example, until there’s a huge mound of orange.

This started last spring.

The first time it happened, I got really mad because people kept walking by and scraping what they didn’t want onto my tray, which wasn’t very sanitary, especially since I hadn’t finished eating my lunch.

Erin—who sits next to me in the cafeteria when it’s not basketball season—just started eating the carrots off my plate enthusiastically and thanking people until they got confused.

She kept saying, “Delicious! May I please have some more!” all crazily, until people were laughing at her instead of at what everyone was doing to me.

I actually like carrots, so I ate some too, because I saw that Erin’s plan was working and I don’t really care that people laugh when I eat those orange vegetables. I’ll have better eyesight than everyone, I thought, and then just left it at that.

The only problem is that the carrot dumping became a weekly event, and it’s really not funny anymore. I hope people forgot about it over the summer, but I doubt it.

I’m one of the few dozen white kids at my high school. I’m quiet like a rabbit. Eminem’s character in the movie 8 Mile is nicknamed B-Rabbit; Eminem is the most famous white rapper in the world; and I actually sort of look like him.

But the main reason people call me White Rabbit is because we had to read this very sad book by John Updike. It was about a long-ago white basketball star named Rabbit who grows up and lives a miserable life. I’m not a star, but I am the only white kid on our varsity basketball team.

Wes, who plays center and is the only other basketball player in the Accelerated English track, told all my teammates about the Updike book—well, just the part about there being a white basketball player with an embarrassing name. My teammates all started calling me White Rabbit.

The nickname stuck and now everyone in the neighborhood calls me that too.

3

ERIN AND I GRAB OUR BASKETBALLS out of the garage, and on my backyard hoop, we each shoot one hundred free throws. It’s our last high school basketball season—last shot—so we train hard.

Simulating game situations, we take two shots at a time and box each other out for rebounds. Erin goes eighty-eight for one hundred and I go ninety for one hundred.

Next we jog our five miles, dribbling our basketballs the whole time.

We do a mile of right-hand dribbling down O’Shea Street past a line of row homes that are as broken and gray as Pop’s teeth, which gets us to the school, where we continue running the next four miles on the old crappy track that actually has weeds growing up through the lanes. Every lap we dribble a different way—left-handed, crossover, behind the back. We pretty much practice every way you can legally dribble a basketball.

All the other basketball players in our school are also on the football or cheerleading teams, which practice on the fields next to the track, but they aren’t practicing yet this