Swagger by Carl Deuker Page A

log on to Facebook to check for messages from Lisa Yee or Mark Westwood. Or I’d play Halo
or watch a baseball game on the computer. A couple of times I asked Levi if he wanted to catch a movie somewhere, but both times he said no. Maybe movies were against his religion, or maybe he didn’t have any money.
    Ryan Hartwell would sit up in the stands every day and watch our games, shouting out encouragement. If we lost, he’d come down and shoot around with us on a side court. He worked mainly with Levi and me, but he spent time with Cash and the other guys too. I never saw him spend any time with guys from the other high schools. That puzzled me then, but now I get it. Nothing Hartwell did was by accident.
    During our sessions on the side court, Hartwell taught Levi how to do a reverse jam, how to go up and under, how to pinwheel the ball down. “A rim-rattling dunk intimidates an opponent,” Hartwell said. He paused, and a smile came to his face. His eyes took in both of us. “Get a little swagger in your game, and other teams will back off. Even the refs will back off. If you play it right, you can make the rules.”
    Levi picked up Hartwell’s lessons quickly, and both Hartwell and I tried to get him to dunk more in the actual games. Every once in a while, Levi would throw one down, but not often. It was as if he was afraid that at any minute Coach Knecht would come bursting through the doors of the gym and yell at him to knock it off. The fun parts of basketball—of anything—made Levi uncomfortable.
    One afternoon, as we were shooting around after Cash and the other guys had left, I told Hartwell about my hopes for a basketball scholarship to Monitor College. He’d gone to college somewhere in the East, and he grew interested as I spoke. “I’ve never actually been to Monitor College,” he said, “but I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. You keep playing hard, and you’ll get that scholarship. I played Division Two college ball myself, and you’ve got enough game. Trust me—I know.”
    Hartwell’s words gave my confidence a huge boost. Still, who knew if I’d even get enough playing time to show Richter what I could do? I needed to see Brindle play the point so I could measure myself against him, but that matchup was months away.

12
    T OWARD THE END OF AUGUST , Cash went to St. Louis to visit his brother, and Nick took off for Missoula to visit grandparents. I don’t know if DeShawn went anywhere, but he stopped coming. Guys from other teams were also gone, so the games at Green Lake became raggedy. Levi and I kept going because we had nothing else to do.
    When I returned home one afternoon, an eight-year-old Subaru Outback, a little scraped and a little dented, sat in the driveway. My mom’s new car didn’t look like much, but my dad said it was mechanically sound. “I’ll need it for work sometimes,” my mom said, “but you’ll be able to use it quite a bit. In fact, why don’t you take it and go camping up in the mountains this weekend? Ask your friend Levi. School starts soon, and you haven’t had any sort of vacation.”
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    Levi and I left two days later. He could only go for two days and one night—his mother needed his help with the little girls, and he was still working with his dad to turn the store into a church, but two days worked for me too. My dad had half a dozen projects around the house that he wanted me to do.
    The Cascade Mountains are close to Seattle. We got an early start so we reached Kachess Lake in the morning. As we drove through the campground, I saw girls our age on the lake roaring about on Jet Skis. It would have been fine by me to skip the backpacking and instead spend the next couple of days hanging out on the beach.
    If Levi noticed the girls, he didn’t say anything. I drove past the lake and through the campground to the trailhead. While he