Howdy,
Here we go, starting a Hawes version of National Novel Writing Month.
#NaNoWriMo (550) — Day 1
Our “yet unnamed” main character is named: Jake Jones.
CHAPTER ONE
It was odd, really.
Odd the way the game of basketball grabbed young Jake Jones’ attention — and held it.
Jake sensed earlier on, before he’d even entered junior high, that he and the game he loved made for an unusual marriage.
He lived aware, of course, that he stood shorter than a majority of the other boys his age. Not terribly short, but shorter than average; and the rules and regulations, essentially even the object, of basketball favored players taller than average. Way taller.
He knew he moved slower than the athletic kids who zipped in bursts on the court. His body a step slow to typical competition, but also a step slow to his mind. He willed his muscles and reflexes moved him quicker, but still Jake’s mind played ahead of his body.
He didn’t have a team to play the game of full-court basketball, but Jake hoped the season ahead of him would be the year he joined a team, playing for his new school.
His old school, an elementary where he used to live, didn’t have teams until sixth grade. Now that he’d started sixth grade the problem was his new school, in a new town, switched to an intermediate school, grades sixth, seventh, and eighth all on the same, shared, campus.
At first Jake had been relieved to see his school wasn’t a huge campus; in fact, it could be called a small school, the kind where the sports teams wouldn’t be too competitive to make.
Then he discovered a new obstacle to earning his way onto his first official sports team: the school didn’t offer a team for sixth graders.
The small school only had one basketball team. Not one for sixth, another for seventh, and a third for the bigger, older eighth graders the way Jake Jones had envisioned going into the school year, thinking about basketball season, as he always did.
There’d been only one team for all three grade levels.
Sixth graders were allowed to participate, or at least attempt to, officially. But it was hard for Jake to imagine that unless a younger ball player was a total star any way he’d make the team of essentially eighth graders and maybe a few mature, skilled seventh graders. And Jake was no star.
Jake believed he loved basketball as much as any kid on that campus, but he knew he wasn’t a star.
He wanted to be. But he wasn’t.
Jake Jones wasn’t as good as “the other” kids. The “other kids” controlled the playground court. And Jake knew it.
What could be surprising, that didn’t bother Jake. At least not the way one might expect. Another kid, or concerned adult, might guess someone like Jake who enjoyed basketball as much as he did would be crushed, sad — maybe even crying — that he wasn’t competitive with “the others.”
Somehow Jake seemed to understand and accept it, without feeling like the world — or his world — had turned upside down.
It did affect him, though. It bothered him that way. It bothered him like a burr, not leaving him alone, making Jake want to get better. He always wanted to practice, always wanting to play against, with, “the others.”
Dreaming of someday topping them.
To be continued …
—Billy
Reading. Writing. Living.
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