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Chapter 149 – Down to the WireAlex got up and got going on Monday morning. It was the day they were going to have the quiz on ‘The Scarlet Letter’ which Alex hadn’t liked reading. Okay, so she knew you were supposed to feel bad for Pearl and be all hating on Dimmesdale, even if Pearl was a little pill most of the time, and Dimmesdale felt so horribly guilty that it finally killed him. But everyone in the whole book except Hester was a giant jerkhead! And Hester was so perfect she was like a Mary Sue in a bad fanfic, complete with tragic backstory. But Ms. Walters loved it because it was chock full of symbolism and meaning and ‘important messages’. Alex made sure to write a lot about symbolism stuff in the essay section of the test.
At lunch, when she was complaining about having to read stupid stuff, Louis smirked, “Don’t you know? It’s the job of high school teachers to only pick out books students hate. And it’s the student’s job to hate the books you have to read, no matter what.”
She kind of argued about that, because she thought “Rappacini’s Daughter” and some of the Edgar Allan Poe stories and “Rip van Winkle” and some of the other stuff were pretty okay. There were a couple Poe short stories she would even read again, and maybe she’d read them to Shar in a spooky voice some night when Shar was older.
And she told Louis the story of the real Mocha Dick, and Louis was actually interested. Okay, he wasn’t interested in reading all of “Moby Dick” but he was interested in the stuff Alex said. And really, how could you make a story be boring when it’s got guys in little rowboats fighting a giant sperm whale with nothing but harpoons? And a seventy-foot whale with huge teeth that’s dangerous enough to sink entire whaling ships? That ought to be more exciting than ‘Jaws’!
Alex totally needed to ask Willow if there was other old stuff written about whaling ships. Even if it had no symbolism at all. Maybe especially if she didn’t have to wade through any more symbolism.
While Alex made dinner and Shar pretended to clean up in the living room while really she was watching “The Iron Giant” for the kajillionth time, Alex used her tPhone and her earjack to call Willow.
“Acid Burn here. Do we have something of the problem-like?”
Alex couldn’t help smiling. “Nope, just chat time. And American Lit time. I figured out I’ve got to write the paper before we get to Huck Finn, so I’m going to write it on the symbolism of the garden in ‘Rappacini’s Daughter’. Which I liked reading. ‘The Scarlet Letter’? Ugh. And my next paper will be on the symbolism of the river in ‘Huck Finn’. And I’m sorry, but ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ is not a good book, and the Uncle Tom in it is not an Uncle Tom.”
“So you wanna talk about ‘Rappacini’s Daughter’?”
Alex admitted, “Well, really, I wanted to know if there were any whaling stories from back then that were shorter and not so boring, and maybe even really exciting. Maybe with a huge fight to the death against a monster sperm whale that was really mad at them.”
Willow sounded like she was smiling. “Well, there were lots of short pieces in magazines about whalers having a mutiny, or whalers fighting a big whale, but I think what you’re looking for is ‘Mocha Dick, or the White Whale of the Pacific’ by Jeremiah N. Reynolds. I don’t think Melville was even trying to hide where he got the idea for the book from.”
Alex paused for a couple seconds and finally asked, “Willow, how do you know all this stuff?”
Willow spilled the beans. “Umm, well, after we talked the last time, I went and looked some stuff up.”
Alex told her, “I don’t care that you looked stuff up. You remembered all of it! You’re still the smartest person I know, and that’s even after I met Sam Carter.”
Willow blushed so hard she could hardly talk for like half a minute.
* * *
On Wednesday, the basketball team had their third-round game. Everyone who was going got to leave school a few hours early, because they had a long drive up to the Bay Area for the game. Alex rode on the team bus with the team and the coaches and the cheerleaders and the other school photographer. And some parents and school administrators, too, so the guys like Jackson and Mike had to behave themselves. And Alex sat next to Ray, and they did homework together.
With some parents and the principal on the bus, people had to find stuff to do that wasn’t loud and naughty. So Donna had her cheerleaders pull out their books and do homework before they could go sit with their boyfriends or pull out their iPods or whatever. Alex knew Donna was kind of bossy as a head cheerleader, but she hadn’t realized Donna was also bossy in a good way.
It was kind of cool to watch. Donna was trying to get her own homework all done, but she was also making sure that the other cheerleaders got help when they needed it.
Okay, Alex figured out what was going to happen about half an hour before it did happen. Donna brought Mika over to Alex and asked, “You’re a big math brain. Can you show Mika how to do straight lines and slopes? I was lousy at it, and Debi doesn’t remember from last year.”
Alex started out, “Sure, but I’m not a big math brain …”
Donna made a huge sigh of frustration. “Ray, is Alex a big math brain?”
Ray grinned. “Totally.”
“Ray!” Alex squeaked in embarrassment.
But Ray just went on. “She’s taking AP calculus and has a solid ‘A’ in it, and she got a 750 on her math SAT, and she’s probably one of the top ten math brains in the whole school. Plus, she doesn’t rub it in your face.”
By then, Alex was so red it felt like her face was on fire. But she wasn’t going to start saying she wasn’t all that great at math. And it was only partly because Donna thought Alex did a ‘fake modesty’ thing that she totally didn’t. No, it was mainly because she kept seeing Maggie Walsh saying, “I didn’t think of that.”
Alex just said, “Ray, you’re embarrassing me. And scoot over.” She made him slide over, and she slid right up against him, and she patted the part of the seat next to her. “C’mon Mika, have a seat.”
And it wasn’t that hard to help Mika. The problem was Mika didn’t think she could do stuff like slopes and intercepts and graphing. She had some graph paper, and she was supposed to draw lines for four problems, and she hadn’t got past the first problem because she plotted like fifteen points, and one of them was way wrong, so when she tried to draw the line everything went weird.
Alex checked Mika’s math and said, “Okay, you’re doing really good. You just have to believe you’re doing good. And don’t plot fifteen points. If it’s a straight line, do two super-easy points. Like one point when x is zero and one point when y is zero. Or one point when x is zero, and one point when x is one.”
Mika looked kind of worried. “But … when x is zero, y’s just 4. And when y is zero, x is just …” She had to stop and scribble a bit to work it out. “Minus three?”
Alex gave her a smile. “Yep. Just draw those two points for me on your graph you already did. Okay?” Mika was okay with that. So Alex said, “Now just draw a straight line right through the points.”
Mika pulled out a little plastic ruler and drew the line. “Okay, but what about plotting the other points?”
Alex smiled. “You don’t have to. You’re all done now. A straight line just needs two points — any two points — for you to figure it out. And you did it.”
Mika gaped. “Alex, you are like totally a math genius!”
Alex didn’t get how just explaining something one more time made her a genius. But she talked Mika through how to write a formula in slope-intercept form, and then Mika could see the slope and intercept right in front of her.
Mika whispered, “I am totally glad I voted for you for Homecoming Queen.” Then she hurried back to her seat next to Debi.
Alex looked over, and Ray was giving her that big smirk, so she whispered, “Don’t you say a word, Raymond Alvarado.”
He just grinned and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
But then Debi wanted help on her trig, and then Donna reluctantly had a science question for her Biology and Physics Fundamentals class which Alex already took two years ago, and then Heyward had a math question, and …
And so she spent the rest of the trip playing tutor to about a third of the other students on the bus. At least, when they all got off the bus, several parents gave her a thumbs-up and the principal gave her a big smile. She would rather have had time to get her American Lit paper drafted.
The good part was that once they were in the gym she had over half an hour when she could work away on her tablet all by herself, while the cheer squad got ready and the guys put on their uniforms and warmed up on the court. She got some math done, even if it was getting too noisy for most people to concentrate well. Being Terawatt taught you the valuable life skill of being able to concentrate on something while everything around you was going whacko, but without you losing all your situational awareness. So when a basketball came bouncing her way, she just picked up one foot and let the ball bounce off her sole and go back onto the court.
Donna trotted over and knelt down on the floor next to Alex. “Hey, thanks for helping the squad out on the bus. I appreciate it.”
Alex just shrugged. “Sure. It wasn’t like I would’ve said no.”
Donna insisted, “Plenty of people would’ve. Totally. Especially when they’re sitting with their BF …” Donna looked around uncomfortably. “Look, I’m sorry I was so bitchy at you about the Homecoming Queen thingy.”
Alex told her, “It’s okay. I’m really sorry about the market segmentation thing, and the campaign texts, and the exit polls, and everything else Louis did without telling me. But they were all so cheesed off at Kelly, and okay, I was, too, I mean, I went and voted for two of the people she was being mean about partly because she was being so mean.”
Donna admitted, “Nicole was pretty mad at me, and she told me how you didn’t want to run for Homecoming Queen at all, and how you were really P.O.’ed at Louis when you found out what he’d been doing.”
Alex grimaced. “Yeah, well, I couldn’t blame you. Or Kelly. I mean, I would’ve been super-upset if I found out someone like Kelly or Libby was running a dirty tricks campaign against me. That was totally not okay.”
Donna said, “No, really the only dirty tricks campaign was Kelly. Against me and Trish. Sometimes I cannot believe that bitch. Louis was just doing stuff like for real elections. That was majorly smart. I mean, that was like state-governor-election tactics. Sometimes Louis seems like a complete goofball, and then there are times like this …”
Alex didn’t want to say too much, but still … “Louis is really, really good at business. He gets it from his dad. He did this like a business marketing study and a business advertising campaign. But he doesn’t work as hard at other stuff, and he’ll do just about anything on a bet. He once spent like two whole days non-stop trying to convince the whole town that I was the Mystery Kid. He lost like fifty bucks on that one. And just the other week he bet Marsha’s brother he could get his head in between the spindles on her stairs, and he won the money, but then he had his head stuck and he couldn’t get it back out.”
Donna snickered. “Roger bet him he couldn’t get a quarter to roll down his forehead and down his nose. But Cliff rubbed a pencil all around the quarters, so Roger and Louis had these black lines running down their faces, and neither one told the other, so they were walking around like …”
Alex snorted with laughter. “I remember that. Marsha made him spit on a paper napkin and she scrubbed his face like she was the mom and he was like four, and he was really embarrassed because Marsha did it right in the main hall in front of everybody.”
Donna laughed and gave her a hug and said, “But thanks for being nice to my squad, even if I wasn’t nice about homecoming.” She hopped to her feet and ran over to where the cheer squad was chatting with the other team’s cheerleaders.
Alex tucked her tablet away in her camera bag and got ready to be A.L. Mack, professional shutterbug. And really, who dreamed up a word like ‘shutterbug’ anyway? But the lights in the gym were a little weird, so she had to take some photos and look at the color profile and manually adjust some settings so the pictures would come out right without dragging them into Photoshop and messing around with the colors there. Then she had to go over and help the other shutterbugs with their settings, because it wouldn’t be right to let them spend hours taking pictures and end up with junky stuff.
And then the game was great! The other team was one of the top teams from the Bay Area in their division, and the teams were pretty evenly matched. The other team had a taller center and a taller shooting guard and a power forward who was almost as beefy as Heyward. But Jerrold was better at small forward and Ray was better at point guard. Still, Ray and Jerrold and Heyward more than made up for the other team’s great center and shooting guard, and Ray’s team won by six!
The ride home on the bus was great, with everyone singing and yelling and celebrating, even if some of the guys hadn’t showered enough after the game. She was so glad Ray wasn’t all stinky and stuff, because she got a lot of hugs and kisses. And their team was going to the semi-finals Friday night in Los Angeles.
* * *
On Thursday, Jack and Willow called her on the tPhone. As soon as it rang with the ‘My Little Pony’ music, she pulled the phone over to her with TK and flew into the guest bedroom for privacy. Not that you had a lot of privacy with an eight-year-old who had telepathy and maybe even some precognition. Plus a tendency to snoop at doors.
“Tera here. What’s the situation?”
Jack said, “Oh, come on, say ‘what’s the sitch’.”
Willow added, “He’s got a ton of Kim Possible jokes ready, so I wouldn’t if I were you.”
“Party pooper.”
“That’s not what you said the last time we had time together.”
“Well, what I said then is not suitable for the delicate, shell-like ears of innocent young maidens.”
“Well … nyah!”
Alex rolled her eyes while Jack and Willow teased each other.
Jack finally got back to the point. “So Acid Burn’s been searching through electronic archives of newspapers all over the planet, looking for suspicious stuff.”
Willow bubbled, “We may have a hit!” The bubbliness trailed off. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”
Jack said, “There are some accounts in Toronto that made the news. And they’re maybe-yes maybe-no stories. We’re sending some people up to snoop around. But I wanted you to get a heads-up, in case we need to send you up there.”
Alex groaned. “Yeah, because the thing with Batman went so well. And please please please don’t make it be Friday night! Ray has a mega-huge game!”
Jack replied, “It won’t be like that. If we’re doing a meet-and-greet with another superhero, we can schedule it on our own time.”
Alex sighed in relief. “Good! Because if we win Friday night, we play next Saturday for the state championship in our division!”
Jack carefully asked, “And your team isn’t getting any special perks thanks to Danielle’s sloppy policies with tossing out the garbage, right?”
Alex winced a little. “I don’t know. I mean, I told you about Ray. He’s good, but he’s not Lebron James. And our center is just as good as he already was last year, but he’s healthier, but that might just be luck. And our power forward grew a ton since last year, and put on a ton of muscle, and he’s definitely college-level good now. And so our power forward from last year is playing small forward, even though he’s 6'6", which isn’t all that usual for high school teams. And our shooting guard definitely hasn’t gotten any physical improvements.”
Willow hinted, “Sounds like someone’s been thinking about this a whole lot.”
Alex rolled her eyes, even though she was on the phone. “Well, sure. Around here, how could you not wonder?”
And Willow jumped back the original topic. “So if we have a Toronto superhero, we’re gonna want you to make the first meet-up.”
Jack just smirked. “Well, first we have to do the snooping around by subtle spy types in trench coats and fedoras.”
Willow giggled, “Tell her who you sent!”
Jack pretended to worry. “What if she hollers at me?”
“Come on!” Willow prodded.
Jack drew it out some more. “We-ell, I might have sent part of Team Two up there to look around …”
Alex fussed, “You’re not gonna get Sergeant Carlson in trouble with his wife again, are you?”
Willow just giggled.
“Ja-ack!” Alex complained. “What did you do?”
Jack went with a game-show announcer voice. “Mark Carlson, you’ve won an all-expense paid trip for two for you and your lovely wife, to beautiful … Toronto!”
Alex gasped. “Jack! You didn’t!”
Willow bubbled, “He sure did! He even got Graham to talk to them about it first, and Corinne decided she wanted to go, instead of having Sergeant Carlson go do the husband-and-wife spy thing with Lieutenant Lupo.”
Well, duh. Corinne would probably rather eat rat poison than have her hubby go off to Toronto for a week of ‘sight-seeing’ with a drop-dead hottie like Jo Lupo. That totally wasn’t fair.
Willow kept going. “And Graham is going, too, and he’s taking his girlfriend Rita, who I still haven’t gotten to meet, and they’ll just be two fun-loving couples seeing the sights together and chatting with the Torontonians they meet. Nothing dangerous.”
Alex winced a little. She really hoped nothing dangerous happened, because way too much bad stuff had already happened to Corinne. She fumed, “Well, okay, but they better not get in trouble and get hurt or anything!”
Jack calmly said, “They’re not supposed to. It’s supposed to be a looking-at-sights and friendly-chatting type of op, not another Korea. If anything dangerous comes up, they’re supposed to call the cops and get out of the way and just watch while the Royal Canadian Mounted Police gallop to the rescue.”
“Jack! Really!” This time it was Willow complaining. “Alex, Toronto is a big city. They have regular police. They don’t have Mounties riding horses in the streets.”
“I knew that,” Alex said. Well, she had been pretty sure about it.
Jack finally admitted, “I’m hoping Mrs. Carlson will feel more useful this way, and she’ll feel less stressed the next time when the sergeant leaves her alone to go on a mission.”
Willow added, “And he’s got Lieutenant Marshall’s group fitting her for a way better prosthetic and Captain Fisher doing this special effects makeup for her face! I think she’ll be really excited about how it all comes out.”
Jack just said, “Miller told me she’s been really sensitive about paying for the prosthetics and surgeries herself, and he’s had Marshall’s people looking into the best prosthetics out there. We’re just not telling her what this one costs, since it’s part of the mission.”
Alex asked, “It doesn’t have a secret weapon hidden in the shin or something, does it?”
Jack stalled. “We-ell, not in the shin …”
“Jack!”
* * *
Alex worried about the Toronto op, and she worried about the upcoming basketball game, but nothing went wrong. She got her American Lit paper done, and she had to make up the chem lab from Wednesday afternoon, and she got Mr. Hooper to give her Friday’s pop quiz at lunchtime so she could leave early with the team, like she did on Wednesday.
And she ended up doing a ton of tutoring on the bus on the way down, just like the last time. Only this time, Donna orchestrated it all. So Alex had about fifty minutes of helping people right off the bat, and then everyone had to leave her and Ray alone for over an hour, and then Alex went and checked on everyone’s work and did some more tutoring, and then she got more no-pestering time working on her own stuff and leaning against Ray.
The game was just as tough as Wednesday’s game, only for a different reason. The opposing team had a 7' center and big forwards, so there was lots of battling and positioning down in the paint. Their guards weren’t as good as Ray and Jackson, so that meant Ray took more shots and he gave Jackson the ball more. And they won by five!
That was great. It meant they were in the finals, which would be next Saturday night in L.A., against the top-seeded team in the entire division.
Ray showed her the stats on their opponents. The Cougars hadn’t lost all year long, and they played in Los Angeles in a super-tough section. The Cougars were rated #1 in the whole state, and #2 in the entire country! Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, Ray showed her the playoff bracket. The Cougars had gotten a bye for their first game, but they had won their other games by 32 points, 28 points, and 35 points. Uh-oh.
Alex nervously asked, “If they’re rated number one in the state, what are we rated?”
Ray frowned. “Well, they keep changing our rating, because we won what people say is the easiest section in the state, but then we’ve done great in the playoffs so they keep giving us better ratings. And we won tonight, so maybe by next week we’ll be ranked like 10 or 11 in the state.”
Alex scowled. That didn’t seem fair, even if there were lots of other divisions and just scads of basketball teams up and down the state.
She just told herself over and over that she couldn’t use her powers to help them win next week. No matter what.
* * *
Then Jack called her on Saturday, and he didn’t sound happy. Alex hastily asked, “What’s wrong? You didn’t let Corinne get hurt, did you?”
Jack replied, “No, everyone in Toronto is fine. They’re just playing tourist and not making much progress, according to Miller. Seems that most of Toronto is hoping they really do have a superhero of their very own, so the reports are a tad … unreliable.”
Alex tried again. So … what’s going on? Are you okay? Because you don’t sound like a happy guy.”
He frowned. “No, I’m pretty much the opposite of a happy camper right now. Top Banana just told me that the President is getting serious pressure from a really powerful Senator to allocate you or Action Girl full-time as this scumbag’s personal bodyguard.”
Alex did a full-body cringe. “Please tell me it’s not that really creepy old guy with the bad jet-black toupee and the Southern accent who gets on TV all the time!”
“Him? Nope. It’s Senator Robert Kinsey, who’s got some serious pull these days. He’s chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which means he’s got everybody where it hurts: their bank accounts. Big Cheese told me that Kinsey’s a master of supporting other people’s porkbarreling from behind the scenes, so tons of powerbrokers owe him massive favors. This is going to be a problem.”
Alex complained, “Well, I can’t be a bodyguard! I’ve got school! And Shar! And Ray! And saving the world from monsters and supervillains and stuff!” It wasn’t whining. Really!
Jack muttered, “Well, it’s not like Hanna can do it, either. I’ve got Acid Burn investigating him, and I’m working on a plan for dealing with him, but I may need you in D.C. before long so you can personally tell him where he can shove it.”
Alex thought it over for a bit, and it seemed like Jack sure couldn’t tell this mega-important guy ‘no’ but Terawatt in person probably could. Even if he would probably be a jerkhead about it.
Jack suggested, “You know that ‘fold it seven ways and stick it where the sun don’t shine’ thing? Willow realized how you could actually do it with your morphing power.”
“Jack!” Honestly, Willow was supposed to be a good influence on Jack, not Jack being a bad influence on Willow! And now that Jack made her think about it, she could see how she could take something into her morph and leave it somewhere like that, but … EWW! She shuddered in disgust. And now she was stuck with that idea in her head, too! That was so gross!
* * *
And then a few days later, Alex got another heads-up. She was home making Tuesday night dinner, and her mom already had a really yummy-smelling chicken stew in the slow cooker, and Alex was getting Shar to make her special spinach-leaves-and-mandarin-oranges salad and she was teaching Shar how to cook rice the real way.
Rice was so easy. You dumped some rice into a nice, heavy pot. Then you dumped in twice as much cold water right out of the faucet. Then you heated it until it boiled, and you turned it down to a simmer and covered it for fifteen minutes. The end. Mega-easy, and it only took a few seconds of your attention at the start and in the middle, while you cooked the rest of dinner. Ray’s mom used ‘converted’ rice and Louis only knew how to do ‘instant rice’ in a microwave bag, but even instant rice took almost as long as real rice, and didn’t taste as good, and cost just a ton more.
She and Shar were smack in the middle of sautéing up a batch of Shar’s Special Carrots when the tPhone rang. Fortunately, Alex had her tPhone in her pocket and her earjack in her ear. She tapped the answer button with her TK and said, “I’m here, but I’ve got a little audience and we’re cooking dinner.”
Willow’s AutoTuned voice cheered, “Oh, great! Say hi for me!”
Jack added, “Me, too.”
Alex let Shar stir the carrots again before she asked Shar, “Hey, guess what?”
Shar grinned and hopped up and down on the balls of her feet. “It’s Auntie Willow and Uncle Jack! Say hi for me, too! And if it’s top secret stuff, I can go watch a movie.”
Right, because getting out of household tasks so you could watch “The Iron Giant” again was always a favorite Shar tactic. She said, “You just watch the heat on those carrots. We don’t want ’em to get all burned and yucky.”
She didn’t bother with her usual Terawatt tone as she replied, “She says hi right back at ya. Is there a problem?”
Jack told her, “No, I just wanted to give you an FYI so you’d know there wasn’t a problem.”
“Okay, Jack, that makes a sense that is … not.” She was pretty sure she’d gotten that line from other-Buffy or other-Willow, but she liked it.
Willow said, “So two couples we know had a wonderful vacation in beautiful Toronto, even if it was kind of cold, and somebody’s new foot works way better than before, and she was so happy about it she cried on the conference call. And she really hit it off with Graham’s girlfriend, who’s really nice.”
Jack chipped in, “More importantly, we don’t have a superhero for you to go meet. There may be one, but he —”
“Or maybe she!” insisted Willow.
“— or maybe she or possibly even both is keeping a really low profile if they are real. And he never tackles more than a couple of ordinary human bank robbers. But the whole city’s amped about maybe having their very own superhero, so some of the stories our team heard are probably … suspect. From what our foursome heard from a couple dozen different people, our hero or heroine may have one or more of: super-speed running, flight, super-strength, and some other stuff. Or it may be a team that has a power each. Or it may be an urban legend. On the other hand, a weird guy playing the guitar on a street corner insisted the super was an older man in a white lab coat carrying a raygun. So maybe we have zilch. At any rate, you can scratch those plans to go visit sunny Toronto.”
“So I just have to deal with the senator?”
Jack insisted, “No way. I have to deal with him, but I’ll probably be pulling you in for the meeting. Maybe you and A.G. can do a little hammer-and-anvil on him and flatten him out.”
Shar stirred the carrots some more and piped up, “I could firebend him!”
Jack snorted in amusement, so Alex knew he had heard that. Then Jack stopped being amused. “I just had a thought. I need to go call Inspector Erskine and ask him for a favor.”
Willow pointed out, “I told you that you should’ve been nicer to him!”
After they hung up, Alex spent several minutes trying to figure out the connection Jack had made between being amused by Shar and needing to call the FBI’s CTU. Everything she came up with was pretty grim.
* * *
On Saturday, they drove back to Los Angeles for the division championship game. Alex was on the team bus again, but this time there were at least half a dozen other buses hired out to drive people to the game, and a bunch of people driving in their own cars. It was a good thing the championship game was in a big place, instead of a dinky little high school gymnasium.
The Cougars were a big team. Their center was maybe 7'2" and their power forward was taller than Heyward, even if he wasn’t as wide, and their small forward was maybe two inches taller than Jerrold. Alex winced inwardly a little bit, because Jerrold hadn’t had to defend against a bigger small forward all year long. And the Cougars had a hotshot shooting guard who was like 6'6" and with long arms. Ray was the only guy bigger than his opponent, because their starting point guard was about 6'1". And the Cougars had a really good bench, too. People in Paradise Valley were talking about all of their starters playing college ball for somebody, but people were talking about even the Cougars’ benchwarmers being good enough to play college ball for someone really good.
So the Cougars started off with a really mega-tough man-to-man defense. People were getting pushed around and knocked down and stuff, and there were lots of fouls, and Jackson lost his temper and shoved the guy guarding him and got a technical, which was really stupid, even if the guy was totally shoving him and stuff. But the Paradise Valley team was playing a really aggressive triangle-and-two, and Ray was keeping the Cougars’ point guard from being able to make easy passes to their shooters. At the end of the first quarter, the Cougars were down by two, and Tony had a bloody nose, and Jerrold had an icepack on his ribs from a nasty elbow.
In the second quarter, it got pretty obvious what the Cougars were trying to do. Since they couldn’t just stomp Ray’s team and Ray was doing a great job against their point guard, the Cougars were trying to make everyone foul everybody. By halftime, everyone except Ray was in major foul trouble, and two of the Cougars’ starters had fouled out. But in the third quarter, they found out that the Cougars’ bench was mega-good. Their replacements were almost as good as their starters, and had a lot fewer fouls. Tony went down hard in a tussle for a rebound and had to be helped off the court. Then Jerrold fouled out. Then Jackson fouled out.
In the fourth quarter, it was Ray and Heyward and three guys off their bench who just weren’t as good as Tony and Jerrold and Jackson, even if Cliff was a better defender than Jackson was. And even with Ray stalling like crazy, their tiny lead was slowly slipping away. Ray made a couple of three-pointers to keep ahead of the Cougars, but once Heyward fouled out — on a call that Alex really thought was totally wrong — their team was in serious trouble and just wasn’t getting much in the way of rebounds at either end of the court. So the Cougars pulled ahead. And even with Ray stalling a bunch and making three more shots, the Cougars won by six.
Everybody on their side of the court was totally cheesed off and sad and grumpy. The Cougars were really good, but they won by playing a totally dirty game. The Cougars fans called it ‘hard-nosed’. Alex didn’t. But she had some really good pictures she was sure KPVC and the paper would want to run, like the Cougar center elbowing Tony in the face, and the Cougar guard jabbing Jackson in the kidneys which was why Jackson lost his temper and got that T, and a Cougar forward taking out Tony’s legs so he fell really hard on his hip and got knocked out of the game.
Donna tried really hard to be spirited and to look on the bright side on the team bus on the way home, but pretty much everyone, even Alex, was totally discouraged. Alex spent her time going through her still and video footage, and emailing stuff off.
And when she got home, she found out that her mom and dad had driven down with Shar and the Alvarados, and when Tony got knocked out of the game, Shar had gotten so mad that Aunt Barb had needed to take Shar for a walk away from the game for over twenty minutes, until Shar cooled down. Literally.
Her mom admitted, “Shar was really mad. Your dad’s ice cream just suddenly melted like he threw it in a furnace. I hustled her right out of there. Fortunately, there’s a big fountain outside there, and no one was looking while Shar … umm … blew off some steam. When she was done, maybe a third of the water was boiled off. And she cried herself to sleep in the car on the way home. It really wasn’t fair what happened to Tony. But how do you explain to an eight-year-old that sometimes the bad team wins?”
Alex sighed. “Especially this eight-year-old. She really needs to believe the goodguys win, because she’s in the middle of the biggest good-guys-versus-bad-guys fight in the world.”
Her mom hugged her. “No honey, you’re in the middle of that battle, and you’re doing a great job of keeping Shar out of it.”
She just hugged her mom hard for a long time.
But when Alex went to bed that night, Shar crawled in bed with her and cried, “It’s not fair the mean guys got to win and we didn’t!”
Alex just held Shar and rubbed her back and told her, “Honey, sometimes the mean people win, but not for too long, and then everyone finds out they’re jerkheads and doesn’t like ’em anymore. Look at what we did in Japan. The badguys won a bunch of times in a row until Uncle Jack showed how smart he really is, and then I went out there and they won again, but then you and Jack and Riley came to the rescue and you saved me, and then you and me and Yuki turned Gojira into a french-fried ice cube and the good guys won at the end. And that’s what really matters.”
And she just cuddled with Shar and rubbed Shar’s back until Shar fell asleep again. Then Alex used her TK and lifted Shar up and tucked the little girl in her bed with Piki.