Home Court Read Online Free PDF Page B

looking down at the scraped-up knee he got yesterday. “Definitely not much fun.”
    So it was a mutual decision. We weren’t scared of those guys. We just didn’t want to let those punks ruin a good Saturday. I looked at the bulky backpack. “What else you got in there?” I asked.
    â€œGot a Nerf football,” said Deuce.
    A few minutes later, I had it in my hands, ready to air it out.
    â€œMike, you go long,” I said. “And Deuce?”
    â€œI know, I know,” he said. “Go short.”
    We had a good time playing — I got my best grass stain of the day diving for one of Mike’s passes. Still, it kind of bothered me that we’d let those guys kick us off our own home court.

I woke up Sunday with stuff to do, and as soon as I hit the kitchen, Dad added one more thing to the list. He was holding up my shorts from yesterday like Exhibit A in the Crime of the Century. I’d just thrown them in with the rest of the laundry. I guess that was wishful thinking.
    â€œThink I can see some cloth in between all these grass stains,” he said. Then he leaned in and put his eyes right up close.
    â€œYeah,” I started (what was I going to do, deny it?), “we played some baseball and I was in the outfield, and then there was some Nerf —”
    â€œI don’t know about Nerf, but there’s definitely some turf,” he said, cutting me off. Then he tossed me the shorts. “Those are good shorts, so you get those stains out of there even if you’ve got to use a washboard.”
    I grabbed the grungy shorts out of the air and put them back by the washer. I sort of made a mental note to add it to my list of things to avoid doing. I looked around at the detergents and all that stuff. Whatever a washboard was, I didn’t think we had one.
    Sunday was always kind of heavy on chores. I also had to get some serious work done on that history paper, plus the rest of my homework. I had kind of a panicky feeling when I realized how much that was. That feeling must’ve passed pretty quickly, though, because I was down at the little park with my skateboard an hour later.
    I was rolling along the pavement at the bottom of a set of concrete steps. I tried an ollie and nailed it. Even though it was just a small one, it felt cool to jump through the air with the board stuck right to my sneakers. I felt like Superman, if Superman had any reason to skate.
    When I landed, I still had some decent speed. I tried to hop up on the first step for a boardslide. The steps had worn-down metal edges, so they were perfect, but I doinked it. The board got hung up on the edge and I went flying. And this time, it wasn’t the Superman kind of flying. I had to catch myself on the railing to avoid feeling like Clark Kent in the worst possible way.
    That was okay. It was just my first attempt of the day, and I already knew I could do a boardslide. I was just trying to get a little better at both tricks and to start linking them together. It’s just like basketball: Okay, so you can dribble and you can shoot. Now, dribble and shoot. Put those together for a pull-up jumper.
    The next trick I wanted to learn was a little tougher. I wanted to have these two down before I tried the pop-shuvit. In that one, you pop the board up in the air so that it’s spinning around under you. Then its wheels land on the ground right before you land on it. That was the idea at least. The few times I’d tried it, the wheels had landed somewhere else, and I was the one who ended up on the ground.
    Anyway, I worked on those first two tricks for a while, but before too long I had to leave to get back home. I wasn’t that late when I rolled into the driveway, but Junior was out there dribbling a basketball. “Come help me out,” he said, as if he were painting the house instead of working on his ballhandling.
    And what am I going to do, not help my older brother? So we got