The Baller: A Down and Dirty Football Novel - Vi Keeland Page 0,40

Not to mention that I really didn’t need any more attention on my personal life. My job was to report stories, not be the story. Yet, as I tossed and turned, unable to fall asleep, I wondered if he was okay.

The room was pitch dark. I considered pretending to be asleep. Morning would likely bring more clarity. Not much good usually came from getting upset at midnight.

Brody didn’t turn on any lights. He made his way to the other side of the room, and I heard him unzip his pants and toss them on the chair in the corner. He didn’t turn on the light in the bathroom until the door was closed. A few minutes later, the bed dipped, and he slipped in beside me. My eyes were shut, but I could feel him looking at me.

“Her name was Willow.” His voice was barely a whisper, and there was a sadness to it that made me forget I was pissed at him in an instant.

Even though the room was virtually dark, I could see his eyes. They were filled with an anguish that caused a physical ache in my pounding chest. I cupped his cheek, and he closed his eyes for a few moments. When he reopened them, he continued. “I was thirteen when she moved in next door to me. She and her mother moved in with her grandmother. She was beautiful. And wild. I wasn’t a saint, that was sure as shit, but Willow . . . she just had a streak in her.”

He paused for a long time. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t find the right words. It was obvious that wherever this story would lead, it wasn’t going to end well. So I waited until he was ready.

“Her mother was a drug addict. She didn’t stick around very long. She’d disappear for months at a time, and every once in a while she’d reappear long enough to rob her mother blind and screw up Willow all over again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We did normal, wild teenager things, like pool hopping in the community pool, taking the train to jump off the rocks into the Harlem River where the waterway meets Spuyten Duyvil Creek, or stealing a bottle from her grandmother’s liquor cabinet and riding the subways while passing it back and forth in a brown paper bag. Teenage shit. But Willow was always pushing for more. It seemed to get worse every time her mother would reappear. We lived in apartment buildings next to each other in Brooklyn. They were close together, but not attached. There was maybe three, three-and-a-half feet between our flat rooftops. When her mother would reappear, Willow would come to my apartment, jumping from roof to roof. She’d straddle the jump, not thinking twice about the thirty-foot drop to concrete below her. She’d go from being wild to dangerous.”

There was a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach listening to him talk about Willow. For so many reasons. I’d met Drew around the same age as he’d met Willow. I knew how my story ended, and now I knew his wasn’t going to be pretty either.

“I could spend hours telling you the shit we went through together over the years. But I’d rather fast forward and give you the Cliffs Notes version so you can understand why I lost it today.”

“Okay.”

“By the time we were seniors in high school, Willow had followed in her mother’s footsteps. She’d found drugs and quickly went from experimenting to chasing a high on a daily basis.” Brody let out a humorless laugh. “You should see the looks you get riding the subway at two a.m. with an eighteen-year-old you just pulled out of a crack house and a seventy-year-old woman in a bathrobe and curlers. There were nights when I’d have to toss Willow over my shoulder because she couldn’t walk, and poor Marlene would be right next to me.”

Brody paused again, and his next words hit me hard. “I hated her so damn much, but I couldn’t make myself stop loving her.”

I laced my fingers together with his and squeezed.

“I was recruited by some of the best colleges in the country, but I wanted to stay local. Senior year, I’d narrowed it down to Syracuse and University of Georgia. My dad was pushing for me to be a Bulldog and we all knew why, although we didn’t talk about it. When Willow disappeared for six weeks right before I had to commit to