With one rising basketball star and one player flaming out, Emma Pacchiana captures both the triumph and grief of the game. What would you do if you could see the end of being able to do the thing you loved? In every detail, “The Pick” drops the reader right into the world of the characters, a world rendered so specifically, you’ll not soon forget it.
He was six foot ten and three-quarters, The Pick, and weighed in at 230 pounds, with a wingspan of seven-five and a size fourteen shoe. He’d lived in Michigan since birth (on August 3rd, 2005) and averaged thirty-one and a half points per game his senior year at South Christian High School, where he’d also played running back for the football team. Now, as he neared the end of his freshman season at Kentucky, he had the highest rebound average in the NCAA since 2007. He wore number 33 and drove a Mercedes G-Wagon with a custom pink leather interior. His girlfriend’s name was Shayna Rice-Watson. He loved Dragon Ball Z.
We knew everything about him, even though some of us wished we didn’t, even though some of us would have driven down to Grand Rapids in 2003 and stopped his parents from ever meeting if we could have. Our front office considered him a gift to the sport of basketball that ranked with the invention of sweat-wicking polyester. Some of us held the same opinion. Some of us forced ourselves to. All fourteen of us saw his stats like laughing skulls floating in front of us when we were unable to sleep, as we lay awake in bed next to our wives or girlfriends or Snoopy plushes, feeling his existence weighing down on our own like an evil twin, like the prodigal son, like our own dead fathers. Because we sucked. Because we had to suck. Because we were doing it for him.
One of these nights in the middle of March found me on the phone with my old buddy CJ, complaining for the tenth time about something I’d seen on Instagram. I was in the bathroom of my hotel room, icing my left knee. The meniscus tear was from college three years earlier. Nicholson, the team physician, said my flareups were psychosomatic. I’d never told any of the guys that. The psycho part.
“These fucking fanboys are turning him into a monster,” I was griping. “He’s so into his own hype. They think he’s the second coming of Kobe. Guy’s not even in the league yet and he’s going on Live saying Dame’s washed? Fuck that. Just because you were doing jumpshots in preschool—I swear I almost commented something, told him to just shut the fuck up. He’s so up his ass it actually pisses me off.”
“Maybe you should,” CJ said. “Maybe it’d finally get Hatch to trade you. Be done with all this shit.”
“Nah,” I told him. “It’s not the same.” CJ’d been unloaded onto Utah a month back. He and I were drafted together out of Duke, but he’d always been a league above me in talent, which was why Hatch, the GM, considered him a potential liability to the mission of losing as many games as possible before the end of the season. I was more like an asset. If I got traded now, with my stats, it would probably be to another team tanking for their shot at The Pick, and I’d be in the same position I already was. Or worse.
“Your ego is not your amigo,” CJ drawled in his familiar elder-hippie impression. “It’s all good. Just gotta keep your head down.”
“You wanna come down and hook me up with some of your shit? Get my ego under control?” It was only half a joke. CJ was heavily into microdosing—part of why the Utah relo stung so bad. We had tentative postseason plans to trip in California most of the summer, with CJ playing point on logistics and me on the back court, just like it used to be.
“Yeah, right, man. Your luck, you get a piss-test the next fuckin’ day.”
“Yeah.” I adjusted the pack on my leg, tried to wipe away some of the condensation with the bottom of my foot. “Whatever,” I said. “He drops me, he’ll regret it. I’m their best shot at getting to the bottom. Their golden ticket. Jaylen Thompson, God-emperor of the suck-fest.” The heel of my sock rubbed harder into my finicky knee, worrying cotton fibers into the dark hollow between femur and tibia.
“Don’t go there,” CJ said. “I’m not indulging. It’s two months. Make your money, get your stats up. Then we go to Joshua Tree and get our shit expanded. And then it’s the draft, and after that you’re set for life. Right?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe Hatch says I’m dead weight too. Throws me out for a second-rounder.”
CJ was quiet. “Ceej?” I asked him after a moment. The knee was starting to burn again. “You there?”
“Hey, man,” he said. “You talk to Kevin lately?”
* * *
Once we were back at home, I grabbed him the first chance I got. Kevin was our ball boy. He was about five-eight, under 150 pounds, and imagined himself a future ESPN contributor, always nosing around some bullshit gossip trail, which was supposedly the way he’d gotten the information CJ heard he had. It also meant he allowed us to routinely emasculate him in exchange for the chance to ask us stupid questions, so after practice I made him stand under the hoop and pass me shots to dunk on top of him. But when I tried to bring up The Pick, he was evasive. “You’ve gotta be dying to play with him, right?” was all he said, yelling over the sound of my Jordans on the hardwood.
“Sure,” I said once I’d landed, once Kevin was scrambling for the ball I’d slammed down an inch from his head. “If we get him.”
“You must be stoked, though.” Kevin dribbled twice, then passed the ball to me and wiped his upper lip with a skinny wrist. “You’ll be key if Hatch builds the roster around him. Your defense, I mean.” He kept talking as I went for the jump shot. “You’ll be, like, a part of something.” I ignored him, ran for the ball myself and turned back to dunk it again, my fingers slippery around the rim, the rubber just slightly off-balance in my hands, sloppy, too aggressive, too volatile, with poor handling, everything all my coaches had tried to drill out of me in college, when I’d gone from king of the shit, the best high-school small forward in Virginia in a decade, to redshirt on a team of All-Americans with a screwy knee and a dad who’d killed himself. The ball bounced violently off the rim and flew to the other end of the court.
While Kevin ran after it, I sat, resting on my palms behind me, and spat on the floor. “Kevin,” I yelled to him. “Hey.”
“Yeah?” He returned, ball under his arm.
“When The Pick gets here—if he gets here, I mean. Don’t fucking kiss his ass. Don’t act like you were just acting with me. It pisses me off, and I’m not even a star. He won’t be able to stand you.”
“Hey, man.” Kevin’s freckly forehead creased to a frown. “I was just making conversation. You don’t have to, like—”
“I suck, okay? My job is to suck. I get paid to suck. Paid a lot more than you. You know it, I know it, Hatch knows it, every fuckin’ butt about to be in this stadium tonight knows it. So don’t come in here talking like you think I’m so great. It’s fucking, like, offensive.”
“You guys don’t really suck,” Kevin said. “You’re just losing. It’s a tactical position.”
“My foot up your ass is a tactical position.”
“You know what, Thompson?”
“What?” I stood up. “Level with me, dude. Stop sucking up. CJ says you got dirt on this guy. Okay. Hit me.”
“CJ said that?” Kevin’s rabbity eyes glared up at me.
“Is it true?”
“Why you wanna know?” His voice was faux-tough-guy, little brother trying to hang. I stared him down. When you have eight inches on a guy it’s easy to do. Eight inches and a once-upon-a-time million-dollar option. I just put it into my gaze.
“You didn’t hear it from me,” Kevin finally muttered. Then he reached into his pocket and showed me something on his phone.
* * *
The whole way back to the lockers I had to stop myself from giggling. I felt like somebody in a musical, bouncing around on the soles of my sneakers to a song only I could hear. The song: The number one pick is a total scumbag! To me, it was more beautiful than any girl’s voice. I just couldn’t help spreading it around. First to the guys in the showers when I came in, then to Malik Valentine, our starting center and the team brains, per himself. By the time I finished texting him I could see Murray and Isaac and Trey already on their phones, investigating, disseminating. An hour after I heard it from Kevin, there were nine of us at the practice building, hunkered in the chrome-and-glass players’ lounge outside the locker room, discussing.
“The question,” Valentine was saying, leaning with folded arms against the big window overlooking the river, “is how long has this been out there? ’Cause I heard something last week, some people saying he was accused or whatever. But if we’re talking Kevin the towel boy, Kevin and, you know—no offense, JT,” he said, holding out a big hand in my direction. “But Kevin and Thompson, that’s a little more, uh, mainstream.”
“Kevin told me on Monday,” Trey said. This was news to me, but then Trey was the highest-drafted in the room: fourth overall, but injury-prone, and now best known for spending half his salary trying to get featured on LeagueFits. It looked like Kevin had been making some tactical choices of his own. I slouched a little in my brown leather chair, adjusting the position of the knee, anticipating the strain I suddenly felt approaching.
“So it’s getting around,” said Isaac. “So maybe we go to Hatch.”
“We had a game on Monday,” Gordon Pope said, narrowing his eyes at Trey. “We could have gone to him then.” Pope was the oldest on the roster, twenty-seven and generally about as serious as a grade-three Achilles rupture. He’d been sitting on the bench for the last month, not quite a trade asset anymore but still a better player than most of us who were currently starting. He and I played the same position. If we hadn’t been trying to lose on Monday, Pope probably would’ve gotten some good minutes.
“I don’t even know if this shit is true, dude.” Trey shrugged. “Like, some girl says some shit happened in high school. Okay. Is Hatch even gonna care?”
“It’s a couple people saying it,” I said, a little too loudly. “This guy says basically everybody at his school knew. And she was only fourteen. And she has all these fucked-up texts—”
Isaac cut in. “You can fake texts.”
“Yeah, but—”
“In college I was tight with this guy that basically got kicked out because he was messing with this psycho chick who—”
“We get it,” Valentine said. “Thompson’s right. It seems, I mean, nothing’s positive, but it seems pretty legit.”
“Yeah.” I pulled on the end of the tape on my knee, fidgeting with the fraying threads on the edges.
“Question is,” Valentine continued, “will this even matter?” There was a moment of confused silence. “Like, say it’s true. What’s the odds this actually, in the real world, stops him from getting picked first?”
For some reason, I felt myself looking over at Pope. He was staring at his sneakers. Everybody was pretty quiet. Valentine was still standing with arms folded, authoritative, calm. He was beginning to really piss me off. Who decided he was our big leader anyway, the twenty-year-old who still bragged about his ACT score? He was just a starter on a tanking roster along with the rest of us, sucking just like everybody else. I stood up.
“We can get people to take this serious,” I said. “It is serious. That chick said she tried to kill herself. You really wanna play with somebody like that?”
“I’m just saying, JT,” Valentine said, “it’s not what I personally—”
“I do.” We both turned to Trey, who’d interrupted him. “Whatever,” he said. “I think he’s a douchebag. He’s still a great player. I’m not gonna ask what you guys do in your personal lives. And no hate, but I’d rather be on a team with him than with any of you.”
“Fuck off, Trey.” This was Murray, who’d been sitting mostly silent in the armchair next to mine. “That’s messed up. You know my little sister got date-raped in college? And besides, y’all are both point guards, you’re getting traded if we get him anyway.”
“I can play at the two,” Trey said. “Better than you.”
“People are gonna care about this,” I said, trying to regain some control of the conversation. My ears were hot. I could feel this slipping away fast, the lucky break I thought we’d finally been given turning into more of the same old demoralizing bullshit. I couldn’t believe it was possible that the fucked-up story I’d finally gotten out of Kevin would literally change nothing—but at the same time, once I thought about it, I suddenly couldn’t imagine anything else. “Hatch will care,” I insisted, even though I was believing it less with every word. “It’ll make the team look bad.”
“Look bad?” said Isaac. “We are bad.”
“Yeah, and it’s—we could be good! This fuckin’ situation sucks! Why am I busting my ass playing four games in five days, not sleeping, killing my knees, killing my stat line—”
“Thompson, you barely have a stat line.”
“Shut the fuck up. You know what I’m saying. Shouldn’t there be somebody to give a fuck about us? Hatch doesn’t care. The front office would dump any one of us. Maybe Coach cares, but they could fire him too. The fans hate us. Even The Ringer hates us. Like—fuck, is this really what we wanted to be doing in the fucking NBA? Do we seriously not even care about—like, ourselves?” Horribly, my voice cracked a little on the last few words. My throat felt weird and scratchy. And I didn’t even know what the hell I was talking about. I kicked my sneakers at nothing and shut my mouth.
“He’s not wrong,” I heard Murray say after a heavy silence. “It could be something. I mean, look at, you know, Bill Cosby and shit.”
“This guy’s not Bill Cosby, man,” Trey said. “He’s a kid.”
“Yeah, and look at D-Rose,” Isaac added. “He played for ages. Shit, look at Kobe.”
“You better not be saying shit about Kobe,” warned Valentine.
“Get Kobe’s name out of your fucking mouth, dude.”
“Step off, I didn’t mean—”
The room was suddenly gridlocked, overlapping arguments and justifications and cussing drowning out every other thought, what always happened when somebody brought up Kobe. I couldn’t get a word in. Nobody cared what I had to say anyway. The tape was peeling off, hanging loose on my aching knee. I ripped it off and stepped out of the crush, holding the sweaty cotton in one fist, my phone in the other. The screen lit up with a notification that The Pick was going live.
I shut the door to the lounge and sat down on the floor. The knee burned cold and precise, like I could feel every separate tendon inside it. The Pick was streaming from a pool party, filming his friends drinking White Claws and throwing their girlfriends in the water, college freshmen and sophomores whose names and positions and stats I knew automatically and wished I didn’t. I was twenty-three, supposed to be cresting my peak, the best I’d ever be, and instead I was nothing, just a cog in somebody else’s machine. I watched the screen as I wrapped the tape back onto my knee, but it was frayed and stretched-out and losing its stickiness and peeled up every time I tried. CJ’s voice was in my ears as I watched the feed: maybe you should. Be done with this shit. The Pick was trash-talking some guy shooting hoops from the pool. It was the same kind of party I went to way too many of in my freshman year at Duke, the kind I used to black out at on nights before we traveled for games, because I wasn’t playing anyway and it didn’t matter and I was just a kid and my dad was dead. When he flipped the camera around and started reading comments, I turned off my phone. Everybody was going to pretend like it never happened. My knee really hurt when I tried to walk, hurt in a way that just couldn’t be psychosomatic, psycho-anything. We had a game in six hours, a game I would be starting in, a game we would lose. We were giving up our best years for this guy. Every time I tried to take a step, to put any pressure on the left leg, my brain stopped me. It was busy thinking about doing something else. Maybe you should, it said. Maybe.
* * *
“Jaylen?”
When I lifted my head, Dr. Nicholson was standing above me, looking down at my limp and sweaty slouch on the cot sympathetically. I nodded up at him and took the tiny paper cup he was offering, tossed it back and swallowed the painkillers dry. His other hand held two shiny black sheets with blurry skeletal images I couldn’t quite make out. I didn’t look at those. Instead I tried to smile, managed something that probably looked grotesque, and asked him, “Are we still losing?”
Nicholson laughed a little. “Game’s over,” he said. “98 to 120.”
“Cool,” I said. “Cool.” But when I tried to laugh back I found myself pressing both hands to my eyes and shivering, red and white cosmos swirling behind my eyelids, my head achy and cold and tired, so fucking tired, and then I was seeing it again, the fall, feeling the hands of the Cleveland guard as I tried to pass around him and failed. The sudden hopelessness of knowing it didn’t matter anyway, knowing nothing I did mattered, realizing all in one blow that basketball, my one purpose in life since age eight, wasn’t actually my purpose at all, it was always just some other guy’s purpose, some asshole kid whose shitty personality didn’t matter just because he could dunk from half-court, and I had to throw away mine so he could have his. Realizing it and faking out the guard anyway, throwing everything I had into one pointless twist and feint and getting off the pass to Valentine, and then once the ball was out of my hands feeling the insane ripping gutting pain in my knee, white in my eyes, nausea in my throat, and falling.
“Jaylen,” I heard Nicholson saying again, and his voice was surprisingly tender. “It’ll be okay.”
“Yeah,” I said, reflexively, wiping my eyes, trying to hide as much of my face as I could, giving the same automatic answer I’d been using for that phrase for five years. “I know,” I said.
“I mean your knee,” said Nicholson. “You should be able to make a good recovery. There’s been a lot of strain, but nothing was torn, and you won’t need another surgery. If you focus on healing up for the next few months, you should be back by next season.”
“Oh.” I looked blankly at the X-rays he was showing me, his finger tracing the image of my insides like I was supposed to know what it meant. I didn’t know how to take it. My season was over, he’d clearly implied, but that was obvious. I already knew that. I’d just kinda thought, in a part of my brain I hadn’t even realized existed until it was proven wrong, that my pro career was too. Without even meaning to, I’d already seen the next ten years unfolding in my head: healing up back in Virginia, a few months with my mom and my kid brother, then partying in SoCal and Vegas with CJ, no more drug tests, a sad enough story to get free drinks and attention from sensitive girls, then in a year or two off in Mexico or Brazil or somewhere cool in Asia to get the star treatment in a foreign league. It was all there at once, and the most enticing part of it all was imagining the draft, which I’d watch on TV if I saw it at all, watching The Pick go wherever he would go and not caring, knowing what he did and would probably do again and not caring, because it wouldn’t mean anything for me anymore. I’d have my own life, one where if I sucked I sucked on my own terms, for myself and nobody else.
“Okay,” I said to Nicholson. “Thanks. Seriously.”
“This is great news,” he told me. “The meds are probably making you a little foggy. Once you get a good night’s sleep, you’ll feel it.”
“Yeah.” I looked at the door. In fact I didn’t feel foggy at all; I felt wise, calm, maybe a little floaty, but in a good way, like I could see everything from above, things I hadn’t seen before. “Hey,” I said. “Did anybody grab my stuff from the lockers? My phone?” Nicholson went back into the office and returned with my gym bag, handed it off to me, probably figuring I had a girlfriend to text or something. The screen when I swiped up was filled with messages from people who had seen the fall on TV. I ignored them all and opened up Twitter instead. While I was sitting there the perfect words had come into my head, fully formed, just like the vision of myself as a G-Leaguer on the beach in Cancun: the perfect way to let everybody know exactly how fucked-up this situation was, let them know the kind of lowlife sociopath shit Hatch and the team and this whole suck-fest of a league were ignoring so they could make a billion dollars selling ads off some scummy teenager. I typed them out in one breath, not wanting to lose my chance, lose the feeling. I didn’t care what they did to me for saying it. I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore.
“See,” I heard Nicholson say as I hit Post. “There’s a smile. Now you’re realizing. You got really lucky.”
Emma Pacchiana is a writer and copy editor whose fiction has appeared in Foglifter and West Trade Review. She lives in Virginia with her wife and two cats and is represented by Samantha Haywood at the Transatlantic Agency.