Point Guard

morgan spencer

The starting five step out onto the court. Keegan is smaller than the rest of them, her jersey tucked into her shorts. She jumps slowly up and down, wiping the bottom of her shoes. I clap my hands above my head. She pulls her team into a huddle, explaining what each of them should do once she calls the play. Rose is standing off to the side, ignoring her, telling the team to instead pass her the ball.

Keegan was eight when she started playing basketball. Before, we had been given a pink basketball for Christmas, and I would play the opposite team, trying to defend her. We didn’t have a basketball hoop, so we used the streetlamp in the backyard. The score was always the same. Keegan with ten points. Me, with zero.

I was fifteen, when I started telling people that my sister was a basketball prodigy. I explained that she was going to be a professional someday, and get drafted once she left college. I explained that she was the number one point guard in the nation.

My sister wants to get multiple tattoos. On her rib she wants the two questions: What do you want? What are you willing to do to get there?

The game starts with eight minutes in the first quarter. Ella plays center, and grabs the ball from the air passing it back to Rose who is the pretend point guard. Keegan will call out the play, while Rose throws it to the wrong person. It rolls out of bounds, the other team gets the ball.

When we were sixteen, Keegan told me that she had considered quitting. She thought that it was too much pressure, it wasn’t fun anymore. She sat down next to me on her bed, her head between her hands. I have to be a role model, she said. I looked up at the basketball sitting in a case in her room.

I asked her if basketball still made her happy. I told her that the only thing that mattered is that she was happy.

She asked me if I wished I had continued to dance. I told her this was different.

It is halfway through the first quarter and the game is tied. The other team’s shots go in no matter where they shoot from on the court, and Rose continues to miss layups. I bite my nails, and can feel the sweat running between my shirt. I like it when Keegan’s team is winning, when the score is a forty point difference.

I want a tattoo of a tree growing up my right rib.

When I was fourteen, I told my mother that I didn’t want Keegan to play basketball anymore. I told her that I wished Keegan had never discovered basketball. We would never have to move to a different state, she would be able to hang out with me more then just one month out of the year. I said I wished that she had never picked up that pink basketball.

My mother left me sitting on the couch. She turned around, and asked me why I didn’t understand that she loved it? She grabbed my hand, and told me that I needed to support her, because Keegan had supported me.

At one of Keegan’s basketball tournaments the bleachers we were sitting on didn’t have backs to them. I leaned back, my fingers inside of a Haribo gummy bear bag. My father said the next thing he saw was my feet in the air.

It is the end of the second quarter and Keegan’s team is up by five points. There are five seconds left, and Ella throws Keegan the ball. She steps back and shoots it, watching it as it lands inside of the net. They are now ahead by eight points.

In sixth and seventh grade I wished that Keegan and I were not sisters, but instead two people who had never met.

When we were ten, Keegan’s trainer at the time, told us that she had potential to go all the way. I watched as she dribbled the ball between her legs. Her shorts were too big for her and our mother had to roll them up four times so they didn’t fall to the ground. I asked the trainer why he thought that? He told me that she is able to see the floor. She knows what everyone else is doing, and knows the travel before the travel happens.

I told Keegan in the car over the summer between our sophomore year and junior year, that when she is drafted into the WNBA she has to hug me first and thank me last in her speech. I tell her that everyone thanks the person they care the most about last.

On New Year’s when we were sixteen, we were in Atalanta at another tournament. The television was blaring from New York as the countdown for the ball dropped, and my parents and I sat at a steak restaurant, as Keegan was having a silent dinner with her team because they lost two games. Basketball was going to be my next true love.

At the start of the second half Rose is sitting on the bench. Keegan pulls the team close to her again, explaining what they will do. I can’t catch what she is saying.

During basketball games when Keegan starts to get frustrated or angry I can tell what she is thinking. My mother who is sitting next to me asks me how I know that she is upset. I say she rolled her neck, and mouthed dammit. My mother says she didn’t see anything. I told her she wouldn't.

Almost every two years until we were sixteen, Keegan switched teams. Sometimes she would go for the better basketball team, other times she would choose the people who were on those basketball teams. My father tells me which schools Keegan should think about for college. My mother says that she wants Keegan to get a good education as well as playing for a good basketball team. I tell Keegan that I hope she picks UCONN because I had been looking at schools in the Boston area.

I ask Keegan what her top three are and she tells me that she thinks Oregon State is the top. I tell her to not make the choice based on me.

In the middle of the third quarter the eight point lead has turned into a twenty point lead. Keegan has hit another three point shot. I ask my father if this team is as good as everyone has continued to tell us. He says that it is. I ask him if she has a chance to win the championship.

During the summer once, we were sitting at Chipotle, and Keegan was watching me eat. She said that our mother and father didn’t understand her dream. She didn’t just want to be a good basketball player, she wanted to be the greatest of all time.

Keegan asks me when we are fifteen why some teammates are mean to her. I tell her they are jealous. She asks me how I know, and I tell her that I used to be the same way.

It is the end of the third quarter and Keegan is sitting on the bench. The other five players, who aren’t the starters that I like to call the B team, are on the court. The score shrinks from twenty point lead to ten. Rose has decided that she doesn’t want to play defense.

Keegan tells me that her coach is harder on her than she is on anyone else. She says Rose doesn’t have to do anything. She doesn’t work hard, she just sits down whenever she gets mad. I say that her coach cares more about what Keegan does. Coach Mel doesn’t like me though. No I say, but she wants a part of your success.

I will sit outside of the basketball game until Keegan’s team has started. Most of the time I will sit cross legged and complain about how many hours the tournament is behind. I tell my mother that the referees like to blow their whistles because they can, not because they actually have anything to say.

On my left wrist, and on Keegan’s right wrist we each want the tattoo REAL.

It is the start of the fourth quarter and Keegan is back in the game. She turns the lead from ten points to thirty. She sits for the rest of the fourth quarter.

When we were fourteen Keegan started taking me to the basketball gym with her. She tried to teach me how to shoot a three pointer, and decided that we should call it a twenty three pointer for me.

I don’t hear the end buzzer. Instead I watch as the clock resets itself to eight minutes, as the next team walks onto the court.

Morgan Spencer is a junior creative writing major at Interlochen Arts Academy. She has been published in The Interlochen Review, and The Red Wheelbarrow. She has won several regional Scholastic Art & Writing awards. She writes mostly nonfiction about ballet and basketball.