Rising Above All

The worst part about eighth grade was that it lasted an entire year. Jordan Ellis had done the math — 180 school days, plus however many days of summer where people from school somehow still found ways to make things difficult — and he had concluded that the only strategic approach was to exist as minimally as possible. Be quiet. Sit in the back. Keep his head down. Do the work, get the grades, survive until high school, where presumably things would redistribute themselves into more manageable configurations. The strategy had been working reasonably well until Travis Benton decided Jordan was interesting. Travis was not interesting in a good way. Travis was the kind of interesting that was mostly about proximity to an audience and the particular talent some people had for identifying exactly the thing that would make another person smallest and deploying it with precision. What Travis had identified about Jordan was this: Jordan's family had moved mid-year to a smaller apartment after his father lost his job, and Jordan didn't know anyone at this new school yet, and he ate lunch alone. This was the raw material. Travis was very creative with raw material. Today it was the sneakers. Jordan's sneakers were two years old. This was a fact about sneakers that would not have registered to a person with a reasonable value system, but Travis's value system was entirely based on what registered, and what registered today — loudly, in front of the table of kids Jordan had been working up the courage to sit near — was: "Do those come with a time machine?" Laughter. Not everyone — some people looked away, which Jordan had learned was almost worse, because it meant they knew and chose silence. Jordan did not respond. He put his tray down at an empty table and started eating. This was the correct strategic decision. It gave Travis nothing. Travis, deprived of a reaction, turned back to his own table. Victory, of a kind. Jordan ate his food and did not look at the other table and thought about the basketball tryouts that were coming up in three weeks. Basketball was the one thing. He knew this in the way you know true things — not with hope, which was fragile, but with the kind of knowledge that lives in your hands and your feet. He had been playing since he was seven. He had worked on his shot every morning since the family moved, alone in the apartment complex parking lot, before the day started requiring things from him. He was better than he'd been a year ago. He was better than he'd been a month ago. Whatever else was true — the smaller apartment, the two-year-old sneakers, Travis Benton and his careful cruelties — that was also true. Three weeks. He would be there. He would show up and play and let the work speak for what words never could. And somewhere in the back of his mind, past the noise of the cafeteria and the weight of the day and the accumulated cost of staying small — a different Jordan began to take shape. Taller. Certain. Moving through the world like someone who had decided, once and completely, that he was done letting other people write his story. That Jordan was three weeks away. Jordan Ellis picked up his fork and kept eating. Three weeks.