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The new girl came upon him unexpectedly. He was alone in the dark parking lot behind the auto-glass shop where nobody went at night except for him. It was hard to explain what he was doing. He was developing a twisting kick that involved heaving himself into the air with a broom handle. The kick part was comop ing along, but the landing needed work.

He was picking little asphalt bits out of his knee when she happened by.

“Hey,” she said, not the least bit startled. Perhaps she hadn’t seen the kick. Still, he was a male in a shadowy back alley developing his own secret martial art, and many girls would have been frightened out of their boots.

She wasn’t wearing boots. She was wearing flip-flops that went thwack thwack with every step, and a pair of ordinary jeans and a light windbreaker. She was taller than him and big-shouldered. Her hair stood up at odd angles as if she hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours and had then been electrocuted. It was red tonight, as far as he could see.

Janine. Janine Igwash.

Janine Igwash walked straight past him, then climbed the fence, which was eight feet high and topped with rusted barbed wire. No hesitation, gone so fast he wondered if he hadn’t simply imagined her. Yet another absurdity of being sixteen. New girls bigger than him with weird hair appeared in the darkness and slithered up fences like feral ghosts.

He liked the sound of that: feral ghosts. What did it mean? He took out his notebook and wrote in the darkness, she grazed my spine like a feral ghost.

Maybe the beginning of a poem? He flipped back a page to the perfect jump shot begins in the soul/sole. He could just read it by the dull light from the back wall of the auto-glass.

He imagined Janine Igwash walking past him again, only this time he was reading from his notebook. And instead of saying, “Hey,” she said, “What’s that?” Then he looked up at her coolly and said, “I keep track of my thoughts from time to time.” Then she sat cross-legged beside him and he read to her snippets of his thoughts such as the one about the jump shot. And she said, “Really?” As if she’d never thought of it that way. And why would she have?

“My name is Stan,” he said to her in this revised version happening in his head. “Most of the kids in school, they call me Stanley, but really it’s Stan. I was the final man cut from the JV squad last year but this year I’m going to be a starter.”

He got up then, picked up the basketball he had left in the shadows, bounced it twice then launched a beautiful arcing shot at the hoop he’d personally nailed, with backboard, to the old pine tree leaning up against the fence. Swish.

Out loud, to no one, to the feral ghost of Janine Igwash, he said, “With shots like that, I am going to be a starter.”

Then he limped over to the spot on the fence where the girl had disappeared just minutes before. He pulled himself up the chain link. There was even a space in the rusty barbed wire that he could see would be almost easy to slither through. He peered into the darkness through the leaves.

She had just arrived late last year. It must have been hard for ut en hardher coming into the school knowing nobody. Especially with a name like Igwash.

He was gazing across a backyard. Janine’s? A light snapped on in an upstairs bedroom. Someone’s shadow against the curtains. Spiky hair. Maybe she was about to undress, her silhouette black against the white screen. It was hard to see through the leaves, but it sure looked like she was tugging at her shirt.

He climbed down. His knee felt better. He snapped a few high kicks without the broom handle, then punched the air six times rapid-fire, a quick exhalation with each strike. Then he retrieved the basketball again and let loose a turnaround jumper without looking, entirely by feel. The ball hit the back of the rim, then the front, then the back, then spun out and bounced, the sound echoing down the dark alley.

The perfect jump shot begins in the soles of the feet. It moves like a wave through the calves and the thighs up to the hips and along the spine to the shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand and out the fingertips, a natural stroke as at ease in the universe as an ocean wave that curls and falls. Easier than breathing. Truer than thought.

Stan liked that. Truer than thought. He bounced the ball seven more times, pounding a single word into his brain — starter, starter, starter — then glanced again through the darkness at what he thought might be Janine Igwash’s bedroom window.

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