JUMP ROPE by Andy Mozina
“Stuck with girls,” Little J.T. says to himself, holding the ball that’s losing air. He cuts his eyes at Shamari and Leah on the picnic table. They don’t even want to shoot around.
“This is bullshit,” he says.
Little J.T. is seven years old. Almost eight. He throws up a shot. No go. Ball barely bounces on the worn-ass grey court with river cracks in it. They’re playing half-court on the other side. P.B. (Power Butt), Tyler and Davante against Mike, Reggie and LaQuisha. She’s a girl but she can ball.
Shamari and Leah sit on top of the picnic table with their feet on the bench. Sandals and brown legs. Shamari black brown. Leah brown brown. They’re going to talk and ignore him because they’re in middle school. Make him look as lonely-ass as Preston, playing by himself.
Power Butt gets a rebound. Mike’s hanging on him, but P.B. jumps back up and banks it in.
P.B. is Little J.T.’s half-brother, same daddy, different mama. P.B.’s mama comes around sometimes to take P.B. places and sometimes P.B. spends the weekend wherever she lives. P.B. is thick but he ain’t fat. His real name is Miles. Everyone calls him Power Butt, or P.B., because one time he said, “Ima crush yo head with my ass!” He didn’t even mean it, it was so funny. P.B. ever since. Little J.T. thinks he should call him by his real name, because they’re brothers, but, fuck that, he calls him P.B. even in his head. Their daddy is Big J.T. Stands for Julius Tyrone, but it’s J.T., and he’s Joseph Thomas, so he’s a J.T., too. Davante, who just stole the ball from Reggie, has a white mama and a black daddy, just like Little J.T., but he’s older and doesn’t really talk to people. Tyler is a tall white boy who lives on their street but close to the Dollar Tree on West Main. He’s in love with Shamari and she’s always looking at him but they’re not together. Reggie is a knock-down shooter, and Mike plays dirty as shit but nobody calls fouls on him. P.B. made up the teams and nobody said nothing.
After supper, Big J.T. said, “Get off the damn couch. Get on out and play some ball.” Daddy was right. Spring had got warm all of a sudden.
His daddy has been kind of fighting with his “now mama,” but Little J.T.’s not sure how bad it is. She’s been buying too much shit again. His daddy hates it when she buys shit – like nails, a weave, tons of clothes. And now she wants a big family vacation this summer. “I ain’t never had a full-on vacation,” she said the other day. “Never once.”
“Uh-huh,” Daddy said.
“What’s the point if you never get one? I’m askin’ you.”
“Oh, come on, you’re killing me,” he said.
Sometimes he says that like it’s fun, sometimes he says it like he’s going to kill her back. That time it was like “don’t push no more.”
“Like, give a brother a chance,” Little J.T. says to himself. “For my size, I bet I play better than all those motherfuckers.”
He throws up the soft ball. Hits the underside of the rim.
When they were shooting around before picking teams, Little J.T. put up a shot from the arc and was surprised when the ball never got as high as the hoop and fell way short.
“Whoa, J.T., you are little,” Tyler said. Nobody passed the ball back to him to try again.
On the picnic table Shamari and Leah are talking quiet so he can’t hear, thumbing at their phones. They knock shoulders and laugh. Leah leans back, lifts one sandal off the bench and puts the back of her hand to her mouth. Then she play-slaps Shamari’s arm and Shamari keeps talking. He can’t hear her. She’s making Leah laugh and laugh. Maybe they’re texting pictures of him missing shots.
Little J.T. is tired of this shit. He lets the deflated ball roll on the bare dirt by the court edge. He doesn’t want anyone to get more chances to see him not make baskets. There’s jumpy-ass Preston over by the bitch-ass jungle gym. Always looking like a firecracker just went off in his head. When they were shooting around, Preston never even tried to touch the ball, acted like he didn’t hear when teams got picked. Maybe could’ve been four on four if Preston had said something, but Preston’s got problems. Let him hang upside-down by his knees and break his neck.
He wanders in the direction of the girls. “What you bitches laughing about?”
“Fuck off, Lil J,” Shamari says in a voice that’s still laughing. “You rude.”
Little J.T. sees the jump rope lying near the picnic table. “Give me that jump rope,” he says.
They look into their phones. He steps over and picks the rope off the ground. It’s got blue plastic handles that slide loose on the rope.
His daddy has had three women Little J.T. knows about. First, P.B.’s mama, who’s still in the neighborhood. He probably still loves her because sometimes she’s over at night when now mama is at work. Then there’s his own mama, who was white and a druggie, and no one knows where she’s at. “I wish I knew,” his daddy said one time, and shook his head. “She’s got problems.” Then there’s now mama, Janelle, who is really no one’s mama but sleeps with his daddy. Big J.T. can do what he wants, that’s for sure. Has it made with everybody loving on him whenever he wants. He’s been on a city crew for a long time. Hard hat, yellow vest and shit.
Little J.T. gets the handles and steps over the rope, then remembers only girls jump rope. So he starts whipping the rope around, holding on to one end. He stands by the free throw line and he twirls the jump rope like a fucking cowboy. A plastic handle smacks him in his own lip. Bleeds a little bit, but fuck it.
“What you lookin’ at?” he yells at the girls.
“What is your problem?” Leah says, looking away from him but sounding like she really wants to know.
“You got problems,” he says back. He whirls the jump rope at the two poles that hold up the backboard on this half of the court. Rope catches one pole and wraps around. He looks back to where they’re playing. Tyler posts up Mike, then shoots a turn-around jumper over Mike’s hand. He drains that motherfucker. Shamari is loving on that.
“Hey!” he calls to the girls. “Hey, tie me up. Tie me up!”
He stands in the bare dirt between the two poles, with room to spare, one palm on the cool metal, one holding out the jump rope. The sun is going down but it’s going to be light for a little while more.
They keep talking and laughing and looking at their phones. “Hey, tie me up. Tie me up. Come on!”
He waggles the jump rope at them. “Tie me up!”
They finally get off the picnic table, acting all chill, and walk toward him. Leah picks her wedgie like she just doesn’t care. Shamari is like a giraffe or some shit; she’s, like, half neck.
She looks sideways at Tyler, who’s got the ball at the top of the key. Ball goes thap, thap, thap, scriffing shoes. Suddenly he makes his move to the basket, rises up – and misses.
“Tie me up.”
“You want us to tie you up?” Leah says.
“That’s what he said,” Shamari says, laughing to herself. “Come on, Little J.T., let’s get you tied up.”
“Damn, he scrawny,” Leah says.
He knows he’s got stick arms and stick legs. His T-shirt hangs on him. His long shorts hang on him. He’s heard that meth mama babies don’t grow right and come out before they’re cooked. Little J.T. knows his body ain’t right. But fuck it. He’s going to end up like Big J.T. somehow.
“Don’t make me tell you what you look like, turtle mouth,” he says to Leah, standing between the poles. “Just tie me up.”
“All right, it’s on,” Leah says, laughing in her throat, almost grown-up. “Tying up this little shit is gonna be fun.”
“Hold to the poles,” Shamari says. She’s getting serious. Little J.T. grips the poles tight. Finally something’s happening that he’s making happen.
Shamari wraps a rope around his wrist and then around the pole. It hurts until he moves his arm so his wrist is flat, not pinched to the pole. “Leah, you please get that other jump rope, other side the table,” Shamari says.
Leah goes and gets it. That’s how girls talk to each other – please this and thank you that, that type of crazy-ass shit all the time. Nothing you can do about it.
Little J.T. looks straight ahead, like he’s not being tied up, just watching the basketball game. Tyler is balling out of his mind, but Shamari is all scrunch-eyed working the ropes, so she doesn’t know. He loves that she doesn’t know. She all the way unties him and starts over. She wraps the rope around his waist first and then two ends go back out to his wrists. Shamari ties one and Leah ties the other. This time his right wrist feels a part of the pole and his left wrist feels a part of the pole. Shamari ties the second rope around his wrist, pulls it super tight, and goes across to his other wrist and Leah pulls it super tight, and he’s not sure his blood is getting to his hands any more. He’s got a heart beating in each wrist. The rope around his waist is mad tight, so if he tries to move to one side, it pulls from the other side.
“All right, Lil J,” Shamari says, like a mama. “You enjoy yourself.” And she and Leah walk back to their picnic table.
“Damn!” he says under his breath. “Bitches good with ropes.”
Then the game is coming at him. They’re playing full court all of a sudden. LaQuisha breaks to the hoop and, even though he ducks, her flying foot brushes the side of his head. Not hard, but it’s, like, she just fucking kicked him in the head.
“Watch the fuck you doing!” he yells at her, but she made the layup and everyone’s running the other way.
P.B. looks back at his half-brother before turning and trotting up the court. He gets a pass, dribbles, stops, passes into the lane. Goes off someone’s foot.
The ball’s coming back this way again. They’re going to crush against him, but he can’t get out the way.
Reggie takes a jump shot. The ball swishes, drops, and bounces off his shoulder.
“Goddamn,” Little J.T. says. “Let me out of this shit.” He fights against the ropes but he’s not strong enough to do anything. It’s like putting up a trey, seeing it in his head, knowing it’s going through, and the ball just doesn’t fucking go anywhere. He can’t get loose. He can hardly move. It makes him crazy mad. “Hey, hey! Untie me. Let me go!”
Not even P.B., Miles, his own brother, seems to care, though. Everyone just runs up and down the court, playing the game. It’s like he’s part of the court and no one gives a shit.
“Motherfuckers, let me go!” he screams.
The girls are not laughing. There’s something in their phones they have to check out. The only time Shamari looks up is when Tyler has the ball. It’s like she’s some kind of psychic for that shit.
He twists and his wrists hurt bad. He can’t feel his hands anymore. He gets mad scared, but he doesn’t want to cry. He looks down at the crumbled asphalt edge of the court, the dirt between his feet, because he doesn’t want anyone to see his face.
He keeps his head down until they haven’t been on his half of the court for a while. He looks up. He wants to wipe his face but he can’t. Lucky no one’s looking at him. Game’s over. A water bottle goes around. Everyone’s sweating, even LaQuisha. The sun is gone down. Time for him to get home or Big J.T. will put a switch to his ass. That’s how his daddy says it, but the two times his daddy hit him, he did it with his open hand.
“Motherfucking let me go!”
“What the fuck,” P.B. says, standing by Shamari and Leah, looking over at him. They probably told P.B. he made them do it. “You sure a stupid little mofo,” P.B. calls.
“Don’t tell Daddy,” he yells to his brother. “Don’t tell him!” But he can hear the crying in his yelling. P.B. acts like he doesn’t hear him, but he won’t tell. Of course he won’t. But he also won’t respect Little J.T. for asking him not to tell. That hurts like a motherfucker.
“Untie me!” he yells as loud as he can. “Let me go!”
Everybody is picking up shit – T-shirts, phones, the ball, even the deflated ball. Even Preston can figure it out, and he comes over for the walk home. No one’s looking at Little J.T. and he knows not to ask anyone to untie him again because if he asks now and they all blow him off, it’ll chafe his ass for the rest of his life. They’ll talk about it forever. He’s not going to be a baby, but they’re all just walking away, talking, laughing, slapping the park sign. He wants to cry and scream so bad. Finally P.B. comes back to him.
He says nothing as he unties him. Takes him a while to pick the knots. Little J.T.’s hands swell and prickle, his wrists burn. When he’s all the way free, he says, “Thanks, Miles.”
“Yeah,” Miles says.
Little J.T. is not sure how to hear everything in his brother’s voice.
Maybe it means he fucked up big time and having a little half-brother is a pain in the ass. He knows he fucked up big time. Don’t ever let anyone tie you up. For real.
Never again, Little J.T. tells himself.
He knows he’ll never ask again. But he doesn’t know if it’ll ever happen again, now that everyone knows it can be done. He’s afraid that it will somehow, and he wants to forget that it will.
Miles is already walking away. J.T. doesn’t want to touch the ropes, but he can’t leave them by the poles where everyone will see them. He gathers up the two jump ropes. It’s like they’re his now.
Andy Mozina is the author of two story collections and the novel Contrary Motion (Spiegel & Grau, 2016). His stories have appeared in Tin House, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Ecotone, and Alaska Quarterly Review.