Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (free children's ebooks pdf TXT) 📖

It wasn’t true. Lillian was the only person who could make Kelsey laugh so hard she peed her pants. For as long as she could remember, before they knew that Kelsey would be the basketball star and Lillian would be the oddball, they’d just been cousins who saw themselves as the yin to the other’s yang.

Their fathers had started them early, when the basketballs were almost as big as they were, and they would laugh and tumble over them in saggy diapers, like rolling around with a light pumpkin, getting it stuck between their pudgy legs.

Kelsey can still hear Lillian’s deep belly laugh and remember how contagious it was, how once they got going they could not stop. She imagines, but doesn’t remember, that their fathers would roll their eyes and shake their heads. Probably in fear that one of their children would not shake off the silliness and transition into the real thing, dribbling, doing figure eights, butterfly drills.

Those drills slowly began to make sense to Kelsey but not to Lillian. It was like watching a generational rope unravel, so gradually that it would have gone unnoticed, except that each person in the Randolph family had easily wrapped themselves around the strand before them, creating an unbreakable bond. It was hard to believe that one person could unravel it.

Kelsey’s talent compared to Lillian’s clumsiness led to a rift between their fathers. Neither one knew what to say, so they didn’t talk about it.

But this was Basketball Town; it wasn’t a subject you could just pretend wasn’t there.

It was always Lillian who refused to believe that they had to keep playing this charade, that basketball was the only thing that mattered. She was the equivalent of the little kid who keeps yelling, “The emperor has no clothes,” except in Lared there was usually a marching band drowning her out.

Kelsey heard Lillian’s voice all the time now. Watching her teammates wearing green surgical masks, hearing Brian say the boys deserved the gym and she was just “having her period” if she disagreed, the way her father was overstepping his bounds as ref. Kelsey was full of questions that Lillian wasn’t even there to pose. So they must have been coming from inside her own mind.

She opened the glove box and pulled out the second postcard from her cousin. It was a long skinny one. A picture of a mountain ringed with fog took up the whole front. “The highest peak in North America.”

You should have been here, Kels. I woke up and kids were missing from their beds, which is pretty much a counselor’s worst nightmare. But it’s light out all night, so at least searching for them was easy. I couldn’t believe where they were. The stupid outside court with the dirt floor, huge potholes in it and an old pickle barrel for a basket. I have never seen basketball played like this. First of all, they were terrible—even worse than me! Just laughing and falling in the dirt and trying to put the ball through that stupid smelly bucket. But it was also absolute joy. I didn’t think it was possible to play basketball that way, not for glory or attention but just for the thing itself. These kids surprise me every day. Love, Lil

Kelsey drove with Lillian’s words swirling around and around her head: “just for the thing itself.”

At home, her mother was waiting in the entryway. Her scrunched face made Kelsey wonder instantly what she had done. Her mother rarely got mad, but her moral compass was finely tuned, and her eyebrows were pointing due north, a sign that Kelsey had done something drastic. But she couldn’t think what.

“Jimmy Jeffs called.”

“Mom, everyone—”

“Do not ‘everyone does it’ me, young lady. You know better. Get in my car. We are going back to pay for a Snickers bar.”

“It was literally like fifty-seven cents.”

“Really, Kelsey? Who do you think you are? And for that matter, who do you think I am? This is about self-respect, not fifty-goddamn-seven cents.”

Her mother had a habit of swearing when she was taking some kind of parental high ground. It was confusingly contradictory.

“Fine, I’ll pay for the stupid candy bar.”

“Oh, you buckle up, young lady. This is going to cost you a lot more than fifty-seven cents.”

Kelsey stared at her mother’s profile as she drove. She had one dimple, and when she was mad it pulsed in her cheek, as if that was where she kept her heart. She’d been a fabulous basketball player in her day, but now she was thick in the middle and limped a little from arthritis in her left hip.

“Too many hip checks against those Wyoming girls, the ones that grew up on ranches,” she’d always say. “God knows they must have practiced against black angus cattle.”

Whenever Kelsey played against a Wyoming team her mother would offer the same advice: “Just set your feet. Don’t lean or move your hips.” As if Kelsey didn’t know how to take an offensive foul.

Her mother might be angry at the moment, but Lillian’s postcard was fresh in Kelsey’s mind, and she couldn’t stop herself from asking questions.

“Mom, do you miss playing ball?”

She looked like she was thinking hard about whether to answer.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“What do you miss most?”

“Are you trying to distract me? You are not getting out of this, Kelsey.”

“As if, Mom. I’m not that dumb. I honestly want to know.”

“Hmmmm. Well, I loved that feeling you get, you know the one? When the whole team is like a well-oiled machine and you execute a play like clockwork. I can still feel that sometimes, watching you girls. Watching each person like a cog in a machine, doing what it takes for the whole thing to come together. It’s like magic. I love that.”

“But if you were all alone, just playing say, by yourself, and nobody watched, would you love it?”

Her mother glanced at her as if this was a trick question.

“Want to know a secret? That