Break Point

January 14, 2020.

It was Tuesday, which was the first day of the week in what felt like forever that wasn't going to be followed by a game. I had started in game 8 last Friday as well as game 9 yesterday. Game 10 wasn't until tomorrow so it felt like I had a little bit of a break, even though I still had practice to attend to after school. I had scored 6 points during the game on Friday and 9 during the game yesterday. The odd number on yesterday's game was from a free throw shot that I made, though, not a three pointer, which was a shot I had yet to make during any game this season. Scoring at all in the first place was still an improvement for me, so I was pretty happy with my performance.

It was still early in the week, and it was going pretty mediocre in terms of everything outside of basketball. On the good side, I'd been doing well in my classes. I got back a perfect score on a math quiz, an A on a human geography quiz, and I even did pretty well on a biology test. Despite this, my biology grade might be about to drop again, which brings us to the bad side. For one, Harper had been pretty cold to me recently, and I couldn't figure out why. She wasn't acting mean or even ignoring me really, but she seemed more closed off than she had in the past. Nathan, Cam, and Max were still avoiding me when they could, but to be fair I was also avoiding them. I wished I could think of something to do about that situation, but nothing was coming to me. It wasn't really too much of a problem, since Cam acted pretty normal during games when we were on the court together. I hadn't been on the court at the same time as Nathan (Coach Hendrix probably had something to do with that) and I had only been on the court with Max for a minute or two, which wasn't long enough for something to happen. Chance also returned to school yesterday. He hadn't been in any classes or come to any of the games since his incident. I thought that they might have suspended him, but he might just have been taking some days to himself. He was at the game yesterday, and just sat on the bench the entire game glaring at me. I guess he didn't like that I had taken his position. I didn't really care though. What was he going to do about it?

I walked down the hallway thinking about all this. I guess my week had more bad points than good points but when you add in my basketball performance as of late, I guess it balanced out. Things always have a way of doing that. I was about halfway to my next class when someone yelled something from behind me.

"Blake, look out!"

I turned right as some strong hands shoved me backwards against the wall of lockers. My books fell out of my hands and my shoulders were pressed back against the lockers. The person I ended up facing? You guessed it—Chance.

"Hey, man..." I said weakly, but I knew that there was no talking my way out of what was coming. The look in Chance's eyes as he faced me was filled with more rage than I'd ever seen in a person before.

"Did 'next time' come earlier than you thought?" he growled at me. "You really thought you could steal my spot on the team without any consequences?"

"Look, you don't want to do this," I tried to reason, but my voice hardened all the same. I hated bullies. I had lost my cool on one in middle school, and it cost me greatly. So I tried to stay calm. "Not here, and not now."

He tightened his grip on my shoulders. I looked around to see that lots of people had gathered around to see what would happen. It was mostly people who weren't on the basketball team and had no idea what was happening, but I did see Jackson and Nathan mixed in the crowd, neither of which was coming to stop what was happening. "You mean that you don't want to do this."

"No, I don't," I replied. "You know why? Because then we'll both be kicked off the team, and that helps no one."

"You deserve to be kicked off the team!" Chance shouted.

"And yet you're the one who's actually off it," I said.

Apparently this was too much for him to handle. With a roar he cocked back his arm and ran his fist straight into my face. My vision blurred and my eyes rolled back into my head as my head was forced back against the lockers, propelled by Chance's fist. I'm not sure how many times I was hit. I think it was two or three, but it was hard to tell. I wasn't really counting, after all. One thing was certain, though. It would have been a lot more times than it was if it weren't for what happened next.

Before I knew it, Chance was lying face-up on the ground with someone on top of him. It took me a moment to realize that it was Harper. She was kneeling over him, scratching relentlessly at his face with a burst of anger that I'd never seen from her before. It took me a few seconds of Harper scratching and Chance wailing to realize that I needed to do something.

I ran over and grabbed Harper by the arms, pulling her away from Chance with great difficulty. I noticed that she was bleeding a little on her arms and face from some cuts. Chance obviously hadn't gone down without a fight.

"What are you doing?" she exclaimed, kicking at me and trying desperately to get out of my grasp.

Everyone that was watching was silent, taking it all in. Fights hardly ever happened at the school, and it apparently all happened so quickly that no one had time to even film it. I heard the sound of adult voices yelling and coming closer down the hallway, so I figured we'd better get out. I rounded a corner, dragging Harper along behind me, and walked out the main entrance to the school.

"Where you taking me?" she asked as we walked hastily down the side of the street. "Can you let go of my arm now? I'm not going to run back."

I hadn't noticed that I was still holding her arm. I let go. "Sorry," I muttered.

"So where are we going?"

"My house," I replied simply.

"Your house? Why?" she seemed surprised at this, but continued to follow me all the same.

"To fix you up," I answered, "and to wait until all this boils over."

That was all I said to her until we reached my house. My nose was bleeding, but I didn't think she'd noticed since I only wiped it off when she wasn't looking. Occasionally, she'd try to talk to me or ask me something, but I wasn't really in the mood for a conversation. When we arrived, I slid my key in the lock and motioned for her to enter.

"Is anyone here?" Harper asked.

She'd asked me that a couple times, but I hadn't given her much of an answer. I just shrugged. "I doubt it."

I motioned her to follow me up the stairs. "Oh, so your parents both work?"

I shook my head. "No, but I doubt anyone will be here anyway. My sister doesn't get out of school for an hour or two, so it's an empty house pretty much all day."

"Oh, you have a sister? I didn't know that."

I mumbled something inaudible in response and motioned to the room on the right. "That's my room, you can sit or something while I find the band-aids."

"Oh, okay."

Harper entered my room and I walked into the bathroom. Before I picked up the band-aids, though, I cleaned my nose a little. I didn't think it was broken, but it definitely got close. I grabbed the band-aids and some medical tape off the shelf and went back to my room.

"Thank you," Harper said to me as I tended to her cuts. Health class was one of the ones I usually paid attention in, even if Aubrey was nagging me the whole time. "You didn't have to do this for me."

"Yeah, and you didn't have to attack Chance like that for me," I replied. "Why did you do that, by the way?"

"Why did I stop somebody from pounding somebody else's head into a locker when I saw it?" she asked sarcastically. "Gee, I don't know."

I finished wiping of the cuts and looked at her. "A lot of people were there. They saw it too, but you were the only one to do something about it." I went back to the cut. "Unfortunately, you made the matter worse."

"I made it worse?" Harper exclaimed, causing me to cringe inwardly. I knew that had come out wrong. "So I made the whole thing worse by just trying to defend you?"

"I didn't need someone to defend me," I said. "I needed to calm him down is all."

"Yeah, and that was going to happen! How were you planning on calming him down while he was in the process of beating you to a pulp?"

"Look," I sighed heavily. "I needed him to get it out of his system and be done with it. Now, he's even angrier than before. Plus, he's not the only one in the wrong anymore. We are too. So I appreciate you sticking up for me, I really do. All I'm saying is that this isn't over."

"You're not in the wrong," Harper said, her voice still hard. "I mean, I scratched his face to death but you didn't do anything."

"Yeah, you'd be surprised at the school's fighting rules," I told her as I finished with her cuts. "I'm gonna go throw this away."

I took some of the excess stuff I'd been working with to the bathroom and threw it away, along with the Kleenex that I'd been wiping my nose with periodically. It didn't even look like a Kleenex anymore, though, because it was literally blood red. I ran some warm water and washed my nose with it.

"Oh, you're hurt," said Harper, her voice suddenly soft again.

I looked over to see her leaning forward from the bathroom door, staring from the red tainted water in the sink to my nose.

"I'm fine," I told her.

"Is it broken," she asked, sounding concerned.

"I don't think so," I replied and smiled at her. "Thanks to you, of course."

She smiled and helped me stop the bleeding by stopping up my nose. We finished cleaning everything up and sat back down on the bed. We didn't say anything to each other, since we were both lost in our own thoughts and were both equally as tired. Even so, I knew that we were both thinking about the same thing. I was pretty sure that I had run the whole situation with Chance over and over again in my head at least a hundred times since it happened. I knew that nothing I could've said would have made him decide not to punch me, but something was still bothering me and it took me forever to finally figure out what it was. When I did figure it out, it didn't make me feel much better, though.

The thing bothering me was that I had seen both Jackson and Nathan in the crowd of students around us, and there could've been more people I knew. Yet neither of them did anything to stop what happened. They both just stood there and watched. Maybe they just didn't know what to do, or maybe it happened too quickly. Either way, it gave me a bad feeling. I mean sure, Jackson and I had been friends for a short period of time and sure, Nathan and I had had a rough go of it lately, but I still thought that both of them would have my back if I ever needed it. It just really made me uneasy. How do you tell who your true friends are?

I'd have to mull over that one later, though.

"We'd better get back to school," I said to Harper, breaking the silence. "We'll be having a long talk with the counselors."