Inside Hudson Pickle Read online

  “That’s wh—” A barking cough overtook Uncle Vic and stopped him from talking.

  “Never mind, Hudson.” Mom pointed at Uncle Vic again. “You are having that X-ray tomorrow.”

  When he’d finished hacking up his lung, Uncle Vic turned to me instead of Mom. “I hear you’re going out for the basketball team.”

  I frowned. Mom must have included that detail in her account of my hockey disaster, determined, as always, to put a happily-ever-after spin on everything.

  “Tryouts are tomorrow,” I mumbled.

  “Excited?”

  “Nervous.”

  “A superathlete like you?” Uncle Vic stroked his goatee. “What do you have to be nervous about?”

  I shrugged. Basketball had been Mom’s idea. She’d enrolled me in summer camp to get my mind off hockey (and keep tabs on me while she worked). As much as I’d wanted to hate it — preferring to wallow in my hockey-fueled depression — I’d been hooked by a breakaway on my very first day. I loved the feel of the ball on my palm almost as much as the feel of the puck on my stick. And when the ball swooshed through the net? Well, that was the best.

  I didn’t want to try out for the school team — I had to. At the same time, the thought of failing again tugged at my stomach like food poisoning. I didn’t know if I could handle not making the team. Again.

  “Basketball should be a slam dunk for you. Check it out — you’re like Shaquille O’Neal. Only younger, lighter and whiter.” Uncle Vic laughed at his joke.

  He was the only one.

  Uncle Vic stood up and stretched. “Well, good luck tomorrow, kid. Break a leg, as they say in show biz.”

  “I hope not,” I said, trying to keep the attitude out of my voice. And failing.

  “It’s just an expression,” said Uncle Vic.

  “I know.”

  Mom brushed crumbs off the table into her palm. “Why don’t you two go out and shoot some hoops while I finish cleaning up?”

  “Sorry.” Uncle Vic yawned. “Too tired.”

  Mom bit her lip and tilted her head inquisitively. “Again with the fatigue. Is this common?”

  “Cut me some slack, sis. I’m just a little sleepy. Next time, kid.”

  “No problem,” I said, covering my disappointment with a wave of my hand.

  “Okay, then I’m turning in. See you in the morning.” Uncle Vic headed upstairs toward my room — our room.

  I flopped down on the sofa and clicked on the TV, pushing the On button much harder than necessary. The more I thought about it, the more Uncle Vic’s behavior seemed strange. How many thirty-three-year-olds went to bed before seven o’clock? Was he up to something? Whatever it was, I hoped it wouldn’t involve hogging my bedroom the entire time he stayed with us.

  Mom came into the living room a couple minutes (and a hundred channels) later. “I’m sure you’ll be great at tryouts tomorrow, Hudson.”

  “Whatever,” I mumbled, pretending to be interested in a commercial for some new energy drink.

  Mom reached over the back of our worn leather sofa — the one she’d rushed out to buy as soon as I’d been diagnosed with asthma — and put both hands on my shoulders. “Remember to bring your inhaler.”

  “Don’t need it,” I said without taking my eyes off the TV.

  “Just in case.”

  “It appears that you’re asymptomatic,” I said in a high-pitched voice, mimicking Dr. M., the respirologist who’d followed me since I was diagnosed at four. I could do a pretty mean imitation, thanks to all the time I’d spent with her over the years. But I wouldn’t see her again. “I’ve outgrown it.”

  “She warned us of a relapse.” Mom gently massaged my neck with her thumb. “You’ve already had two colds, and cold-and-flu season has only just begun.”

  I swiveled around to face her. “I’ve outgrown it,” I said again. As if repeating a statement could make it true.

  “Your spirometry result was good, but …” Mom gave me a you-know-what-I-mean look, then she picked up one of the many clean dust cloths she keeps stashed around the house.

  “Whatever,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest and turning back to the TV.

  “Bring your inhaler to the tryout, Hudson,” Mom said firmly as she started dusting. “Don’t forget.”

  “Fine. I won’t.”

  But I did.

  Chapter Four

  “Awesome job, everyone,” Coach Koniuk yelled. The sound of sneakers squeaking against the polished gym floor stopped abruptly. “Now grab your water bottles and gather ’round.”

  I walked over to the bench and tried to catch my breath. The tryout had started with fifteen suicide sprints. The most we’d ever done at summer camp was ten. This was going to be some test.

  “First, I want to thank you all for coming,” Coach Koniuk said, rubbing his hands together. “It’s great to see so many of you trying out for the team.”

  I pushed myself into the circle surrounding the coach, intentionally bumping my shoulder against Trev’s. What was he doing here? He hadn’t shown much interest in basketball since I’d raised the net on my driveway to full height.

  I tried to shake off the nervous energy buzzing through me as I examined the crowd. There were more wannabe basketball players than I’d expected (or wanted). Our school was in hockey country; any sport that used a ball instead of a puck was considered second-rate at best.

  “It’s going to be hard for us to get gym time until volleyball season ends in December,” Coach Koniuk continued, “so Coach Johansen and I are going to hold tryouts for the junior and senior teams together. And for some practices, the girls’ teams will be joining us.”

  There was a collective groan, and I felt Trev tense up beside me.

  “Relax, boys,” Coach Koniuk said, “girls don’t bite.”

  “But they do wiggle.” Aidan rotated his hips like a hula dancer, then held his hands up to his chest to mimic a bikini top. “And jiggle.”

  There were a couple of scoffs and a snort of appreciation from some of the other guys.

  “Enough!” Coach Koniuk bellowed. “If you want to be part of this team, you’re going to have to show some respect.”

  Aidan spread his arms out wide, exaggerating the movement of his hands away from his chest. “I meant dribble, Coach.”

  Coach Koniuk ignored him. “Tryouts will last all month. I’ve posted the schedule on the board. The teams will be announced at the end of October. That should give us plenty of time to practice before the season begins in January. Any questions?”

  “How many will you pick for each team?” I asked.

  “Ten to twelve players per team, depending on how things go,” Coach Koniuk answered.

  I did the math. Half of us would be cut — mostly seventh graders, assuming that the junior team would have a lot of eighth graders. The senior team would probably have some star eighth graders, but mostly ninth graders.

  Coach Koniuk looked around. “Anyone else?”

  “Will there be any drug testing?” Aidan smirked, looking straight at me. “It seems possible some of us might be abusing growth hormones or something. With all due respect to those of us who favor clean competition …”

  Nervous laughter filled the gym. My stomach clenched.

  Coach Koniuk gave Aidan a warning look, then ignored him. He clapped his hands. “I’m going to divide you up for drills. We’re going to start with crosscourt sprint and shoot.”

  The seventh graders went with Coach Johansen. The eighth and ninth graders went with Coach Koniuk.

  We spent the next hour learning the crosscourt-sprint-and-shoot drill, which was a sequence of passing, sprinting, jump shots and free throws. We took turns, so I had lots of time to check out the competition.

  Here’s what I knew: I was the tallest seventh grader but not the fastest. And
my shooting percentage was better than most but not the best.

  Next we did some dribbling drills, including the two-ball dribble and full-court zigzags. I was feeling pretty beat-up by the time we got to play some three-on-three. My chest felt tight, and I was starting to wheeze, but I could see the coaches were taking notes, so I gave it my all. Practice had to be over soon.

  I had just finished picking up a rebound and was about to turn and shoot when Coach Koniuk blew the whistle. “We’re going to end practice with ten suicide sprints. Go!”

  I made what I hoped was a quick, crisp pass to Coach Johansen and ran for the baseline. Without stopping, I sprinted to the closest free-throw line. Back to the baseline. To half-court. Baseline. Far free-throw line. Baseline. Endline.

  I started to cough as I ran across the court back to baseline again. I kept running. Far free-throw line. Baseline. Half-court.

  The lines were starting to look fuzzy. I stopped running, but I couldn’t catch my breath.

  “You okay, Hudson?” Trev was standing next to me.

  “Fine,” I gasped as I pounded on my chest. “Keep going.”

  Trev followed me as I sprinted toward the free-throw line. “Where’s your puffer?”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

  Where was baseline?

  I stopped and crouched over, feeling like I’d swallowed one of the balls. I couldn’t get any air into my lungs, no matter how hard I tried. Frantically, I gulped and gasped, as if I were trapped under a sheet of ice in a frozen lake.

  “Coach!” yelled Trev. “Hudson is having an asthma attack!”

  I’m not entirely sure what happened next. I heard Trev tell me to calm down. I felt Coach Koniuk and Coach Johansen lead me out of the gym to the nurse’s office. My arms hung limp over their shoulders.

  Someone handed me an inhaler. “Can you do it?”

  I shook it, removed the cap with my teeth, spit it out and put the mouthpiece between my lips. I pressed down on the canister and breathed in as much as I could. Then I did it again.

  Within a few minutes, I felt better. Like there was only one elephant sitting on my chest instead of a hundred.

  “Do we need to call an ambulance?” Coach Koniuk asked the school nurse, who was standing next to him.

  “I’m okay,” I answered for her.

  “I’ve already called your mom,” the nurse said. “Good thing you have an asthma care plan.”

  I sat on my hands to stop them from shaking. “My mom works at the hospital.”

  “She should be here soon, then.” Coach Koniuk put his hand on my shoulder and spoke to Trev. “What’s your name again?”

  “Trevor Bach.”

  “You okay to stay with him till his mom comes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great. Take care of yourself, Hudson, and I’ll see you two at practice on Friday.”

  I nodded. “Sure thing, Coach.”

  Trev didn’t say anything.

  “If you need me, I’ll be right there.” The nurse pointed at a desk behind the glass partition dividing the room. “I have to write an incident report.”

  “Well, at least Coach Koniuk knows our names now,” I said when she was gone.

  Trev’s legs bounced impatiently in the chair next to mine. “Not cool, Hudson.”

  I shut the door on this thought — that I’d made a bad first impression on the coach — and decided to focus on Trev instead. “You’re into basketball now?”

  Trev shook his head. “Gran’s making me try out. She says I need to focus on ‘regular American sports’ now that I have my black belt in karate.”

  “But you’d rather do judo,” I guessed. “Or jujitsu.”

  Trev shook his head. “I want to achieve the next dan level in karate,” he said. “Ni dan.”

  “You mean you can do better than a black belt?”

  “There are ten degrees or dan levels.” He spoke like he was giving a prepared speech. “I’m a sho dan black belt, the first degree. I want to get to second degree, so I can be an instructor, but Gran says it’s a waste of time. She wants me to focus on my religious studies and making friends at school.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah, well, trying out is no big deal. And when I get cut” — Trev snapped two fingers together like scissors — “I’ll go back to doing what I want to do.”

  I shuddered at the word cut — the sports equivalent of a fail. An epic fail. A humiliating fail. Not just one of those red Fs that appear on the top of a graded paper. Being cut from a sports team was a public fail, something everyone knew about, something that could change the course of your life. There was no way to hide it — kind of like an asthma attack.

  I thought about how much getting cut from hockey had changed my life. It could not happen again. I needed sports and I needed friends. Come to think of it, so did Trev. Maybe being on the team would stop the bullying. Aidan wouldn’t pick on him if they were teammates, would he?

  “What makes you so sure you’ll get cut?” I asked.

  “I’m too short for basketball.”

  “It’s not all about height,” I said, even though Mom had chosen basketball as my replacement sport for exactly that reason. “Steve Nash is only six foot three, and he’s one of the best point guards to ever play the game.”

  Trev lifted my inhaler off the nurse’s table and held it up between us, dangling it from his fingers like it was a dirty jockstrap. “Maybe it’s not the right sport for you either.”

  I grabbed it out of his hand. “Asthma never stopped me from playing hockey.”

  “What triggered the attack, then?”

  “It wasn’t an attack,” I said, refusing to believe that my asthma wasn’t completely gone. “Just a bit of reactivity. No big deal.”

  Trev frowned. “Why didn’t you bring your inhaler?”

  “I just forgot,” I said. “There’s a lot going on at my house. I’m tired.”

  “Because of Uncle Vic?”

  “I guess.” I crossed my arms over my chest, wishing I could say that Uncle Vic and I had been up all night watching sports. Or that he’d taken me to the bar to watch his band play.

  I wasn’t about to tell Trev that my rock-star uncle had gone to bed way earlier than me — and had snored so loudly that I could hear it right through my headphones. I’d tried everything to make it stop, but even hitting him with a pillow and snapping in his ear hadn’t worked. Waking Uncle Vic was like mission impossible.

  Still, I wished that the nurse had called him instead of Mom. I was sure Trev’s complaining would be nothing compared to the lecture I was about to get from her.

  But I was wrong.

  When she finally arrived, all she said was, “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Five

  As we followed Mom out of the nurse’s office and past the gym, the empty hallway seemed creepy and unfamiliar.

  “You missed the changeroom,” I said.

  Mom blazed ahead of us at roughly the speed of light. “No time,” she said over her shoulder.

  “But we’re still in our gym clothes.”

  “I’m parked close to the door. You won’t freeze.”

  “Can we give Trev a lift?”

  “Of course.” Mom’s pace slowed to the speed of sound. “Thank you for helping Hudson, Trevor. It’s good to see you two together again. We’ll drop you off on our way to the hospital.”

  The hospital? “But I’m fine, Mom! It was just a little reaction. I only needed a small puff.”

  She didn’t say anything else until we were all in the car. “If you’re going to make a habit of forgetting your inhaler, you’re going to have to go back to taking Flovent.”

  “But Mom —”

  “And wearing your medical ID bracelet.”

  I groaned. “But —”
/>   “I’ll make an appointment with Dr. M. to discuss it. Right now, I have to get back to Mercy General to pick up your uncle.”

  “He’s at the hospital?”

  Mom peeled out of the parking lot. “He’s been there all day,” she said.

  •••

  When we got to the hospital, Mom headed directly to the ER. It was clear from the way she marched through the halls that she’d worked there for a million years. We passed the cardiology waiting area, where I used to play when Mom couldn’t get childcare. From there, I knew how to follow the lines painted on the floor to get to the pediatric intensive care unit. Before I outgrew my asthma, I’d wound up there a couple of times.

  The rest of the place was a mystery to me, even though my mom spent most of her days there, looking at people’s hearts. She used to do ultrasounds for pregnant women, but that was a long time ago, before we’d lost my baby brother. Not that I remembered anything about it — I was only two when Darwyn died.

  We entered the ER through a back door labeled Staff Only. Uncle Vic was sitting on a stretcher wearing a hospital gown the color of green vomit. I flashed back to the image of him sitting in the ambulance in his underwear, wrapped in a blanket, on the night of the fire. It was freakishly similar, except the audience was even bigger this time. The blue privacy curtain had been pushed to the side, and a gang of health-care workers hovered around him.

  “Martha, you’re back.” A man in blue scrubs held a medical chart in one hand and reading glasses in the other. He was not smiling, but Uncle Vic was (at one of the nurses).

  “Sorry, I had to step out, Dr. Carreira.” Mom’s bloodshot eyes flashed angrily in my direction. “Do you have any updates?”

  “I’ve ordered a complete pulmonary function test. It will be performed in conjunction with a referral to the respiratory and neurodiagnostic clinic in Buffalo.”

  “The spirometry results are that bad?” asked Mom.

  “They’re suggestive of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.”