Ball Don't Lie: List 2

But Jimmy’s bluffed on a handful of other occasions.

Wipes hands on shorts and lofts up a high-arcing knuckleball that gets a good bounce on the rim and rolls in.

Feel the electricity, man, of two thousand faces burning on YOU. Four thousand eyes in the back pocket of YOUR hoop shorts.
Revel in it.

Coach Reynolds pulled Sticky aside in the middle of all the mayhem.

But he gives y’all a legitimate point guard.

Her wavy brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail except for the wispy bangs that framed her dark brown eyes.

He walked back toward the makeshift home plate and tossed the ball to Sticky.

This is where you find out who came to win and who’s happy just playing. Who’s willing to rip somebody’s head off when the pressure’s on, and who’s likely to cower in the corner like a puppy.

Saturated toilet paper clogs both floor drains, forming ankle-high puddles you have to step over to get where you’re going.

This cat’s a rotting burrito. Greasy gray hair and beard sticking out of a tightly wrapped Mexican blanket. Half-dead eyes. Callused clay feet under nappy frill.

Gotta watch them vagrants, Chuck says.

He turns and lumbers back into the bathroom.

Chuck slams his heavy door shut and fumbles through his bag for his keys. When he finally gets ahold of them he frantically shoves the car key into the ignition and cranks it.

The suits that were walking the sidewalk are now in one big group, speculating. There are curious faces pressed against most of the business windows.

Everybody asks him question after question, about what happened, where it happened, why it happened, and Sticky keeps his cool. He answers clinically. Detached.

Everybody asks him question after question, about what happened, where it happened, why it happened, and Sticky keeps his cool. He answers clinically. Detached.

She pressed his cheek against hers and told him: Welcome to our family. Then she tousled his hair with her hand.

Sticky bristled under all that touch.

This prompted a big family meeting the following night before dinner.

Through hysterical tears, she told him to come home right away.

You know how it is, Mr. Smith said, and he stood there a second, slipped his hands in his pockets. They’re impressionable.

At the 7-Eleven on the corner of Wilshire and Seventh, he shot west past Wahoos and Chevron and Houstons. The avant-garde bagel shop.

The lights spun around the cop car without sound. A flash of bright blue light spinning around methodically.

There were muffled voices coming over the cop’s radio. The tinny echo of the rattling cart.

On their way to some high school party on Second Street, at some guy named Cyrus’s house, Sticky spotted the baskets and veered Anh-thu onto the empty blacktop with pleading eyes.

The old-school wooden backboards were all tagged up with different-style gang markings. Sticky knew how to take care of stuff like that, though. He’d even kept some of the community service solvent thinking he might one day clean up the outside of Lincoln Rec.

Somebody’s mom snipping red and white roses out of a perfectly manicured flower bed, laying them side by side on a spread-out towel.

At this exact moment, a strange thing happened—most of the nice middle-class couples instinctively headed back to their safe houses and cars, while packs of street zombies seemingly came out of the bushes to take their place.

It’s like two completely different worlds exist in L.A.: one that operates under the sun and another that slinks out under the shadows of the moon.

Lawns shorten and turn brown. Cars lose their luster.