I HATE YOU, FULLER JAMES

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

                   

Fuller

                   

"I'm incredibly sorry, Principal Davis," I said, hanging my head in apparent shame and dropping my gaze to his desk. He and I were running through the same routine we always did. I'd apologize and he'd respond with something like, "I'm going to give you one more chance, son. Do you understand?" I'd agree, call him "sir," and all would be good until the next incident.

                   

Normally, being called into the principal's office didn't bother me too much. I'd sit in the chair across from Principal Davis, where we'd usually ended up talking about basketball and reliving the highlights of his high school career as the star center forward. We'd then move on to his time at the University of Virginia. We'd usually wrap up with how he could see a lot of himself in me.

                                                                               

But, this time, instead of it being the two of us, Coach and Wren Carter were here, too.

Coach Carter shook his head. "Fuller, we've been over this before. In order to play, you have to be passing all your classes. We've made a lot of exceptions for you over the years, but this is one that you know we can't break."

                   

My cheeks burned with embarrassment. It was bad enough Coach knew that my AP Lit grade had dropped to an F, but it was like rubbing salt in an open wound to have Wren find out, too. She was hands down the smartest kid in the entire school. I kept my gaze cast downward, on Principal Davis's desk. There was no way I could handle seeing a smug grin on Wren's face or, even worse, a look of pity. I'd never failed a class before. But, between the before school workouts, a full day of school, basketball practice, shooting hoops for an additional hour after practice ended, and hanging out with my little brother, I barely had enough time to eat and get a few hours of sleep, let alone read books and write AP Lit papers. I managed to keep up a 3.2 grade point average by getting most of my homework done and earning decent grades on tests, but that certainly wasn't high enough to earn any kind of academic scholarship.

                   

I wanted to drop down to regular Lit, but my parents forbade me from doing it. "You aren't applying yourself, Fuller," my dad would say. "If you spent half as much time on your homework as you did on basketball and with the ladies, you'd be doing fine in school." Like he had a clue. He was an emergency room doctor with an eidetic memory. He was constantly at work and, unlike him, my only path to a full scholarship was basketball.

                   

Plus, most people at school, including Wren, assumed I was a dumb jock. Who was I to prove them wrong?

                                                                                        

I should have been able to coast through senior year, not have to worry about my spot on the team because of some English class that I'd never need again. Last time I checked, professional basketball players weren't worried about using proper APA citations when they were tearing up the court.

                   

When I wasn't training, I spent time with my little brother. We watched Deadpool and read comic books together. Even though he knew the character Deadpool wasn't real, he always claimed he was going to be just like him when he grew up: indestructible. Instead, he was forced to deal with a diagnosis that had taken that dream from him and left him with an uncertain future.