The Cortlandt Boys

By Laura Vanderkam

A small town high school basketball team wins the Pennsylvania state championship with an improbable last second three point shot. The Cortlandt Cavaliers celebrate their unlikely victory, but good fortune changes the boys’ worlds in unpredictable ways. This story revisits the characters 10 and 20 years later as the ramifications of their youthful success play out over the course of their lives, forever linking them and the people around them to this little town that has its ways of not quite letting you go.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9780986284403

Laura Vanderkam

Laura Vanderkam is a contributing editor at Reader's Digest and is the coauthor of Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds. She lives with her husband in New York City.

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2014

Prologue

Max, 1993-1994

Everyone knew the Harrison Warriors were going to win that game.

They knew it. The Cortlandt Cavaliers knew it. The kids lined up begging for sold-out tickets to the boys state basketball championship at the Hershey Arena sure knew it, judging by the number of Harrison-green jerseys clothing the masses. The Hershey Patriot-News knew it, and blared its prediction from the newspaper boxes greeting the Cortlandt High School band bus as it splashed through an Exxon parking lot. March Massacre in the Making, said the headline. No one could stop Harrison’s Brock Brown. Coached by his father, who’d once played in the NBA, he was Pennsylvania’s MVP and set to enroll at Penn State, delighting the commonwealth’s sports pundits. The Cortlandt Cavs, on the other hand, had squeaked through the semifinals past an unusually error-prone Pittsburgh squad. The Cavs had no players like Brock, just a pair of 6’6" twin guards, James and Mickey O’Riley, and three other solid players to round out the starting line-up. Even though they’d landed in the championship game, the state coaches’ poll still ranked them 17th.

As if to magnify the gloom, the gray March clouds dumped so many buckets of rain onto I-81 as the caravan from Cortlandt headed southwest that the band bus’s windshield wipers couldn’t keep up. Maxine Wozniak, star reporter for the high school newspaper, star trumpet player, and star student, whose brash braininess endeared her to her classmates about as much as you’d imagine, sat in her assigned seat next to the silent mascot Moe Cox. Everyone in Cortlandt was obsessed with basketball, particularly with the boys headed to the championship, but Moe wore his Cavalier costume daily, whether there was a game or not. No one had seen the cartwheeling giant without the headpiece since he showed up as a mute transfer student three years before. For all her inquisitive nature, Max had no idea why Moe didn’t speak. She called his parents for a newspaper profile. She grilled the beleaguered principal about why Moe didn’t have to adhere to the no-hats dress code like everyone else. No luck. She did know that his costume took up his whole seat and half of hers, but at least his dependable quiet let her mull how she’d spin the impending defeat for the newspaper’s front page.

The bus careened across three lanes, nearly missing the exit to the Hershey Center because the driver couldn’t see the sign. When Max climbed down the bus stairs into the parking lot, her umbrella wouldn’t open and the NPR stickers on her trumpet case bled onto her coat. It was a dreary day for underdogs. Even the brave daffodils trying to bud by the sidewalks drooped as low as the Cavaliers would soon be hanging their heads.

The gym was hot. The floor squeaked. Max set her case on a chair, pulled out her trumpet and played the first notes of the Cortlandt fight song, just to hear how they sounded in the yawningly vast arena. The fanfare blasted to the ceiling. The building manager jumped at the noise and hustled the band toward a drafty room beside concession stand 2B to practice. The Harrison Warriors were about to warm up. No one could bother Pennsylvania’s favorite squad.

As the percussion section tried to angle their drums through the practice room door, the tuba player backed against the wall and whispered to the third chair trumpet. Max looked where he pointed. It was the O’Riley twins’ girlfriends. Raina Walker, the frizzy-blonde editor-in-chief of the school paper (much to Max’s chagrin), wore an I love Mickey button on her oversized flannel shirt. Max’s hand flew, by instinct, to her mangled right ear. When the girls were eight, back when the social stratification of their small town wasn’t so fundamentalist, Raina got the brilliant idea at a slumber party that they should pierce their ears with the automatic hole punch they were using for crafts. Why did Max go first? She was the only one bold enough to go for it. Raina’s aim, though, was suspect. Even nine years later, when the bloody splash on the Walkers’ row house carpet, the other girls’ shrieks, and Max’s trip to the emergency room were just wincing memories, she still wore her brown hair long enough to hide her half-missing ear lobe.

Gracie Kean, James’s girlfriend, was too pageant-polished to try Raina’s grunge look. She was too cool for big buttons. She had, however, used a glitter pen to paint James’s name onto her lavender fingernails. The lavender was a shade from Paris, she told anyone who’d listen. It was a gift from her absentee mother, sent when Gracie won the Miss Pocono Teen competition earlier that year. The woman seemed to lead a glamorous life, judging by the presents she mailed to Gracie at her grandparents’ house in decidedly less glamorous Cortlandt, though no one could be sure. She hadn’t been seen in that town in years. The girl spread her fingers out before her. Then she dug her make-up mirror out of her purse to be sure the rain hadn’t consigned her hair to the same frizzy fate as Raina’s. It hadn’t; whatever hair spray she was using seemed to guard against the messiness of rainy days and, in her mind, life in general.

And then they appeared: the boys. They wore their purple warm-up suits and shiny Nikes like they were there for a parade and not the drubbing even their fans expected. James nodded his red-haired head in time with the tunes seeping from the concession stand’s CD player. He took in the scene, this day that would color the rest of their lives, but he wasn’t one to ruminate on the magnitude of things. Instead, he just winked at Gracie. Mickey, equally red-headed, waved at Raina. Leroy, the Cavs’ outgoing point guard, who fancied himself resembling a young Isiah Thomas, had shaved the Detroit Piston’s #11 onto the left side of his head. KC, the center, lumbered behind him. He was 250 pounds of massive, mannish creature stuck with a baby face. You couldn’t look at him without thinking teddy bear though he tried to look intimidating. He even enlisted his grandmother in the effort. She’d been spotted buzzing lightning bolts into his hair at her beauty parlor by the Burger Barn, rolling her eyes the whole time.

Lawrence came last, as usual, lagging enough steps behind that you knew he was doing it on purpose. He was the smoothest of the starting line-up, and the best-looking of the crew. He knew it and he knew that he was inspiring fantasies whenever he walked down the halls of Cortlandt High School, including some from Max, his chemistry lab partner. He chose her because she’d boost his grades with minimal effort on his part. Max was fully aware of that reality. She didn’t care. It was a chance to hang out with him, an excuse to meet up on weekends. How many other girls at CHS had that? He moved his slim frame down the hall in a way that took up more space than he needed, that made you press against the wall so you wouldn’t get in the way. He surveyed the brass section still out in the corridor. You all play loud, right? he said. Make us win this game. Then he ran his fingers through his too-long-for basketball black hair and laughed. One could never be sure at what. His easy smile made you think you stood a chance of being as cool as he was.

He straightened a bit as Coach Dryden met them coming the other way. James and Mickey snapped to attention. KC shuffled up to Leroy and slapped his back. To the floor, boys, the old coach said, like a general sending his troops over the top of the trenches. The casualties could be atrocious. But you couldn’t think of these things now. The boys obeyed, cramming back into the locker room. The tuba players watched in awe, then followed the drums into the practice room. Come on Max, the third chair trumpet yelled. We gotta start!

Coming, she shouted, but she stayed in the hall, studying the tiles and listening to the buzzing lights. Something about the day felt electric, humming and buzzing and pulsing with energy. It felt like she should remember small details for reasons beyond what she’d write in the next week’s newspaper: the poster advertising a teen ministry revival to be held in the center later that spring, the crushed Coke can resting atop a two-month-old Sports magazine on a folding chair nearby, even a photo of Brock up on the wall. Some days, you suspect, will burn on your brain. You try to imagine yourself ten, twenty years hence, looking back on these days like you’re flipping through a scrapbook. You ponder a time when hopefully you’ve grown accustomed to many things you can only dream of now. But it is hard to see yourself then. At age 17 you grasp at big thoughts, but you can only start to imagine a real life, a life beyond the world of jeans, bells, whispered gossip at your locker, and the plodding routine of a small town. You can’t see beyond your little home at the edge of the Poconos which, only 90 minutes from the Philly suburbs, was still far enough away to hold little of consequence. So you smell the bleach and listen to the lights and trust there’s more to the world than this. You tell yourself over and over again that this chapter is prologue. At least Max wanted it to be prologue. The Cortlandt Boys, on the other hand, were beaming for the present and not the future. This was their world. This, to them, was all there was. Their sweet anticipation was not yet muddied by reality. They could linger in the moment, in that pulsing space where everything was still possible, where the ending wasn’t written and they were still kings. Only the endlessly ticking second hand of the clock above the gym entrance was thwarting their hope that it could last forever.

Max watched the team hustle out of the locker room maze and onto the court. Fans from both sides streamed in. People cheered. Moe, the mascot, turned cartwheels across the floor. Someone yelled Mickey’s name. Max looked. Raina? It was an uneasy cry, one unclear what it was seeking. He waved at her again, assuring her. Today, no burden anyone else was bearing would distract him. As Max stood in the doorway to the gym, she couldn’t help staring at the boys’ shining faces. Their purple suits glowed in the bright lights. James ran feverish laps around the court, possessed of an energy that seemed to shoot from his elbows and knees. Mickey ran through his lay-up drill with the reserve guards. He slapped the ball. He tossed it in, sure, not looking. KC made a drive toward the basket. The ball arched, rose, and fell in the hoop. Coach Dryden nodded. Lawrence laughed. He moved like a cat across the court. He pawed a ball from the cart with those hands Max studied so diligently during chemistry lab. He dribbled it a few times. Then he ran, eyes on the basket. He leapt. KC crashed into another player; even in jest, it was the first blow of a brutal battle. Lawrence soared above it. Max kept her eye on that sweet arc. The ball swooshed through the net before she’d even seen it leave his hands.

***

Coach Dryden had announced before the first game that year that he would retire at the end of the season. So the Parent Booster Club threw him a party at the Cortlandt VFW, that musty building on the Lehigh River that, as one of the few event spaces in town, had played host to too many decades of weddings, 25th anniversary celebrations, and the occasional gathering of actual veterans of foreign wars, when they didn’t meet at the Pocono Diner instead. Max went early to blow up balloons. Then she switched into journalist mode, since she was officially there to interview Dryden for the school newspaper. Mickey and James looked all arms and legs in their matching gray suits. Lawrence slicked his hair back for the occasion. KC couldn’t find a suit that fit. In his immensity, he could never find suits that fit, or anything from bus seats to beds that fit, really, so he wore a mismatched jacket and pants and then eventually left the jacket with his grandmother. He stood on stage in shirt sleeves, folding his arms over bulging buttons, hoping that his lack of a jacket wouldn’t be so obvious that way.

Max tracked Dryden down to answer questions she imagined would cut through the fluff. Why, exactly, are you leaving? Was there scandal? No— I’m not getting any younger, Max, he said, smiling. You aren’t either but it will take you a while to realize that. And, how exactly, do you think the team will do this year? Oh, we’ve got a good squad. He thought about it. All serious. Responsible young men. I think we could win the state championship. Max started to write that down, started to write her headline: Dryden Says Team Will Go All The Way. But then he laughed. "Oh, I don’t know about that. But sometimes when you play together for a while, you really learn how to play together. You play tight. And the outcome is better than you might expect." There were toasts with Cokes and presents from the players. Hill Country Tools, the tool company where the O’Rileys worked along with half the other parents in town, donated a plaque for the gym lobby. Moe shuffled around, posing for pictures with whichever children didn’t find him terrifying. Then the grown-ups drifted home and the boys and their girlfriends lingered in the parking lot waiting for it to empty.

As Max started to walk toward her house, Lawrence spotted her. Hey, Max, he called. She turned and saw him studying her in a way she wasn’t used to being studied. We’re going to Leroy’s. You should come. His gaze made her feel unexpectedly cool for a moment. She nearly skipped to join the crowd, or at least tag along next to the crowd since Gracie and Raina had no interest in speaking to her. Raina, who revealed herself on occasion to be bright but brilliant at hiding it, rolled her eyes and shuffled away when Max asked her something about their newspaper class. It was so obvious Max almost found it funny. Almost. She did still have to live in this world for eight more months.

Max’s alleged curfew was in 45 minutes, though it was more theoretical than anything else. She wasn’t cool enough to be invited to the kinds of events that required a curfew. But as she looked at her watch, she decided she could test it this once. They all shuffled halfway up one of the steep side streets past the Walkers’ home and accounting firm to Leroy’s place, one of the most neatly kept homes in town. It had a prim garden out front and a two-car garage, which was a rarity in old central Cortlandt. His mom and dad had gone to Harrisburg for a small business convention that weekend. But even if they hadn’t, Leroy always liked to play host. While most houses in Cortlandt backed right up to the cliff walls, Leroy’s little spot of earth featured an actual backyard with none of the junk that neighbors seemed to stash behind their houses. Max sat on a folding chair. Lawrence handed her a Milwaukee’s Best from the stash the boys kept in the garage under a pile of old Isiah Thomas posters. Max hated the taste. She drank it anyway, trying to drink fast enough that it would look like she had done this much before, but not so fast she’d choke or cough or anything embarrassing. Raina poured hers into a cup she produced from the kitchen. Mickey and James lugged the ping pong table out through the garage’s rear door. Beer pong, Lawrence told her when she looked at him. He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the table. He stood behind her, putting one hand on hers to show her how to aim the ball toward the cups at the other end. He rested the other oh-so-lightly on her waist to keep himself steady. He leaned in closer than he needed to. With his arm guiding hers, she launched the ball. It spun to the bottom of the cup. You’re a natural, Max, he yelled into the cool, hilly night. She’s gotta play!

But she begged off. She said she had to leave soon. She lied that she was in trouble from the last weekend and had to be home early. He shrugged. She realized he hadn’t cared anyway. He set up the triangles of cups, cups they had only half emptied by the time Max put down her can and slipped out, the sounds of the boys already yelling and throwing trash into the neighbors’ yards ringing behind her. She rushed home, but as befits a theoretical curfew, no one was waiting up for her. So she wandered around the house. She wasn’t quite able to sleep as she thought about Lawrence standing behind her. She lay in bed thinking about that for a long time.

The boys had other things on their minds. When Max’s mother came back from her half-day shift at the post office early Saturday afternoon, she was still worked up enough about the town gossip to break the spell of silence that normally reigned in the introverted Wozniak house. Cortlandt’s post office sat next to the police station, down by the river. The night before, a couple of drunk kids had shoved an empty squad car in the VFW parking lot over the bank and into the water. One of the postal clerks was sure it had been the boys. An off-duty security guard from Hill Country Tools had spotted a lanky red head in the parking lot at 2 a.m., yelling and singing the school fight song. The cursory sort of investigation done when the likely culprits are star athletes either had or had not resulted in any confessions, but it was obvious to the officers that criminal charges against the boys from Cortlandt High School meant that they would not play so well during the season. No one wanted to be responsible for that. So Cortlandt lost a squad car and applied for a state grant to replace it.

The real news of the weekend, though, spread even quicker through school on Monday. Mickey and Raina had been caught in her car Saturday night in a dark, wooded corner of the historic Curtis Inn’s parking lot near the half-built new addition. Mickey worked on the Inn’s construction crew part-time to earn cash before the basketball season started. He must have thought his special spot would be safe, hidden as it was behind a construction fence and a dumpster. They’d been in a rather compromised position when a cop on patrol shone his flashlight into the fogged-up back seat. The situation escalated from embarrassment to trouble when the patrolman checked their IDs and saw their ages. Raina, though a senior, was a few days shy of her 17th birthday. He told her to put her clothes on and called her mom. Then he booked 18-year-old Mickey. Most likely it was payback for the squad car, but the boy spent the night in jail until the bondsman opened his office the next morning and his parents bailed him out. The cops took blood samples for unclear reasons, something about new technology the state was experimenting with, or possibly just to be menacing. They told Mickey they could prosecute him for statutory rape for having sex with a minor, and that he could spend real time in a real prison. But then Raina’s mother showed up and asked the chief not to make a big deal of it. She brought along a weary-looking Coach Dryden who assured the brass that basketball season would put a strict schedule on the boy. Indeed, his work ethic was legendary on that team. More than once the year before he’d stayed so long after practice drilling 3-point shots that the night janitor sent him home when he was done scrubbing the toilets and needed to lock the place up. There would be no more troublemaking, the cops were respectfully assured. Mickey escaped from the Cortlandt authorities for the second night in a row.

But he told the boys. He told them, and soon all of Cortlandt was whispering their versions of the story. Raina refused to dignify such talk. She retreated from her clique of Gracie and a few cheerleaders and decided to throw herself into the newspaper class, at least as defined by showing up and changing the occasional headline to introduce a spelling error. Her retreat into the fascinating world of high school journalism did not last long, however. By Valentine’s Day, she lost interest in much except going to basketball games and Mickey, always Mickey, in a love that, for all its teenage semi-innocence, gave off a feeling of impending doom.

***

Mickey won the tip off to start the game, but soon Brock and the Harrison Warriors rallied to an 8-zip lead. Glum acceptance settled on the Cortlandt side of the gym. It would be a painful 32 minutes. Three minutes in, the ref blew his whistle on Lawrence for traveling.

Fortunately for the Cavs, though, this early lead lulled Harrison into over-confidence. The forward threw the ball in bounds, barely looking where it was going. Lawrence, still smarting from the whistle, slid in and snatched it. He spun like a ballerina and stepped behind the 3-point line. The ball soared toward the basket, and swished through the net.

This let a glimmer of hope into the arena. The Cavs’ band played the fight song. This time Leroy peeled the ball away as Harrison threw the ball in-bounds. He bounce-passed it to KC. KC faked a shot. Mighty Brock soared to stop it and landed, puzzled and without the ball, out of bounds. KC grinned at his foe on the floor. He tapped the ball in: 8-5. Brock licked his wounds and tossed the ball in more carefully than his forward had a few seconds before. The point guard dribbled down the court, slowed and signaled the play. He faked, then drove in as Brock blocked KC outside the paint. Their bodies smacked. Already, the blows sounded slightly wet. The boys would be hustling all afternoon. Lawrence called that he’d cover. The point guard drove toward the basket for the lay-up. He missed. The Cavs’ stands hooted. A few of the hardiest folks in the crowd started catching each others’ eyes. If this wouldn’t be a total massacre, perhaps it was possible to have a little fun. Lawrence leapt for the rebound and muscled it down, out of the hands of a guard who struggled to smack the ball away. No luck. Soon everyone ran down the court. Lawrence tossed it to Leroy and followed the others. Leroy eyed the situation at the top of the key, whistled a little tune to himself, then spotted James, who roared past the pick KC set for him. Leroy made a quick pass to the open man. James darted behind the 3-point line. Another shot. Another three, touching nothing but net. The stands went wild. It was all tied up.

Harrison’s coach, Brock’s father, jumped on the sidelines. Time out, he signaled. Anything to stop the rally. The band played the Cavs’ fight song with new vigor. Max signaled to her fellow trumpets to blast a cavalry charge. Charge! the Cavs’ stands roared in response. Moe waved his sword in the air. The band played the charge again and again, just for the hell of it, until the tuba player claimed it was distracting the players from their huddle.

And so the fight raged. A guard kicked Lawrence’s shin. He fell. Everyone cringed for him. But he hobbled up, wincing just a bit for the rest of the half. He wouldn’t sit. There was no time for bench riding today. He could rest and ice everything tomorrow. Brock and KC traded elbows to the face. Leroy air-balled a shot and sat down to recover from Harrison’s taunts. Air ball! Air ball! It went on every time Leroy checked in and out of the game until the band started shouting just to block it. James skinned his knee when he fell setting a pick. The game stopped so a janitor could wipe the blood from the floor.

With one minute left in the half, Brock and KC fell into a sweaty heap below the basket as they fought over a rebound. Even as the ball rolled away, they pummeled each other until the ref pried them apart. The ref called a foul on KC; Brock nailed both shots. The fans screamed wildly, but he didn’t seem to hear. Harrison led by four. The Cortlandt Cavs rushed down the court. They were too fast. Harrison’s point guard stripped the ball from James, then let it sail for a three-pointer at the buzzer. Harrison led by 7. The Cavs’ stands groaned. The band members stamped and wiggled around. No one could sit for half time. This was too close, too edgy, edgier than the score seemed to show. No one wanted to slip out to the restroom. No one dared leave. The ball boy furiously scrubbed the sweaty spots where KC and Brock had dampened the gym floor.

***

Max wanted to be editor-in-chief of the Cortlandt High School Courier more than she had wanted much else in her teenaged life. She wanted the title on her college applications and to stand in front of her classmates and direct them to investigate all the injustices of the school and town. But CHS ran through newspaper advisors like gallons of milk, and Max hadn’t taken the Introduction to Journalism class taught by the newly-appointed newspaper teacher the year before. She’d merely run the paper for the previous three years as one student editor after another couldn’t hack it. That turned out to be just not good enough. The new advisor wanted to make her own mark. For editor-in-chief she chose Raina, one of the few intro students who’d figured out how to make a decent spread in PageMaker. Then the advisor promptly quit to go teach at a school in Scranton. The new advisor was too busy struggling to control the crowds who’d signed up for the allegedly easy newspaper class to care who ran the thing. Max thought Raina’s ambitions for the Courier showed a tragic limitation. She had reasonable aesthetic ideas. Max would grant her that. Left to her own devices, Max would just print a giant block of text. But Raina had little concept of journalism. She mentioned the first day that they should do some movie reviews. And maybe a feature on the vocational education program’s partnership with Hill Country Tools? Max suggested spinning the piece to look at whether Hill Country was really putting money into the program or if they got enough unpaid labor out of it to come out ahead. Raina’s parents’ CPA firm did some of the books for Hill Country Tools, so maybe Raina couldn’t look into it, but someone else could. Or they could try to figure out what kind of subsidies Hill Country Tools got from the state and see how many jobs had actually been created in Cortlandt. What was the cost per job, and did that make sense in terms of tax revenue? Raina looked at Max, baffled. Why did the newspaper have to be so combative? What did Max have against Cortlandt anyway? It was an interesting question, but unfortunately, it was also a question they never wound up debating to the extent it deserved. Raina soon figured out that the advisor wasn’t taking attendance and came up with other things to do during class: listening to Nirvana, sporting the requisite baggy flannel, and re-tying the lime green laces on her hightop Converse sneakers. So Max wound up running the newspaper again, minus the title she coveted.

She swore it wouldn’t matter. She would go Woodward and Bernstein on that school. She exposed that the judge for the Parent Booster Club Scholarship announced the winners before picking up half the application essays from the office. She bought booze at the local liquor store with no one carding her and got the store put under investigation by the state alcohol authorities. That, of course, endeared her further to her classmates. She wrote a piece, cluttered with anonymous, Deep Throat-style quotes, on how the faculty hated the principal due to a nefarious manipulation of the teacher review system. She even had one of those anonymous teachers meet her in Cortlandt’s lone parking garage, just to get the symbolism right. Max amused herself.

Raina balked, though, when Max proposed writing long profiles of the basketball team members as a way to chronicle the season. Raina said she wanted to write those pieces instead. Perhaps it was the story Max wrote on the squad car’s mysterious disappearance into the lake, the story that quoted one unnamed officer saying everyone knows the basketball team shoved it in, but what are we going to do about it? People think those boys walk on water around here. I wouldn’t be surprised if a jury would acquit them of killing someone. Perhaps Raina wanted to spend class time with Mickey. Regardless, Max brought the case to the new advisor and suggested a contest: They’d both write a profile of Coach Dryden. The newspaper would run the best one. He could choose. Then Raina never bothered to turn it in. Max didn’t like winning by forfeit, but she was scrappy. She’d take what she could get. Soon, drunk on her new power, feeling untouchable with the knowledge