“Hey, Jarell, you writing a novel or something?”
Jarell Martin looked up from his notebook to see Vince Carter standing in front of him. “Not really. Just writing down some goals for myself.”
Vince stood next to Jarell and leaned forward, squinting. “That just looks like a list of people on the team. You gonna ask them for advice or what? And what are all these little notes off to the side? Your writing is too damn small.”
Jarell shrugged as he continued to scribble notes in the margins of the page. “It’s a list of players I’m better than. It keeps me motivated.”
Scanning quickly down the list, Vince replied, “but this list is basically everybody on the team except Marc Gasol. You think you’re better than Chandler and Z-Bo?”
“Chandler’s coming off of like five different surgeries. Z-Bo is old and fat. It’s not really a stretch to consider myself a better player than those two. See, here I note that Mike is overpaid, Tony’s got no offensive game, JaMychal is just like me except his range stops at eighteen feet. When I finish writing this all up I’m going to present it to coach, then he’s not going to have any choice but to give me minutes. He’ll probably even have to start me once he realizes how garbage everybody else is on our team.”
Vince let out an exasperated sigh. “Listen, I’m going to drop some veteran wisdom on you right now. You’re not going to get anywhere by making enemies out of all your teammates. Especially when you’re Jarell Martin.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, ‘when you’re Jarell Martin’? I’m the one who has the potential to average twenty points per game. Coach knows it, he just doesn’t want to believe it.”
“Sure thing, Jarell. I’m going to get going. I’d forget about that list if I were you. Try to find some other motivation. Money always worked for me.”
Jarell shrugged again and went back to writing as Vince left the locker room. After gnawing on the end of his pencil for a moment, Jarell found Vince’s name on the list and added another note to the side: “Is a locker-room cancer.”