Taj Gibson carefully chiselled the last few bits of ice off of his sculpture, then took a step back to look at it fully. Here, in the frigid, yet sunny, expanse of lawn next to the Timberwolves’ arena, the ice-tulip seemed to glow with its own source of illumination. The curves of the petals were not perfectly smooth, and the stem was too thick due to Taj’s imprecision with the tools, but it was quite a good sculpture for an amateur, Taj decided.
Shootaround was due to start very soon, which meant that the dance team would soon be warming up as well. Even if he had wanted to make some minor modifications to the piece, he didn’t have the time. Snapping the stem off of the larger block of ice from which the sculpture had been created, Taj cradled it carefully in his hands and walked with it to the front entrance of the arena.
The ice had been so cold that it would be some time before the sculpture started to melt appreciably. Taj figured he had ten minutes to deliver the fully intact piece of frozen art to its intended recipient. So he jogged through the hallways of the arena, not wanting to go faster in case he stumbled and dropped the flower, which had taken him many days of painstaking work to produce.
Just as he was reaching the dance team’s dressing room, where he planned to knock politely and explain his goal to whoever happened to open the door, he ran into the last person he wanted to see: Karl-Anthony Towns.
“What’s that you got there, Taj?” Karl-Anthony asked, peering at the eight-inch-long piece of art.
“None of your business. It’s not for you,” Taj answered, unable to make eye contact with his taller teammate.
“It’s for Brianna, isn’t it?” Karl-Anthony asked gleefully. “It is, isn’t it?”
Taj sighed. “Yes.” Just at the mention of the name of his cheerleader crush, his cheeks turned a light pink.
Karl-Anthony reached out his hands to grab the sculpture. “Can I see it?”
“No.” Taj, still carefully holding the fragile ice-tulip in both hands in a way that made it hard for him to keep it away from his probing teammate.
“I was just about to give her something about that size and about that hard, but my thing is definitely a lot warmer than yours!” Karl-Anthony said. “Let me see!” When Taj still didn’t offer up the flower for inspection, Karl-Anthony grabbed Taj by the wrist to get him to let go.
“Careful! Hey!” Taj yelped. But, in the struggle, the tulip fell out of his hands and crashed to the floor, where it shattered into a hundred ice shards. In the aftermath, all he could do was look at the destroyed remnants of his sculpture as Karl-Anthony laughed.
“Oh, sorry Taj!” Karl-Anthony said, his tone of voice making it clear that he wasn’t sorry at all. “Well, at least I got to see it, so I can tell Brianna all about it when I next see her.” He fearlessly opened the door to the cheerleader’s dressing room and entered it, but not before turning around to say one more thing. “And that’s going to be right now. Later, Taj!”
The door closed, and Taj was by himself in the hallway. Slowly, he knelt down to gather the pieces of his flower from the floor. He couldn’t tell if they were melting already, or if the water pooling on the floor was from his own tears.