"That's a long time ago," he said.
"Yes," Perpetua said. "The building closed in 2015. They moved you to patrol. They took the desk out. Nobody took the paint off. And every Saturday since then, people like Rolf Cheever write their names in your slot, because nobody's sitting at the desk to say no. And some Saturdays, a kid comes anyway. This kid. Since he was eleven. His grandmother brought him the first time because she read this board out loud and saw the word youth and thought it meant something. Because it was written by a police officer, and she thought that meant something too."
Behind them, on Court 4, the hitting had not started again.
"So I'm not asking you to referee chalk," Perpetua said. Her voice was very quiet now. "I'm asking you, since you're the sponsor, to tell me who has Court 4 at eight o'clock on Saturday. You wrote the rule. Ask at desk. Well. Here's the desk. I'm asking."
For a long time, nobody said anything. A car went by on Sumac. A crow landed on the roof of the rec building and walked along the gutter, very self-important, and flew off again.
Ruel watched the officer. He did not know what he expected. He had seen enough of the world by sixteen to know that being shown you were wrong did not always make people less wrong; sometimes it made them furious, sometimes it made them dig in, sometimes it made them find a new reason, a better one, the way a man who has lost his keys will search the same pocket three times rather than admit he left them in the door. He had braced for that. He had braced for Ferrol to say that's ancient history, that's got nothing to do with today, I'm not here to talk about a program from 2010, I'm here about a complaint.
Instead, Officer Sonny Ferrol took off his hat.
He held it in both hands in front of him for a second, and he looked at the strip of white paint as though it were a photograph of someone he used to know.
"I painted that with a two-inch sash brush," he said. "From my dad's garage. Red was left over from his boat. I did it standing on a milk crate." He swallowed. "I had a kid named Tito who could serve a hundred miles an hour and couldn't hit a backhand to save his life. Every Saturday some guy in a nice car would come down at eight and tell Tito to get off the court. Every Saturday. So I painted it. I figured if it was in paint, they'd have to read it."
"They read it," Perpetua said. "They just stopped believing it."
Ferrol nodded slowly. He looked at the ghost of the yellow letters. He looked at Ruel. It was a different look than the one he had given him from the car. It was, Ruel thought, the look of a man trying to see two people at once, the kid he used to stand up for and the kid he had just told he was trespassing, and finding that they had the same face.
"What's your name," Ferrol said. "Not off the card. Tell me."