"Eggs are good protein."
"Eggs are good salmonella," he said, and then he almost smiled, and for a second I thought we were going to have a conversation. Then Jesse came down the stairs in his socks with his hair standing straight up on one side and his phone in his hand, and the room tilted toward him the way it always did.
Jesse was sixteen and a junior and he was going to be our starting quarterback in the fall. That was not settled. Nothing was settled in spring practice, which was what Coach Haskell had told the whole team on day one, standing in the end zone with his arms crossed while the sprinklers ticked on the practice field behind him. Every job is open, he'd said. Every job. But the senior who'd started the last two years had graduated, and the sophomore behind Jesse threw a ball like he was getting rid of a snake, and Jesse had spent the last eighteen months in our backyard throwing to me every single night it wasn't raining, and some nights it was. I had a whiteboard in the garage with the route tree on it, and a mesh bag of five balls, and a laser rangefinder I'd bought at Academy Sports so I could tell him exactly how far he was throwing. Forty-four yards on a rope, in the air, flat-footed. Forty-nine with a step. I knew those numbers like my own phone number.
"Morning, Captain," I said, and slid the shake across the counter to him.
"I'm not captain."
"Not yet."
He drank half of it standing up, and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and looked at his brother, who had sat down at the table to untie his shoes. Luke double-knotted everything. It took him a while.
"What time's your race?" Jesse said.
"Seven-oh-five on the schedule. It'll run late. They always run late." Luke didn't look up from his shoe. "Probably seven-fifteen."
"Is that the two-mile?"
"Thirty-two hundred."
"That's the two-mile."