And the drill went on, as if nothing had happened.
Tavo went to the back of the line. Pim Yanez held up a fist as he passed, and Tavo bumped it without thinking. Two sophomores he didn't know said "Sick" and "Bro, the bend," and he nodded at them. He did not look for Torin, but he saw him anyway. Torin was standing three places from the end of the line, very still, with his arms crossed and his eyes on the grass. He did not look up.
They ran a scrimmage at the end, eight versus eight on a half field, and it was fine. Tavo was on a team with Pim and two sophomores and four kids from the east group, and he played on the left, and he did fine, nothing special, one good through ball that a sophomore missed, one bad turnover that he got back. Torin was on the other team. They passed close to each other twice and did not speak. Once, going for the same ball, Torin went in hard and fair with his shoulder and Tavo went down, and Torin stopped and put out a hand, automatically, the way good players do, and pulled him up, and let go fast, and ran.
At eleven-thirty Coach Pennock blew the whistle and said, "Same time tomorrow. Bring water. Bring more water than you think. Medrano, stay a minute."
The field emptied. Guys walked down the hill to the parking lot in clumps, talking, shoving each other, ripping off shin guards. Tavo stood by the bench with his ball and watched Coach Pennock finish writing on the clipboard, slowly, until the last of the kids had passed through the gate, and Coach Dunagan had gathered the cones into a mesh bag and gone to the shed. Then she put the clipboard down on the bench and sat down next to it, with a small grunt, and stretched out her left leg, and rubbed the knee.
"Sit," she said.
He sat, on the other end of the bench, with the ball between his feet.
"That was a nice shot," she said.
"Thank you."
"Where'd you learn to hit it like that?"
"A park."
"Which park?"
"Corrado. By the Little League."
She nodded slowly, as if he had confirmed something rather than told her something. She looked out at the empty field. The sprinklers on the far side had come on and were ticking around in long arcs, throwing water into the sun.