"Yeah," he said. "Maybe."
Wednesday was full field, eleven versus eleven, three thirty-minute periods with the teams reshuffled each time, and it was hot, a hundred and one by eleven o'clock, the kind of Central Valley heat that sits on your shoulders like a wet towel. Coach Pennock made them stop for water every ten minutes whether they wanted it or not. Tavo played left wing for one period and left back for one and center forward for the last. He scored once, a scrappy thing off a rebound, and he set up Pim for another, and he lost a man on a corner kick and watched the kid head it in and heard Coach Dunagan say, "Who had seven?" and raised his hand, because he had had seven.
He played the second period on the same team as Torin. It was the first time. For ten minutes neither of them passed to the other, not on purpose exactly, just the way water runs around a stone. Then the ball came to Torin in the middle of the field with two big defenders closing on him, and he did a thing with his hips, a half turn, and looked up, and there was nobody open but Tavo on the left touchline, and Torin hit him with a long diagonal ball that dropped out of the air onto his foot like it had been placed there by hand. Tavo took it down and went at the right back and got to the endline and cut it back, and a sophomore put it in.
Running back to midfield, Torin passed close to him and said, not looking, "Nice ball."
"Your ball," Tavo said.
Torin did not answer. But the next time he had it, he looked left first.
At the end of the session, after the cooldown, Coach Pennock sat on the bench and stretched out her knee and did not call anybody over, and Tavo went over anyway, and sat on the other end of the bench, the way he had on Monday.
"I talked to him," he said.
She did not look at him. She looked at the field.
"Okay," she said.
"He said to tell you it wasn't you."
She was quiet for a long time. A grackle landed on the crossbar of the near goal and walked along it, looking down at the grass.
"He said that."