"He said he'd have gone top corner if you said bottom left. He said it was always his shot." Tavo paused. "He said he'd have quit even if it went in."
Coach Pennock took a breath and held it and let it out very slowly.
"I called it," she said. "I've had seven years of nights where I lay there and called it again. Top corner. Go. I had a kid who was having the best season of his life and the worst year of his life at the same time, and I could see it, Tavo, I could see something was wrong with him, and I didn't know what, and I didn't ask, because we were winning. And then I walked him out to that spot and I told him where to put it, like he was a machine I was programming. And it went into the cotton." She rubbed the knee. "I stopped coaching club two years later. Told everybody it was the knee. I went and coached college for a while, where nobody's anybody's kid. Then I came here, because it was home, and because I thought maybe I could be better at it now. And on the first morning, the first morning, a kid walks up the hill in his shoes." She shook her head. "I didn't know whether to cry or throw up. So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I pointed at the corner."
"Why?"
She thought about it.
"Because that kid was laughing at you," she said, "and he was laughing at you because he was scared of something, and I knew exactly what it was, because I was scared of it too. Those shoes walking back onto a field. And I thought: let's see. Let's see what they do. Let's see if they can go where I sent them last time and come back." She looked at him for the first time. "That's not a fair thing to put on a sixteen-year-old in his first tryout. I knew that while I was doing it. I'm sorry."
"I'm seventeen," Tavo said.
She laughed, surprised, out loud.
"Seventeen," she said. "Well. That changes everything."
"He might call you," Tavo said. "He said maybe."
"Maybe's a lot, from him." She stood up, slowly. "Thursday. Noon. Athletics office."
"I know."
"Get new shoes."