"I don't need them anymore," Tavo said. "They did their job. Somebody told me."
Wyn took the bag. He opened it and looked in at the cleats, at the gray leather and the yellowed stripes and the nineteen red stitches, and he did not say anything. He folded the top of the bag over, carefully, twice, and set it on the curb beside him.
"She called me," he said. "Coach. Saturday. I didn't pick up. She left a message." He turned the thermos in his hands. "I listened to it about twenty times. I didn't call back yet."
"Yet," Tavo said.
"Yet," Wyn agreed. "Don't push it."
"My aunt says you're coming to dinner Sunday. Pozole. She said to tell you she said so twice."
Wyn actually laughed. "Twice," he said. "Okay. I'm scared of your aunt."
"Everybody is."
They sat for a minute. Tuli went and got the ball and started juggling it, badly, in his slides.
And then there was the sound of a bike on gravel.
Tavo did not turn around. He watched Wyn's face, and he saw it change as Wyn looked past him toward the lot, toward the backstop, and he knew who it was before Wyn said anything. Wyn's hands went still on the thermos. He did not stand up. He looked, for a moment, the way Torin had looked on the first day of tryouts, crouched over a cleat with the smile gone out of his face all at once.
Torin Brackett walked his bike to the edge of the asphalt and laid it down in the grass. He was in his Delta Valley training shirt and shorts, with his cleats in his hand and a ball under his arm. He stopped twenty feet away. He did not come any closer.
"Hey," he said.