Tuli looked at him for a moment as though weighing something, and then he shrugged his big shoulders and said, "Ask him," and walked off toward the east goal, pulling his gloves on as he went.
Finishing was a line. Fifty-some guys in a line at the top of the box, a server at the D feeding balls in one at a time, one touch to set, one touch to shoot, Tuli in goal for the first half of the line and a skinny sophomore keeper for the second. It was a fast drill and it was not a fair one; you got maybe three shots in twenty minutes, and if the server gave you a bad ball, you got a bad shot, and that was your shot. Coach Pennock stood off to the side of the six-yard box with her clipboard, and Coach Dunagan, a heavy, red-faced man who taught health, stood at the D feeding.
Torin was six or seven places ahead of Tavo in the line. Tavo watched him shoot. He was good. Clean first touch, quick release, low and hard to Tuli's left, a goal. The second time he went near post and Tuli got a hand on it. Torin jogged back to the end of the line without looking at anyone.
Tavo's first ball came in bouncing and he took it on his thigh, which was a mistake, and by the time it came down Tuli was off his line and smothered it. His second ball came in clean and he set it and shot, and it was a decent shot, hard, to the right, and Tuli dove and tipped it around the post, and somebody behind him in line said, "Unlucky," in a tone that might have been sincere.
His third ball never came, because before it could, Torin Brackett said, from the line behind him, loud enough for the whole box to hear: "Coach, are we letting people shoot in those? He's going to slip and take out the keeper."
It got a laugh. Not a big one. A nervous one, the kind of laugh people give when they are not sure if they are supposed to.
Coach Dunagan, at the D, looked over at Coach Pennock with an expression that said this was her call.
Coach Pennock had not been looking at Torin. She had been looking at Tavo's feet. She had been looking at them, Tavo realized, for a while. He did not know how long. Her face had a peculiar stillness to it, like the face of somebody listening for a sound in another room.
She tucked the clipboard under her arm. She walked out from beside the six-yard box, past Coach Dunagan, past the ball bag, and she bent and took a ball out of the bag herself and walked it out to a spot a few yards outside the top of the box, and set it down on the grass. Eighteen yards out. Dead center.
The line went quiet.
She stood up and looked at Tavo, and the look was not friendly and was not unfriendly. It was the look of somebody who has asked a question and wants the answer.
"You," she said. "Medrano, right?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Show me what you got." She pointed, not at the goal, but at one specific part of it, the upper left, where the crossbar met the post. "Top corner. Go."