There is a thing that happens sometimes when you hear a sentence you have heard many times before in a place you have never heard it. It was like that. Show me what you got. Wyn said it every morning. He said it sitting on the curb with his thermos, with his eyes half closed, and he said it the same way Coach Pennock had just said it, with the little drop on the last word, got, like a door closing softly. Tavo had always thought it was just a thing Wyn said. He had never once wondered where Wyn had gotten it.
He wondered now. He stood at the head of the line with fifty guys behind him and a goalkeeper the size of a refrigerator in front of him and a woman he had never met pointing at the upper left corner of the goal, and for one strange second the field at Merrimon High was not there at all, and it was six-fifteen at Corrado Park, and the asphalt was wet, and there was a crooked orange square on a cinder-block wall.
He walked up to the ball.
Tuli Folau, in goal, bent his knees and spread his arms. He did not cheat toward the left. Tavo noticed that. He could have, everybody had heard where she pointed, but he stayed in the center of the goal, honest, giving the shot its chance. Later Tavo would think that was the first thing he ever liked about Tuli Folau.
He did not look at the line. He did not look at Torin. He took three steps back and one to the side.
Three steps. The last one long. Plant foot beside the ball, pointed just left of where he wanted it to go. Hips open. Body over the ball.
Your hip is a terrible liar.
He struck it with the inside of his right foot, the worn inside edge of a cleat that had struck ten thousand balls before he was ever born into it, and the ball went up and out to the right of the goal, wide, clearly wide, a miss, somebody in the line already starting to make a sound, and then it bent. It bent the way it bent off the wall at Corrado, late, all at once, as if it had changed its mind in the air, and Tuli Folau launched himself to his left with his whole huge body flat out and his gloved fingertips stretched as far as fingertips go, and the ball went over the fingertips and under the crossbar and kissed the inside of the post where it met the bar, and dropped into the net.
It made a sound, hitting the post. A small metal ping. Then the soft sound of the net.
Nobody said anything.
Tuli lay on the grass for a second. Then he rolled over onto his back and looked up at the sky and said, quite loudly, "Okay," in the tone of a man accepting the weather.
Somebody in the line laughed, a real laugh this time, surprised, and then somebody else said, "Yo," and somebody whistled, and then the line was making noise, the loose happy noise of boys who have seen something they did not expect to see, and Tavo stood where he was with his heart going and his right toe throbbing and did not know where to put his hands.
Coach Pennock did not clap. She did not smile. She looked at the net, and then she looked at Tavo, and then, for a long moment, she looked at his feet again.
"Okay," she said, quietly, exactly the way Tuli had said it. And then, louder, to the line: "Next. Let's go. Coach Dunagan, keep feeding."