"You didn't move," he said. "In there. I would've moved. If it was me and some guy like me was in my face. I would've moved."
Calvert did not know what to say to that.
"I almost did," he said finally. "I thought about it the whole time."
"Yeah, well." Mick looked at the ground. "You didn't." And he went back across the lot and up the concrete steps and into the school, and Calvert sat on the tailgate by himself for another few minutes with the shoebox on his knees, and then he went in too.
The finalists were posted on a sheet of butcher paper taped to the wall by the trophy case at five minutes past one. There was a crowd around it. Calvert stood at the back and could not see, and Mrs. Agard, who was shorter than he was, wormed her way in through the front like a person half her age and came back out with her glasses swinging on their chain and her face doing something very complicated.
"Senior Individual Exhibit," she said. "Two go to Harrisburg. Second round is three tables. Tamaqua, the canal lock. Pottsville Catholic, the brewery. And you."
The second round was the same three judges again, at two o'clock, for five minutes each, and a few questions. Except it was not the same three. Ms. Garrigan and Mr. Hufnagle came to his table at five past two, but the third judge was a woman Calvert had never seen, with a district office lanyard, who explained apologetically that Dr. Dombrowski had needed to leave early for a personal matter and that she would be filling in, and she had read the first-round notes, and could he just walk her through it quickly.
Calvert walked her through it. He did not remember any of it afterward. He remembered that his voice worked, and that his hands did not shake, and that Mr. Hufnagle stood behind the new judge nodding the whole time like a man listening to a song he knew, and that Ms. Garrigan, when it was over, did not write anything on her clipboard, but reached out and touched the corner of the center panel, lightly, the way everybody seemed to want to touch it, and then went away.