"That's not a bad start, actually," Mrs. Agard said. "Leave out the Mister Rogers."
He almost smiled. She put a hand on his shoulder, on the too-big shoulder of the cardigan, and left it there for a second.
"Judges come through in the first round between nine and eleven," she said. "Three of them. They'll have about ten minutes with you. You'll do the opening the way we practiced, and then they'll ask questions, and you answer the question they asked and not the one you wish they'd asked. And Calvert, listen to me. Whatever happens with the score, this is real work. This is the kind of thing people in this valley have needed somebody to do for a long time. You did it at fifteen with a microfilm machine and a library card."
"And eleven dollars of photostats."
"And eleven dollars of photostats." She squeezed his shoulder once and went off down the row to find Deborah Mazurek, who could be heard faintly, through the locker room door, telling the town of Johnstown that the dam was going to break.
The gym filled up slowly. History Day regional for the Schuylkill and Carbon district was not, by any measure, a large event. There were perhaps ninety tables, and the bleachers were pulled out on one side only, for the parents and the grandparents and the bored younger siblings eating Tastykakes from the snack table the Mahanoy Area Home and School Association had set up by the trophy case. By eight thirty there were people walking the rows with styrofoam cups, stopping at the boards, reading the titles. A boy from Tamaqua had built a working scale model of a canal lock. A girl from Pottsville Catholic had done the Yuengling brewery during Prohibition and had a lot of photographs of men in suspenders standing next to barrels. People stopped at Calvert's board and read the Herald headline and some of them looked at it for a long time and some of them moved on quickly, and one old woman in a church coat stood in front of the list of names and touched the place where it said Francis Gallagher, 29, with one gloved finger, and then walked away without saying anything at all, and Calvert watched her go all the way to the doors.
He did not see Mick Kostka come in. He did not know Mick was in the building until he heard him.
"You have got to be kidding me."
Calvert turned around. Mick was standing at the end of the row, by the sugar-cube Liberty Bell, with his hands jammed in the front pocket of a gray Mahanoy Area Wrestling sweatshirt, staring at the board. He was a junior, a year older and four inches taller than Calvert and built the way the wrestling coach liked them, square, with a neck that went straight down into his shoulders, and dark hair cut short on the sides. He had a split in his left eyebrow from a match at Shamokin in December that had healed into a thin pale line. He worked weekends at the Agway feed store on Route 54, everybody knew that, loading fifty-pound bags of lime and seed corn into the trucks of men who came down from the farms on the ridge, and he was in the gym at eight forty on a Saturday morning, Calvert realized later, because the Home and School had asked the wrestling team to set up and break down the tables, and the wrestling team got a pizza out of it, and Mick had been carrying folding chairs out of the storage room since seven.