"Nobody cares about your stupid history contest," Mick said. He said it slowly, every word on its own. "Nobody in this whole gym cares. You hear me? It's a bunch of kids with poster board. And you're going to stand here in your dead grandpa's sweater and tell three strangers about my family so you can go to Harrisburg."
So he knew whose sweater it was. Calvert had not known that he knew.
"It's not about your family," Calvert said. "Not the way you think."
"Take it down."
"I can't."
"You can. You got tape. You put it up, you can take it down." Mick put one hand flat on the edge of the table, not hard, just put it there, and leaned in. "Pull it before the judges come, and fold it up, and put it back in your grandma's car, and nobody has to say anything else about it. That's the deal. That's the only deal."
Butchie said, "Mick," very quietly, from behind him.
Calvert looked at Mick's hand on the table. It was a big hand, rough across the knuckles, with a Band-Aid wrapped around the side of the index finger and a crust of something white, lime probably, still in the creases of the palm from the Agway the day before. He thought about the line in the logbook. T.K. carried me out. He thought about how a hand like that would have been, on a man forty-some years old, in the dark, with the top coming.
Then he did a thing he had not planned to do. He stepped around the end of the table, and he came and stood directly in front of the board, between it and Mick, with his back to the center panel and the March ninth page, and he put his hands in the pockets of the cardigan, and he did not say anything at all.