"Move," Mick said.
Calvert did not move.
For a long moment nothing happened. The gym went on around them in its ordinary Saturday noise, folding chairs scraping somewhere, a microphone on the stage by the far basket squealing once as somebody from the district office tested it, Deborah Mazurek's voice coming faintly through the locker room door, and the rest of it, the coffee urn, the little kids, the radiator banging under the windows. But in their row it had gone still. The Amelia Earhart girl's mother had her hand on her daughter's arm. A man in a Penn State jacket two tables down had stopped with a cup halfway to his mouth.
"I'm not going to ask you again," Mick said.
"Okay," Calvert said.
He did not know where it came from, the okay. He was not brave. He had never been in a fight in his life, not one, not even in fourth grade when Joey Dutko had taken his lunch box and thrown it on the roof of the bus garage. He was a person who walked around things. He had walked around Mick Kostka for two and a half years, at the lockers, in the cafeteria, in the hallway by the band room where the wrestlers liked to lean, and when Mick had called him Mister Rogers he had laughed along a little, the way you do, the way you show a dog your hands. His heart was going so hard right now that he could feel it in the backs of his knees. But his feet were on the gym floor, on the painted edge of the free throw lane, and they were not moving, and he found, a little to his own surprise, that he did not want them to.
Mick looked at him. Then he looked past him, over his shoulder, at the board, and his face changed in some way Calvert could not read.
"You don't know anything," Mick said, quieter. "You don't know what it's like. You put that up there, and people read it, and it starts all over again. You know what my dad gets at the Sunoco? Still? You know what I got in third grade? Kid named Robbie Chesko told the whole class my grandpa killed his uncle. Third grade. I didn't even know what a section foreman was." He took his hand off the table. "And you know who's judging today? You look at the list?"
Calvert had not looked at the list. Mrs. Agard had it.