"You're good. You're a good player. You're going to play college ball somewhere. D-III, maybe a juco, maybe somewhere small that gives you some money. You defend, you don't turn it over, coaches like you."
"Okay."
"But your mom's talking about you like you're me." He didn't say it unkindly. Amari never said anything unkindly. "And you know you're not, and she doesn't, and somebody's going to have to tell her before she builds a whole house on it."
Jalen looked at the floor between his feet. He'd known. He had known since the fall, when the scouting service ranked Amari ninety-first in the state and didn't rank Jalen at all, and his mother had said *they just haven't seen you yet* with total certainty. He loved basketball. He loved the squeak and the sweat, the second when a back-cut opened and you knew before the defender did. He'd have played it for free in an empty gym forever. That was the problem. It was his. He didn't want it to be her plan, or the family's way out, the thing that justified two hundred dollars and four overtime shifts and Dez kneeling on the floor with a pencil.
"I don't know how to tell her," he said.
"You don't have to tell her. You have to *do* something." Amari stood and shouldered his bag. "Words are for old people."
---
He went home and took the box down from the closet shelf and sat on his bed with it in his lap.
He opened the receipt folded in the bottom. Dick's Sporting Goods, The Marketplace mall, Henrietta. Purchased 2/28. Return within 60 days, unworn, with box and receipt.
He opened the resale app on his phone. The colorway had sold out everywhere in four hours. Deadstock pairs in his size were going for two-sixty, two-eighty.
He sat there doing his own math. Two-sixty in an hour, maybe, if he listed it now. Or two-oh-three at the register on Saturday, all of it his mother's money going back to his mother's card, where it would do Dez exactly no good unless his mother decided it should. The first was quick and smart and a little like stealing. The second was clean, and changed nothing by itself.
He thought about it for a long time. Then he put the shoes back in the tissue and closed the lid, and on the lid, with a Sharpie from his desk, in small letters in the corner, he wrote *NOT YET.*
---
Sal Ferrante's shop on Elmgrove Road was a cinderblock building behind a muffler place, with a hand-painted sign that said FERRANTE TOOL & DIE and, below it, smaller, SINCE 1988. Sal was seventy-eight, round and bald, with forearms like hams and a hearing aid he turned off whenever the machines ran. He'd worked beside Walter in Building 23 for nineteen years, and when Walter called him Wednesday evening, Sal had said, "Bring the kid," before Walter got to the part about why.
At seven-thirty Walter and Dez stood in front of the South Bend lathe.
It was a 1956 model, belt-driven, painted the gray-green that every machine of its era seemed to have come in. Walter put his hand flat on the headstock the way some men put a hand on a horse.
"Hello, old girl," he said, under his breath, and Dez pretended not to hear.