"You're allowed to be both."
He nodded. Then he said, "There's one more thing. About the twenty-eighth."
*
That night, at ten-thirty, Emmett heard a knock on his bedroom door. Not the knock his mother used, two quick taps. A heavier one, a single thump with the side of a fist.
"It's open."
Dante came in carrying the plastic bin from the garage. All eleven basketballs, masking-tape labels and all. Emmett must have brought them home from the lab that afternoon. Dante set the bin on the floor and sat down on the carpet with his back against the bed and his braced leg out straight.
"So," he said. "The ball dies in January."
Emmett put his book down.
"I want to hear it," Dante said. "The whole thing. The way you're gonna do it in front of the judges. Pretend I'm a judge."
"You don't know anything about coefficients of restitution."
"I don't know what that is, so that's true." Dante picked the rubber first-grade ball out of the bin and turned it over. "Explain it like I'm a judge who's also not that smart."
Emmett looked at his brother for a long moment. Then he got off the bed and sat cross-legged on the floor, facing him, and pulled the folded copy of his poster out from under his mattress, where Yolanda would later learn he'd kept it for weeks, and spread it on the carpet between them.
He talked for twenty-two minutes. Dante interrupted eleven times. Some of the interruptions were dumb, and Emmett said so. Some of them were not dumb at all. *What if a guy dribbles it a bunch before the game, does that warm it up? Does it matter what the ball's made of? If the ball's dead for everybody, both teams, why does it matter?* That last one made Emmett stop and frown and write something on the back of his hand.
"That's a good question," he said grudgingly. "That's actually what a judge would ask. It matters because it changes who it hurts. Shooters more than drivers. So if you're a team that shoots a lot, you should plan for it."
"We're a team that shoots a lot."
"I know," said Emmett. "I *know*. That's the whole point. Coach Alvarez should be warming the balls up in the boiler room before cold games. I wrote it in the conclusion. Recommendation number two."