Dante stared at him. Then he started to laugh, really laugh, his head tipped back against the mattress.
"You wrote my coach a *recommendation*?"
"It's science," Emmett said with dignity. "Science makes recommendations."
When the laughter faded, Dante put the first-grade ball back into the bin, carefully.
"I'm sorry," he said. "About what I said. In the kitchen. About my medal mattering more. That was a garbage thing to say."
Emmett looked down at the poster. "It's okay."
"No, it's not. Don't do the polite thing with me, man. I'm your brother. Do it with Mom if you have to, don't do it with me." Dante took a breath. "I asked Coach if I could skip shootaround on the twenty-eighth. He said yes, as long as I'm back in the building by five-thirty. I'm driving to Brennerton with you and Mom. I'm gonna be there for the morning thing. The posters. And then I gotta leave before the oral round, because Brennerton's two hours and the game's at seven. But I'm gonna be there in the morning. I want to see the judges' faces when you tell them about the boiler room."
Emmett didn't answer for a while. He smoothed a crease in the poster with his thumb.
"I'm still kind of mad," he said finally. "At both of you."
"Yeah," said Dante. "That's fair. Be mad in the car. It's a long drive."
*
They left for Brennerton at five-forty in the morning on the twenty-eighth, in the dark, with a thermos of coffee and a poster tube and a tackle box of Sharpies and binder clips and, on Emmett's insistence, three of the eleven basketballs, belted into the back seat beside him like small round passengers.
Yolanda's phone was in the glove compartment. She had put it there in the driveway, in front of both of them, without making a speech about it, and closed the latch. Dante had raised his eyebrows. Emmett had pretended not to notice and then, a mile later, looked at the glove compartment twice.
Somewhere past the county line, with the sky going grey and pink over the frozen fields, Emmett said from the back seat, "I'm still mad, but you can turn the radio on."
"Thank you," said Yolanda gravely, and did.
The finals filled the field house at Brennerton University, a huge echoing barn of a building with a track around the upper level and a hundred and forty tri-fold posters lined up in rows on folding tables, each with a nervous child standing beside it. It sounded, Dante said, exactly like a gym before a game, and he was right; Yolanda had sat in enough gyms to know.