Emmett's table was in Row F. Priya, who had qualified as an alternate and come along anyway in her own family's minivan with a mother, a grandmother, two sisters and a sign, stood at the end of the row and waved at him with both hands.
Mr. Pryor found them at eight-fifteen, in a tie this time, with a district lanyard and a paper cup of tea. He shook Yolanda's hand and then, after a fractional pause, Dante's.
"You came," he said to Dante.
"Just for the morning," Dante said. "I got a game."
"I know you do," said Mr. Pryor. "State quarterfinal. I read the paper." He looked at the braced knee and didn't comment on it. "The morning is the part where the judges actually talk to him. You picked the right part."
The judges came through in pairs. Yolanda stood back, out of the way, with her hands folded, the way you're supposed to, and watched. She watched Emmett explain the drop frame, the temperature chambers, the thermostat logs. She watched him lift the first-grade ball out of its seat belt and drop it, and catch it, and explain why it bounced differently from the others. She watched one judge, a lanky young man with a university badge, lean in and frown and ask, "But if the ball's equally dead for both teams, does it actually change the outcome?"
And she watched Emmett not flinch. She watched him smile, a small smile that came and went, and glance once toward the end of the row where his brother was leaning against a pillar with his arms folded, and say, "That's a good question. It changes who it hurts."
Dante, at the pillar, put his fist over his mouth.
At eleven-thirty he had to go. He hugged his mother hard, and then he went down Row F and stood in front of his brother's table and seemed not to know what to do with his arms. Then he took the gold medal out of his jacket pocket, the regional MVP medal he'd been carrying around for three weeks, and set it on the table beside the first-grade basketball.
"Hold that for me," he said. "I'm not allowed to wear it on the floor anyway."
"That's weird," said Emmett. "That's a weird thing to do."
"It's a weird family," said Dante, and bumped his fist against Emmett's shoulder, and went.
*
The oral round was in a lecture hall with steep seats, three judges at a long table down front, and a single microphone on a stand that had been lowered almost as far as it would go. Finalists presented one at a time, eight minutes each, then five minutes of questions. Families sat in the back rows and were asked, firmly, by a woman with a clipboard, to silence all devices.
Yolanda had no device to silence. She had a small spiral notebook she'd bought at the gas station that morning, and a pen, and she had been writing in it all day. Not much. Words. *Coefficient of restitution. Fifty-eight degrees. Forty minutes. "It changes who it hurts."* She did not know exactly why she was writing it down. It seemed important to have it somewhere she could find later. Somewhere safe.
Emmett was eleventh. He walked down to the microphone with his note cards and didn't use them. He was good. He was clear and a little fast and he made the judges laugh once, at the part about the boiler room. Yolanda held the pen so tightly it left a groove in her finger.