Then the questions. The first two were easy. The third came from the judge at the end, an older woman with steel-colored hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain, who had not smiled once all afternoon.
"Your data from the freezer trial on the fourteenth," she said. "The nine-year-old ball. There's a reading there that's well outside your range. You footnote it, but you don't explain it. What happened?"
Emmett opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
Yolanda watched it happen. She watched him go still at the microphone, watched his eyes go up, past the judges, across the hall, searching the back rows. Looking for something. She knew that look. She had seen it on Dante a thousand times, in a thousand gyms. *Find Mom.*
She didn't wave. She didn't stand. She just sat up straight where he could see her, with her hands on her notebook and no light in her lap, and she looked back at him. Only at him.
Emmett blinked. He looked down at the judge.
"I don't know," he said. "I don't know yet. I think the ball might have had a slow leak, because it was the oldest one with a bladder, and I didn't check the pressure again after. Or I misread the measuring tape in the frame. I'd want to rerun it six more times at the same temperature, and pressure-check before and after every drop, and if it happens again it's the ball and if it doesn't, it was me." He paused. "I should have done that before. I ran out of Saturdays."
The steel-haired judge regarded him over her glasses for a long, terrible second. Then the corner of her mouth moved.
"That," she said, "is the correct answer. Thank you, Mr. Carter."
*
The awards were supposed to begin at four-thirty. At four-forty a man came out and apologized: a scoring discrepancy in the biology division, a twenty-minute delay, perhaps thirty. Yolanda went out into the hallway and stood at a window and looked at the parking lot and did the arithmetic. Brennerton to Fulton Heights, two hours and ten minutes in good traffic. Tip-off at seven.
She went out to the car and opened the glove compartment, for the first time since dawn, and turned on her phone.
There was one text from Dante, sent at 4:12 p.m.
*Coach says the balls are in the boiler room. He says tell Emmett recommendation #2 has been implemented, whatever that means. Also: STAY. I mean it. Mama Ruth's got the cushion. I'll find you after. Both of you.*
She read it three times. Then she typed back *Staying. Play the next pass*, and turned the phone off, and put it back, and went inside.
Mr. Pryor was in the hallway, standing by the drinking fountain with his cold tea.