Emmett did not move from the refrigerator. He didn't look at Mr. Pryor and he didn't look at his mother. He looked at his brother's medal, and then at the floor again, and when he spoke it was in a voice she had never heard come out of him, a voice with nothing in it at all.
"Does it matter now?"
The refrigerator hummed. Down the street a bus sighed at a stop, the bus he should have been on. Yolanda Carter stood in her own kitchen in her good maroon blouse with her phone lit up in her hand, forty-four unread messages now, and for the first time in a very long time she could not think of a single thing to say.
*
It was Mr. Pryor who moved first. He was seventy-one years old and had spent thirty-four of those years in laboratories where things went wrong, and he had learned that when a room goes silent, the most useful thing a person can do is something small and ordinary.
He set his blue folder down on the island, well clear of the milk. He took a paper napkin from the holder by the fruit bowl and laid it, without comment, over the spill. Then he lifted Emmett's score sheet out of the wet by one dry corner and held it up to the window light.
"Ninety-eighth percentile in the state," he said, to nobody in particular. "Highest in the district at the seventh-grade level. Highest at the eighth-grade level too, as it happens, though they don't tell you that part on this sheet." He blotted the corner gently with a second napkin. "That's not why I'm here, though. The test gets you looked at. The project gets you in."
"What project," Yolanda said. It came out flatter than she meant.
Mr. Pryor glanced at her once over his glasses, and then, with great tact, he looked back at Emmett.
"*Why the Ball Dies in January*," he said. "Emmett submitted it to the regional fair in December. I was one of the judges. I have been doing this a long time, Mrs. Carter, and I don't often walk up to a twelve-year-old's table and forget what time it is."
Dante's head came up.
Emmett said nothing. He had his hands in the front pocket of his hoodie and he was pressing them together inside it, Yolanda could see the shape of his knuckles through the cotton.
"The statewide finals are in Brennerton, at the university, on the twenty-eighth," Mr. Pryor went on. "Saturday. Two weeks from tomorrow. There's a display in the morning, then an oral round in front of a panel in the afternoon. It's a long day. Families are encouraged to come." He opened the blue folder and took out a single sheet, a form with a yellow tab on it. "This is the part I'm actually here about. Parent or guardian signature, and the travel waiver. It went home twice in the school folder. It didn't come back either time. The deadline is Monday."
The phone in Yolanda's hand buzzed. She turned it face-down on the granite. It was a small gesture and it felt enormous, and she was ashamed that it felt enormous.
"It went home twice," she said.
"In the Friday folder," Emmett said. He was still talking to the floor. "I put it on the counter. Both times."
She tried to see it, the counter on two Friday nights. She saw the stack of mail that she moved from the counter to the table to the counter again. She saw the team schedule, highlighted in pink, taped to the cabinet above the coffeemaker. She saw a grocery list, a pharmacy receipt, Benny Alvarez's printout of the Linwood College camp dates. She did not see a form with a yellow tab, and she understood with a slow cold drop in her stomach that this did not mean it hadn't been there.