Nobody said anything for what felt like a whole minute. It was probably two seconds. Then Leon Pratt, on the bench, said, "Oh," very softly, and somebody else laughed, and then all the varsity guys on the bleachers were up and hooting, not for me exactly but for the thing that had happened, for the sheer geometry of it, and Kevin Shea had his hands on his head, and Petey Gaffney was writing something on his clipboard so fast the pencil lead broke.
I didn't laugh. I didn't stand over him. I'd been shoved across that court twice in four days and I'll tell you honestly there was a part of me that wanted to, a hot bright part that wanted to bounce the ball on the floor next to his head and say something. But I'd seen his face when he said the thing about being tough, and something about it was still bothering me. So I just held the ball. Then I held my other hand down to him.
He looked at my hand like it was a summons.
He got up by himself. He didn't look at me. He walked to the top of the key, and Dombrowski blew the whistle for the first time all afternoon and said, "Rotate," in a voice that had nothing in it at all.
* * *
The list went up Monday morning. It was one name on an index card, under Rourke's crossed-out name.
BRZEZINSKI, T.
I read it four times. Petey read it once and then went into the boys' room and, he told me later, threw up a little, from nerves, on my behalf.
Dombrowski called me into his office at lunch. It was a narrow room off the gym with a desk made of a door laid across two filing cabinets, and on the wall behind him there was a framed photograph of the 1968 Lansing Hill team that had made it to the state semifinals, in which Dombrowski, younger and thinner and with hair, sat second from the left with a ball in his lap.
"You can't run my offense," he said. "You can't dribble with your left hand. You don't know a pick from a shovel. You're going to sit at the end of my bench and you're going to learn all of that from the ground up, and if I see you loaf in a drill I'll cut you and give the spot to Pruett's reading tutor. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
"Where did you learn to read a miss like that?"