I told him about the crate. I didn't intend to. It came out the way things come out when you're scared and somebody asks you a question in a calm voice. I told him about the bowed left side and the roofing nails and the Hollister wall and the six spiral notebooks. He listened without moving. When I finished, he scratched his eyebrow with his thumb.
"A Stewart's crate," he said.
"Yes, sir."
"Orange or the blue one?"
"Orange."
He nodded slowly, as if the color explained something. "My uncle used to say you learn to swim best in the river, not the pool," he said. "The pool's too nice. Everything comes back the same." He tapped his clipboard. "Callahan's got a game against Shaker in three weeks and a man from Siena who wants to see it. That boy is carrying more weight than you know about. I won't have it carried into my practices. You come to me if there's a problem. You don't settle it on my floor."
"I didn't settle anything."
"I know you didn't," Dombrowski said. "That's why you're on the team."
* * *
Making the team did not make Brent Callahan like me. I hadn't expected it to. What I hadn't expected was that he would stop shoving me and start doing something worse, which was pretending I had never existed.
In practice he would not pass to me. That was fine; nobody passed to the twelfth man on the bench. But he would not stand in a line behind me, either. If I was in the layup line on the right, he went left. If I was getting water, he waited. When Dombrowski put us on the same side in a shell drill, Brent rotated around me like I was a pillar holding up the roof. Kevin Shea took his cue from Brent and called me Laundry, which caught on with about half the team, and by the second week of December "Laundry" was printed in marker on a strip of athletic tape above my locker, and I left it there because taking it down would have meant it bothered me.
It bothered me. But I was learning a three-man weave. I was learning that a pick is a thing you set with your feet planted and your elbows in and that it hurts both people. I was learning, from Leon Pratt, who turned out to be a reader of science fiction and the most patient person on the team, how to hold position on the block without getting called for a hold. And I was learning, slowly, that every real rim in the Big Ten sounded