and it isn't a scratch. I'm telling you this because you've already seen the label." She looked at me with very blue eyes, Brent's eyes. "I'm asking you, please. Don't tell anyone at the school. It would kill Gil if it got out. And Brent says it would kill him, too, but I think he means something different."
I said I wouldn't tell. She thanked me and shut the door. I got on my Huffy and coasted all the way down the Brunswick hill without pedaling, past the dark car lots and the closed Grand Union and the lit-up Christmas windows on Hoosick Street, with the cold making my eyes water, so that if anybody had seen me they might have thought I was crying, and I wasn't, or not much.
* * *
"Retinal something," Petey said on Monday, at our table in the corner of the cafeteria. We had to keep our voices low. He'd asked his mother, without saying who, what Pred Forte in the left eye might be for, and his mother had said it was a steroid drop, for swelling inside the eye, for inflammation, and could be from a lot of things, but if the doctor wanted him seen at Albany Med by a specialist, it was probably the retina. "If a ball hit you hard enough, you could tear it. Or get a hole, or bleeding in the back. My mom said sometimes you lose part of what you see and you don't even notice, because your other eye covers for it. Except up close. Except for things coming fast."
"From the left," I said.
"From the left and above, probably. If it's the bottom of the retina that's hurt, you lose the top of what you see. It's upside down in there." Petey pushed his tray away. He'd stopped eating his Tater Tots, which was how I knew he was upset. "Teddy, that's why he can't rebound on the left. Balls come down off the rim from the left, from above, and he can't see them till they're at his chest."
I'd figured it out by then. I'd figured it out on the Brunswick hill. I'd seen every single miss on the left side of the floor where Brent turned his whole head instead of just his eyes, every one he'd lost, every one that came down to Leon or the other team or nobody. I'd charted it without meaning to, in my head, the way I'd charted the crate.
"He shouldn't be playing," Petey said. "Should he? If it's the retina. If he gets hit again."
"I don't know."
"Shaker's a week from Friday. The Siena man's coming."
"I know."