Petey looked at me for a long time over his glasses. He had a way of looking at you when he was about to say something he'd worked out in advance.
"You could beat him out," he said. "You know that, right? Not for starter, you're not that good yet. But in practice. Every rebound drill. You just go to his left. You'd make him look like a stiff in front of Dombrowski every single day, and Dombrowski would start playing you more and him less, and nobody would ever know why." He lifted his hands. "I'm not saying do it. I'm saying it's a vector field."
"That's not what it is," I said.
"Then what is it?"
I couldn't tell him. Not yet. But I kept thinking about the two hands on my chest at the tryout, and the voice that wasn't Brent's voice, and the balls coming out of the floodlights in the cold, and Mr. Callahan in the red blazer saying hands, hands, hands. Brent had shoved me across the court because somebody had been shoving him across a driveway for years, and he had said what his father said because it was the only thing he'd ever been told about what to do with a person who wouldn't stay down.
I didn't forgive him for it. Not then. But I couldn't hate him cleanly anymore, either, and I found I missed it a little, the clean hate. It had been simpler to carry.
* * *
Dombrowski ran a rebounding drill on Tuesdays that the team called the Meat Grinder. Three offensive players, three defensive players, one coach standing at the free throw line with a ball, shooting bricks on purpose. Whoever got the rebound got a point. First to five. Losers ran a suicide, baseline to foul line and back, baseline to half court and back, baseline to far foul line and back, baseline to baseline.
The Tuesday after the pharmacy, Dombrowski put me on offense and Brent on defense, across from each other on the weak side. Brent wouldn't look at me. He set his feet and turned his back to me and stuck his butt out, the way you're supposed to, and on the first shot Dombrowski threw the ball off the right side of the rim and Brent went up and got it clean. On the second shot, off the front, Leon got it. On the third shot, Dombrowski threw it high off the left side of the glass.