I still had the ball. I want to be clear about that. I sat there on the floor against the bleachers with my tailbone singing and the ball in both hands.
"Foul," said Petey Gaffney from the sideline, where he was excused from gym that semester because of a note from his mother about his asthma. Petey was my best friend and the only person at Lansing Hill who would say the word foul to Brent Callahan out loud. "That's a foul, Mr. D. That's like a felony."
Mr. Dombrowski blew his whistle, but not very hard. He was looking at Brent with an expression I couldn't read, like a man watching his car make a noise it hadn't made before.
"Callahan," he said. "Easy."
"He was hanging on me," Brent said.
I hadn't touched him. Everybody knew I hadn't touched him. But Brent said it in the voice he used for things that were true because he said them, and a couple of the skins laughed, and Kevin Shea, who played point guard for the varsity and followed Brent around like a pilot fish, said, "Stay down, Brez. It's safer down there."
I got up. I bounced the ball once, because my hands needed something to do, and I passed it in to Petey's cousin Ray, who was on my team, and we went on with the game. Nobody shoved me again that period. Brent didn't look at me at all. But when the bell rang and we were heading for the locker room, he bumped my shoulder in the doorway, not hard, just enough, the way you'd tap a vending machine to make sure the candy was really stuck.
"You don't even play," he said. "Why do you care about a rebound?"
I didn't have an answer for him then. I'm not sure I had one for myself. The true answer would have taken too long to explain, and it involved a milk crate, a telephone pole, and an alley behind a laundromat on Second Avenue, and Brent Callahan was not the kind of person you explained a milk crate to.
* * *
The crate had been there before me. I want to give credit where it's due.
My aunt Dolores owned the Suds-O-Rama on Second Avenue in Lansingburgh, the north end of Troy, which was a long low room with twenty-two washers and eleven dryers and a change machine that ate dollar bills with Washington's face too wrinkled. My mother