Then he looked at me.
"My boy says you knew for a month," he said. "And you could've used it. In practice. To take his spot. He says you called it out to him instead. Left, high."
"Yes, sir."
"Why?"
I thought about it. Dryer six went thump, thump. My mother had her hand on my shoulder.
"Because nobody else was going to," I said. "Get the ball, I mean. For him. Somebody has to get it."
Gil Callahan looked at me for a long time, and then he nodded slowly, and stood, and put his hat back on. At the door he turned around.
"Dombrowski says you've got the softest shot he's ever seen on a kid that skinny," he said. "Says you learned it on a milk crate."
"A Stewart's crate," my mother said. "Orange. He'll tell you it matters."
Mr. Callahan almost smiled. It wasn't the commercial smile. It was smaller and it looked like it hurt. "Everything matters," he said, and went out into the cold.
* * *
Brent came back on the sixth of February against Bishop Gibbons, wearing goggles. They were clear plastic wraparounds with a black rubber strap, and they fogged at the edges in the second quarter, and the student section from Gibbons chanted "Kar-eem! Kar-eem!" at him every time he touched the ball. He scored fourteen. He grabbed six rebounds, and four of them were on the left side, because every time a shot went up I said "Left" or "Right" or "Long" from wherever I was on the floor, and after the second game Leon started doing it too, and then Kevin Shea, who had taken the Laundry tape down off my locker without anybody telling him to and never mentioned it. By the sectionals the whole team was talking to the ball in the air like a bunch of crows. Dombrowski said it was the loudest team he'd ever coached and the first one that ever seemed to know where everybody was.
I started the last four games of the regular season. Not instead of Brent. Next to him. Dombrowski moved Leon to center full time and put me at the four, and told me my only job was to stand where the ball was going to land and then give it to somebody who could do something with it. I averaged nine rebounds. The Times Union spelled my name three different ways in three weeks, and Dolores cut all three out and taped them to the change machine.