* * *
We lost the semifinal at the Glens Falls Civic Center to Shenendehowa by fourteen. It wasn't close. They had three guys over six-five and a press we'd never seen, and I fouled out with four minutes left and sat on the end of the bench next to Brent, who'd been taken out to rest his eye, and we watched the clock run down together, and neither of us felt as bad as we were supposed to.
"Next year," he said.
"I won't be here next year."
"I know," he said. "I meant me. Next year I'm going to be the guy who calls it." He was a junior, it turned out; I'd thought he was a senior the whole season, because he walked like one. "Siena called my dad," he said. "The man in the overcoat. He said he'll watch me next year if the eye holds up. He said he liked the pointing." He took his goggles off and wiped them on his jersey. "My dad told him I'd think about it. He's never said I'd think about anything before. He used to just say yes."
"Will you?"
"Think about it?" Brent put the goggles back on. "I don't know. Maybe I'll go to Hudson Valley and study to be a radiology tech. Look at pictures of the inside of people. Dr. Okonkwo says there's money in it." He was quiet. "First time anybody ever let me pick."
* * *
The U-Haul came on the twentieth of June. My mother and Dolores and Petey and I loaded it in four hours, in the heat, with the river smell coming up the alley and the dryers going downstairs for the last time with us over them. Dolores cried and pretended she was sweating. Petey gave me a manila envelope with a copy of his carom chart from the Columbia game and a letter he made me promise not to open until North Carolina, and I didn't, and it turned out to be four pages long and mostly about vectors and the last line said, "You were never invisible, you dope. You were just standing in the right place."
Brent came at six, just as the light was going gold over the Hollister wall. He'd driven the Camaro, but he walked down the alley from the street the way he had in December, with his hands in his pockets. He had something under his arm.