"No, honey. I'm offered." She tapped the paper. "Same wage. They'll pay for the truck. There's a high school down there with a new gymnasium, the man said. He made a point of telling me about the gymnasium, like I'd care."
"Do you care?"
She looked at me for a while. She was thirty-nine years old and had hands that were older than that and eyes that were younger. She had married my father at nineteen because he could dance, she said, and she had stayed married to him for fourteen years because she could not, it turned out, make him stop dancing.
"I care about you," she said. "That's the whole list."
I said I'd go wherever she went. I meant it. But after she went to bed I put on my coat and went down the back stairs and out into the alley, and it had started to snow a little, the wet grainy snow that comes off the Hudson in November, and I shot at the crate until the ball got too slick to hold. I made a lot of them. I didn't count. I kept thinking about how in four years of standing under that crate I had never once played a real game in front of a real crowd. I had never worn a uniform with a number on it. I had never been anything at Lansing Hill but the skinny kid from the laundromat who was good at chemistry, and in June I would get into a U-Haul and become the skinny kid from New York in a town I couldn't find on a map, and nobody here would ever know that I had been anything else.
That isn't a very noble reason to want something. I knew that even then. It wasn't about winning. It was about being seen once, by somebody, before I disappeared.
On the bulletin board outside the gym office the next morning, there was an index card thumbtacked over the varsity roster in Coach Dombrowski's square handwriting.
ONE (1) OPEN VARSITY SPOT. ROURKE TRANSFERRED (FLA.). OPEN TRYOUT THURS & FRI, 3:15. JUNIORS & SENIORS ONLY. BRING SNEAKERS NOT EXCUSES.
Petey read it over my shoulder. He was eating a Ring Ding for breakfast.
"No," he said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You're thinking it so loud I can hear it. Teddy. Brent Callahan put you through the bleachers yesterday, and that was gym class. That was three-on-three with Ray Gaffney. Ray Gaffney is legally blind in one eye."
"Ray is not legally blind."