"He can't see the board in Earth Science. That's legally something." Petey looked at the card, then at me, then at the card. He brushed crumbs off his Members Only jacket, which was a counterfeit from the flea market in Latham and had the stitching coming out on one sleeve. "You'd want me to chart it, right? The tryout?"
"I didn't say I was going."
"I'll bring the clipboard," Petey said.
* * *
Eleven boys showed up Thursday for one spot. Nine of them were bigger than me. One of them was Danny Pruett, who was a sophomore and therefore not allowed, and Coach Dombrowski sent him home with a speech about reading comprehension that made a couple of the varsity guys on the bleachers clap.
The varsity guys were the part I hadn't counted on. I'd figured the tryout would be the eleven of us running drills while Dombrowski stood with his clipboard and his whistle and his gray sweatshirt that said U.S.M.C. across the chest in letters that had mostly flaked off. But the whole team was there, sitting in the first row of the pulled-out bleachers in their practice reds, because Dombrowski believed a man ought to be able to perform with people watching or he ought to find a different line of work. Brent sat in the middle, with his long legs stretched out and his ankles crossed. He was eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells into a Dixie cup.
When he saw me come out of the locker room in my gym shorts and my Converse Weapons, which I had bought used from Dolores's customer's son for eleven dollars and which were a half size too big, he stopped chewing.
"Oh, come on," he said, to nobody, to the ceiling.
Petey was at the far end of the bleachers with a clipboard he had stolen from the AV room and a mechanical pencil and his TI-30 calculator, which he'd brought, he said, in case of emergencies. He gave me a thumbs-up that was so earnest I nearly turned around and went home.
The first day was drills, and I was not good at drills. I'll admit it. I had never run a three-man weave in my life. I didn't know where to go on a pick-and-roll because I'd never had anybody to pick for me. My dribble was all right, a laundromat-floor dribble, low and tight, but in the layup lines I kept starting from the wrong foot and Dombrowski kept saying, "Brzezinski, the other left," and from the bleachers somebody would hum the Jeopardy music. By the