waited, and the ball came down to me. And again after that, a Brent fadeaway that rolled around the iron and spun off right. Each time I didn't fight anybody for it. I was just there, the way you're there when a bus pulls up because you read the schedule.
"Who's he boxing out?" I heard one of the varsity guys say on the bleachers. "He's not boxing out anybody."
"He's boxing out the ball," said Leon, who was on the bench for that rotation.
The fourth time, Brent was waiting for me.
Kevin Shea missed a layup and it came off the left side of the rim, and I slid toward it, and Brent didn't go for the ball. He'd figured it out by then, I think. He'd seen that the ball kept finding me, and he decided that what he needed to do was remove the place the ball was going. He came across the lane with his shoulder low and his hands up and he hit me square in the chest with both of them, harder than in gym class. Not a box-out. A shove. My feet left the floor. I went backward across the lane, across the baseline, and into the padded wall under the far basket, and the back of my head bounced off the pad with a sound like a ripe melon.
The ball bounced away. Kevin Shea picked it up and laid it in.
Dombrowski didn't blow the whistle. I want to be fair to him. He told me later it was because he wanted to see what I'd do, and I believe that, but I also think part of him wanted to see what Brent would do, and I think he didn't like what he saw. He just stood there with his stopwatch and his arms folded across his flaking letters.
I got up. My head hurt. My chest hurt where Brent's hands had been. Petey was halfway down the bleachers with his clipboard pressed against his own chest like a shield, and I shook my head at him, and he sat back down.
Brent was standing at the top of the key, waiting for the inbound. He was smiling a little. When I walked past him to get to my man, he leaned in close, so close I could smell the sunflower seeds, and he said it.
"What, 'cause you think you're tough?"
He said it in a strange voice. That's what I remember. Not his own voice, not the easy lazy voice he used in the cafeteria. It came out lower and flatter, almost like an imitation, like he was doing a bit, except nobody was laughing and his face wasn't doing a bit at all. His face was white around the mouth.