Dee caught the ball off the board and held it. She didn't say anything. Her father had told her a long time ago: you don't talk to the members unless they talk to you, and then you say yes sir and no ma'am and you go on about your business. She had the yes sir ready. It just wouldn't come up.
"This your private court?" Whit said. He wasn't laughing like the other two. He was looking at her racket.
It was a Wilson Chris Evert Autograph, wood, with a laminated frame that had gone the color of weak tea. Somebody, sometime, had hit it so many thousands of times that the varnish on the top of the hoop was worn through to bare grain. The leather grip had split, and Dee had wrapped it in white athletic tape, and then the tape had gone gray and she had wrapped it again, so that the handle was fat and soft and a little lumpy, like a bandaged finger. There was tape on the throat, too, where a crack had started. Two strings were knotted.
She'd bought it at the rummage sale at the parish hall on St. Helena Island in April of 1982, for three dollars, out of a cardboard box that also held a mildewed set of golf clubs and a lamp shaped like a pineapple. It was the best thing she had ever owned.
"Can I see that?" Whit said, and before she could say no, he'd taken it.
He didn't snatch it, exactly. He just reached out and closed his hand around the throat and pulled, and she was so surprised that she let go. Then he was holding it up to the light, turning it over.
"Jesus," Bryce said. "Is that tape?"
Whit wasn't listening to them. He ran his thumb along the frame where the varnish was gone. Something moved in his face, something Dee couldn't read, and then it closed up again, the way a shop gets shuttered at night.
"Where'd you get this?" he said.
"Give it back."
"I asked you where you got it."
"I asked you to give it back."
Trip whistled low. Bryce said, "Oooh." Whit's mouth went flat. He held the racket up over his head, out of her reach. He was five or six inches taller than she was and he knew it.
"Come get it," he said. "Go on. Fight back."
There was a ditch behind her and three boys in front of her who had never been told no by anybody who mattered. If she jumped for the racket, she'd look like a kid on a playground, and they would laugh about it on the veranda tonight and every night for a while.