"Point your toes up," she said. "At your face. Pull on them. It goes quicker."
Whit looked at her from the clay. His face was red and wet and furious and something else. He took the jar. He drank half of it. Then he grabbed his toe and pulled, and gritted his teeth, and after a while his leg went straight.
"Clock's running," Coach Pemberton said, uncertainly.
"No, it's not," said a voice from the far fence.
Everybody turned. It was Mr. Grant. He hadn't raised his voice. He didn't have to. In twenty-two years, most of the people on that court had never heard him say anything louder than afternoon, and now they heard him.
"This is an exhibition," he said. "Says so on the program. The Women's Committee typed it up themselves. Exhibition match, young lady is a guest." He looked up at the umpire's chair. "Nobody runs a clock on a guest in an exhibition. Do they, Mr. Pemberton."
Coach Pemberton looked at him. He looked down the hill at Mr. Dabney, who had the typed program in his hand and was looking at it as if it had bitten him. He sat back down.
"No," he said. "No, I suppose it isn't."
Whit got up. He handed Dee the empty Mason jar.
"That was stupid," he said, low. "You could've had it."
"I don't want it like that," she said. "You dared me to fight. Get back over there and fight."
He looked at her for one more second. Then he limped back to the east baseline, and bounced the ball, and served, and the match went on.
* * *
He held for 5-4. On guts, mostly, and two aces, and a volley that he dove for and somehow got and then lay on the clay laughing, because there wasn't anything else to do. The bleachers gave him a hand for that, a real one, and Dee clapped her racket strings with her palm too, and Mr. Langford on top of the bleachers didn't clap at all.