“I can’t imagine anyone being smarter than you. You might be the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

“Really?”

“It’s . . . hot.”

“Then I accept your assessment! But seriously, I was Forrest Gump to her Einstein. She was doing calculus online by the eighth grade. Reading every book she could get her hands on. Excelled at everything she tried. Well, except dancing. She loved to dance, and Momma got lessons for her, but she was pretty terrible. We all decided it was good for her to have to actually try at something.”

“I wish I could have met her.”

“Me too.”

It’s Trey’s turn to have a lump in his throat, so I say, “I miss my coach too, Coach Dalrymple. My middle school coach was . . . not great. But Coach D believed in me enough to make me a starter my freshman year. Made me earn it though. Do extra practices, more physical training. She said I was tall and talented, but my body was still young, that I would have to build strength to go up against the big girls. So that’s what we did. And when it was clear that Shawntelle and I were college scholarship bound, she pulled together extra funding to get us a shooting coach. She sent videos of us to recruiters, did everything she could to give us every opportunity.”

Trey steers around a bicycle lying flat in the road. Beside it is a lump of something that I definitely do not want a closer look at. “Sounds like you took basketball as seriously as I took football.”

“Did you have a coach who helped you?”

“There’s not a single five-star recruit in the NCAA who did not have someone to help them,” Trey says. “It’s a dirty little secret of sports. You hear these amazing success stories about inner-city kids given a second chance through athletics, but there’s always a determined, supportive coach or recruiter who identified them early and gave them a leg up. Makes you wonder about all the wild talent that goes missing every year, all those kids who don’t get lucky, like we did.”

“This year, no one got lucky.”

“Truth. But yeah, my high school coach was pretty great. Ricky Pallini. He . . . Pre-med would have been a pretty tough major to maintain while playing football. Coach Pallini brought in some tutors for the whole team—but I know a lot of it was for me. To help me study for AP exams. I was going to enter Ohio State with more than twenty credits, which would’ve let me take on a lighter course load the first year, all thanks to Coach Pallini. And my job at the pharmacy. Those tests are expensive. Paige?”

“Yeah?”

“I really wanted to play in the NFL someday. And I really wanted to be a doctor.”

The El Camino bumps off the bridge onto regular asphalt, and the humming of tires against pavement ceases.