Dana tosses the ball his way, it bounces hard off the hood.

Stewart laughs. He looks to Kit.

“Nice shot,” he says.

It’s the boys’ team. Normally, the girls would challenge them to a game. Stewart is a worse shot than Natasha and the girls usually win. But right now, watching her friends approach the car, Kit’s just glad for next.

It’s a word that’s become a whole philosophy, the way her mom uses it.

Next is for whenever now needs a fucking change.

Kit looks back to the intersection. Cars come and go. Nobody lumbers toward Garland Park.

With the boys, sudden, unplanned plans are made. The girls head to their cars and everybody’s going to go to the creek. This is good. If there’s one way to undercut the Coming Doom, it’s distraction. It’s next. Kit wanted to say that to Patricia Maxwell that day in health class.

Maybe you can fool it back, she wanted to say.

But she doesn’t know if that’s true.

“Hurry, Clutch,” Dana says.

Kit moves quick to the passenger side of Dana’s Pontiac Sunbird. As she grips the door handle, the sun catches her fingers, makes them look bigger, older.

She thinks of bare hands clenched to a steering wheel and the wrenches it took to remove them.

“I’m not gonna ask if you’re okay,” Dana says, as Kit gets in, “because I know how much you hate that question. But…”

“I’m great,” Kit says. Then, “Better than you’ll ever be.”

Dana smiles.

“Well, hell yeah,” she says. “You should be. You’re on top of the world. On top of the game.”

Dana revs the engine, pulls out of the Garland Park parking lot, and Kit decides, yeah, maybe she is on top of the game. Basketball anyway. She works hard at it. So does Dana. They all do. And she just hit a game winner. How many of those does someone get in a lifetime? How many has Candace Parker made? Brilliant as she is, a handful at most.

So okay. Yeah. On top of the game. On top!

And maybe, if she lets herself believe it, on top of living her life too.

But she wonders if you have to be in “believing shape” to believe a thing. Just like you have to be in basketball shape for the season. And she wonders, too, how much work it would take to get in believing shape.

How much thinking would that take? Straight-up, unadulterated thinking.

The equivalent of a hundred thousand shots?

So, a hundred thousand good thoughts?

It scares her. Not the work of it. But the idea that you can make a thing true just by thinking about it a lot.

Yeah. That isn’t settling right. As Dana drives pell-mell across Samhattan, past “Town Square” (the cemetery built into the center of the city or the city built around the cemetery, she’s never sure), past Dawn Pawn and all the rest, even as a Samhattanite in a beige suit steps out of the road, quick, like he’s worried the Sunbird was about to mow him down, Kit tries to resist this concept. Despite its upside.