You just gotta wait for the anxiety to die.

Oy.

Okay. Gonna get ready for Dana’s and for the game tomorrow.

Think we’ll win?

I wanna say yes.

And so, you know what?

Yes.

But if you say a thing, does that make it so? Or does that make it not so? Does it support it? Or does it jinx it?

Sorry, Jolly. I’m a handful.

But at least I’m trying. And by the next time I talk to you, the game will have been played.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll walk out of the gym a hero, my mind empty of all this clutter. Maybe I’ll play so freakin’ good my enemy will leave me alone, noble in defeat, aware that even someone as ordinary (but potentially extraordinary) as Kit Lamb deserves a break from too much thinking.

We shall see, Jolly. We shall seeeee­eeeee­

The girls ask the rim questions all the time. It’s their thing. One of their things. They get together in Garland Park and they saunter over to the crappy, netless rim (bowed, no less), and they ask a question, shoot the ball, and receive answers.

But there are rules.

“You can’t ask it the same thing twice,” Dana once said, the day they laid down the rules. “Whatever it tells you the first time is the final answer. Any make or miss after that doesn’t matter. Not with the same question.”

The girls were scared that day; Melanie went white. She’d just asked if her parents would die before she graduated from high school, uncharacteristically morbid. And now…maybe true?

Over time, many of the answers have proven true. But like visits to a psychic, it’s not difficult, later, to read the answers as if they came true, whether or not they did. Except in the case of Kit. Kit, it seems, is special. Her questions have more detail. She does not ask, Will I find love? She asks, Will I be let down by a lover one day?

The details make it harder to dismiss as coincidence when they come true.

“And you can’t ask it about something that’s already happened,” Natasha said that day, her dark-blond hair not quite yet to its signature shoulder length. “The rim doesn’t stoop to proving itself by verifying historical facts. It sees the future and it believes that should be enough.”

The future. There seems to be a lot of the future these days. Colleges, yes, love lives, sure, but these friends wonder more about what kind of people they will be, what they will accomplish, what they won’t, and when.

Today, a few days after having defeated Chaps in the final league game of the summer season, Kit is still thinking of the question she asked the realest rim, the best rim, the rim inside the gym of Samhattan High.

“Come on, All-Star,” Dana says, bounce-passing to Kit way out. That’s another thing: you have to be careful how far you are when you launch a shot. Nobody wants to ask about their health before firing a forty-footer. What are the chances of good news?