I served to Grant. He spun around and whiffed it. Tossed a high one to Ed who backed up then rushed forward but reached it and knocked it over nicely, right to me. I smashed it back but Grant stuck his racket out, it came back at me, and I hit it crosscourt to Ed’s alley, but he was there and gave me a lob, which I smacked at his toes and watched it sail far up as he scrambled back, not backward as I had been taught, with little steps, but sprinting to the back of the court and reaching it and slicing it at just the right angle to my back corner. I hadn’t been ready to run and it flashed past me, ticking the tape. Ed let out a victorious bellow. I could feel the heads down the row of courts swivel toward us. We had all taken to grunts and groans and hollers. They got better and I got worse and I slowly relinquished all hopes of a shutout and just tried to scratch out a humble win.

In the end they beat me 6–4. I threw my racquet at the fence and stalked off. I knew what this looked like; it was the kind of behavior that was abhorrent to my parents. Any anger was dealt with swiftly and severely, quarantined immediately, allowed no audience. I expected Grant and Ed to react similarly, to urge me home that instant, remove me from this public place because people were watching. People on the clubhouse veranda, people walking to their cars, people on the courts, and even people on the putting green could hear me swearing and kicking tires in the parking lot. I was surprised by it myself, the anger that came pouring out all because a couple of hacks had beaten me at tennis. But they just sat on the little strip of grass beyond the court with the three racquets zipped back up in the cases and the balls back in the can. After a while I had nothing left in me and they came to where I was by a maple tree near the entrance to the club and we started walking home.

I was too ashamed to speak. They chatted away to each other, as if they weren’t angry with me, as if they weren’t embarrassed for me and humiliated by me. As if I were not, as my mother used to say as she whisked me up to my room, a little beast who needed to change back to a boy.

“Your family belong to a club like that?”

Grant laughed. “No.”

“Look at that guy burrowing into those bushes. What do you think he’s doing?”

“Look at the dog on the porch.”

“He’s waiting for him to fetch the ball!” Ed joked.

And when the man backed out of the bushes with the dog’s filthy ball, they burst into hysterics. They thought everything in our neighborhood was funny.