“We win together, we lose together,” Mr. Tomski says.

“You know how to pass?” Pete says again, and without even thinking about it, I throw the ball back at him.

“Like this?”

Pete has his hands down. It hits him in the face, and for a second nothing happens, then he runs at me.

“Hey,” Mr. Tomski shouts, and sort of reaches out his arm to get between us, but I’ve already turned away, and he catches me in the neck. It doesn’t hurt exactly, but I can’t breathe, it’s like breathing in a glass of water, then I cough and the air comes flooding back.

“What’s going on here?” My mother has come; she sees me bending over. “Tom,” she says. “What’s going on?”

Granma is there, too. She bends down with me and I can see her orange shirt; she puts her hand on my shoulder.

“You all right?” she says.

“I’m fine.”

But Mom is still mad. “What’s going on?” She’s starting to repeat herself. Tomski is always a slow talker; he doesn’t say anything right away. There are other parents around, picking up their kids. People come and pat him on the back. But Mom keeps at him. She says, “How can you put him under that kind of pressure? When he hasn’t played all year.” Since she started teaching again, she’s gotten better at what she calls her “angry” voice—she doesn’t sound like somebody you want to disagree with. And Mr. Tomski isn’t good at disagreement anyway.

“Mom,” I say, “Mom. It’s okay,” and Granma says, “Calm down, Jenny.”

But she keeps going, she’s really lost it. “You don’t know what it means to raise a boy on your own, a kid who doesn’t talk to anybody, who doesn’t have any friends, who doesn’t want to be here, who doesn’t want to be on the goddamn basketball team, where it’s like, I always have to be happy enough for two people, just in case a little of it rubs off. . . . It’s your job to make this stuff easier, it’s not your job to throw him to the lions like that, where everybody’s watching him, just so they can watch him mess up, which is what everybody wants him to do anyway, because they’re all a bunch of . . .”

Finally, Mr. Tomski gets a word in. “He did great, he played great. You should be proud of him.”

“Don’t tell me what to feel about my son,” she says. It’s still hot in the gym, and her voice is cracked from screaming—her face looks red and sweaty—but she sounds teary, too, and she keeps brushing the hair out of her eyes. “Of course I’m proud of him,” and she reaches out her hands to me. “I’m sorry,” she says to me, quietly this time. “I’m sorry about all of it, the whole nine yards,” and closes her arms around me.

Then my dad walks up, wearing one of his suits and looking about eight feet tall.