I nodded.

“Well, you get the team there tomorrow morning at ten. I’ll meet you at the fountain, and maybe we can get on with making a team. That okay by you? Or you going to get mad and shoot at yourself again?”

I wanted to say something else to him, but I couldn’t. He put the uniform he had taken out back into the box, fixed his shirt in his pants, and said he’d see me in the morning.

When he left, I sat on the floor for a while and tried to figure out what had went down. I hadn’t thought the cat’s not showing up had bothered me so much, but it had. I was glad that he was back, and I felt funny about that, too.

Paul came back into the office. “Hey, man, you okay? What happened to you, man?”

“Go to hell,” I said.

We hit Lincoln Center with our bags and stuff and were looking around for Cal, and this white guy comes over and asks us were we the Alvin Ailey dancers.

“Yeah,” Ox said, “but only now we ain’t going to be dancing in no alleys anymore.”

The guy looked at Ox like he was crazy or something and put on this frozen little smile and backed away. We sat around the pool, checking out the chicks and just digging everything and digging everybody digging us. Finally Cal shows, and he’s wearing that jacket we bought for him. Breeze or Paul must have given it to him after he left the center. With our bags and that jacket everybody knew we were a team.

“Where we going, man? Paul asked.

“Back to school,” Cal said.

We went over to Ninth Avenue and a school called Haaren. I had heard about Haaren, they had a pretty tough squad, but I had never been in the place. We went to the office, and Cal met the principal, a white dude. I don’t know how he got to know all of these people, this principal, Sweet Man, or how he got the gym in the first place, but I was a little proud of him. I didn’t want to say nothing to him about it, but Paul ran it down.

“Hey, Cal, how’d you get this gym?”

“Me and Matt Lee used to play ball together,” Cal said. “He’s the principal here now. Guess you don’t know who your real friends are sometimes.”

We went into the visitors’ locker room, and Cal told us to change. The locker room was pretty nice, too. I dug some of the guys trying to act cool, and I could dig where they were coming from.

“Hey, coach, where do we put our valuables?” Breeze asked.

This guy, Matt Lee, got a strongbox and put it on the table and said that he’d lock it up until we had finished for the day. Breeze, who had already stripped and put his clothes in one of the lockers, took out his Afro pick and dropped it in the strongbox.