When I did that, Snakeskin fell to the ground, and I went over and stomped him until he was still. Then I still had to score three more baskets before the game was over. But there wasn’t anybody to stop me now, and I could show off my stuff. Only the scouts couldn’t see me for the la-di-da niggers in their faces. I went over to the sidelines.

“Here I go!” I shouted. But all you could hear was those la-di-das teheeing and those glasses hitting against each other. I scored one basket, then another.

“Look at me!” I was shouting. “Look at me!”

But they didn’t look. I took the ball and ran up to one of the la-di-das and slammed the ball into her head, and she just turned and kept laughing.

She laughed until I woke up.

Cal called us together for practice the next day. We all met at the center and went down together, all except Breeze. Cal called his house, but his mother said he had left already.

We took the A train, and all the way downtown Cal was talking to me about Aggie. How she was such a good singer. How fine she was, stuff like that. I didn’t really want to hear any of it, though. I knew all that stuff already.

“Why you leave her?” I asked.

“I guess I just wasn’t together enough for her,” he said.

I didn’t know what that meant, but he wasn’t talking anymore, so I let it lay.

When we got to the gym, Breeze was already there. He was selling cassettes to some of the kids in the summer program. He was always selling something to kids. I told him that the reason he sold to kids all the time was because he was just about on their mental level.

“What we’re going to work on today,” Cal said, “is Mr. Calvin Jones’s TIT.”

“It sounds better than Gatorade,” Roy said, and everybody cracked on that.

“I guess it does,” Cal said. “It always sounds good before practice starts. Now the TIT is simple. TIT stands for Two-Inch Theory. If you can jump two inches more than the guy you jumping against, you going to beat him. You don’t have to jump a foot more, just two inches. If you can get two inches on a man when you driving, you can score on him.

“If you can get two inches on a man when you going for a loose ball, you’re going to get the ball. And to get all these two inches, you have to try a little harder than what you think your best is right now. Do we all understand what Mr. Jones is talking about, girls?”

Everybody said they understood, and then we made some more cracks about tits and stuff, and then Cal had us all stand near the top of the key. He got a ladder and put it next to the backboard. Then he covered the hoop with a board and Scotch taped some paper to the backboard. One by one we had to come over to the backboard and jump up and touch the paper as high as we could, and then he marked where we touched and put our names next to it.