“You always get away with trash like that in games?”

Thomas shook his head. He might not be the best student in the world, but he knew when trouble was barking at him.

“Look, it was a good game.”

“Yeah, after your ten fouls.”

Is he talking about my fouls or his own?

Vic was a junior, a junior just one-upped by a sophomore. This was all about his saving face. And the more Thomas thought about Vic’s face, the more he thought he resembled one of the guys on the hated Blue Devils. One of the guys Thomas and his father used to love to hate.

Leave him alone.

Thomas wasn’t about to call Vic “JJ” or even say anything. But as he turned to head home, Vic had grabbed his shoulder. Thomas’s instinct was to pull his shoulder roughly out of Vic’s hand.

Vic’s instinct, on the other hand, was to swing right for the nose, which he hit just perfectly with the first blow. Blood sprayed and the guys stood around to watch the ensuing fight or beating, whichever was about to happen.

But when Thomas stood straight from bending over as he held his gushing nose, he didn’t say a word.

Vic stood there, waiting, but Thomas just walked off with Nathan and a couple other guys, making sure he didn’t bleed over his clothes. One of them, a senior named Craig, gave Thomas an extra T-shirt to stop the bleeding. They asked if he was okay and said Vic was nothing but a white-trash redneck who didn’t know any better.

Thomas didn’t reply. He knew exactly the kind of guy Vic was. If they knew Thomas any better, they might say the same thing about him.

Strangely, Thomas felt sorry for the guy.

I’m probably just suffering from a concussion.

But he didn’t think so.

Thomas knew there was probably a reason Vic was so mean. The same way his father was mean. Deep down, something was broken. They were just waiting for someone to finally come along and fix it.

“You need to write me a Christmas list,” Mom said when he walked through the trailer door, handing him a notepad and a pen.

Thomas was chewing on a Starburst candy that tasted stale. He wondered how candy that already tasted like chewy, flavored cardboard could get so stale. Maybe that was why they were on sale for a quarter at the dollar store he stopped in on the way home from the basketball game.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll take a sixty-inch TV, a satellite dish with all the college and pro games on it, and a PlayStation 3.”

“I’m serious, Thomas.”

“You want me to give you Christmas ideas? For me?”

“I signed Sara and you up for the Angel Tree program.”

“The what?”

Thomas rubbed his nose, which he’d managed to clean up at the bathroom at the dollar store. He didn’t need Mom asking him about the fight.