“I didn’t hit anybody back,” Lucas said, “even though I did feel like hitting something a few times.”

“So is it true?”

“It’s true,” Lucas said.

He hadn’t taken the bus today. His mom had driven him to school, so they could talk one last time about all the questions he was going to get, the way she was sure his friends were going to react, how he should handle it.

“You can’t hide from this,” she said.

“I’m not hiding,” he said.

“And you have to remember, you didn’t do anything,” she said.

Lucas answered her by quoting Mr. Collins, who’d told him that sometimes other people’s choices affected your own, whether you liked it or not.

They had tried calling Gramps all day Sunday. They had driven over to his apartment and rung his doorbell. Nobody had answered. His car wasn’t in its usual parking space on the side of his building. Lucas’s mom told him that as soon as she dropped him at school, she was going to take another ride back over there.

“Your grandfather really did all that wack stuff?” Ryan said. “And you didn’t tell me?”

“It wasn’t my place to tell anybody,” he said. “He never told me until I found out.”

“Usually you tell me everything,” Ryan said.

Lucas managed to smile, if not for long. “No,” he said. “Most of the time you tell me everything.”

Ryan said, “My mom thinks this is going to be a big deal with the people who run town basketball.”

It was something else Lucas had discussed with his mom, what the fallout might be with the Wolves.

“She thinks they might want another coach to finish the season,” Ryan said.

“Does she want that?” Lucas said.

“She doesn’t,” Ryan said. “But she thinks they might fire him.”

From his room after they’d had an early dinner, Lucas heard his mom on the telephone in the kitchen for nearly an hour. She wasn’t a board member herself for Claremont Basketball. But she knew just about everybody who was.

When she finally was off the phone, she came up to his room.

“They were actually more reasonable than I thought they’d be, and a lot less hysterical,” she said. “They all feel as if they got blindsided by this news.”

“So what did they decide?” Lucas asked.

“They didn’t decide, as a matter of fact. Just about everybody I spoke to mentioned that it’s Christmas, and even if they do end up voting to fire Gramps, they don’t want to do it during Christmas. And they’d all like to hear from him before they make a decision.”

“Did anybody try to call him?”

“A bunch of them did. They did as well reaching him as we have,” his mom said.

“Is Gramps still in Claremont, even?” Lucas said.