“I’ve played a lot of basketball in my life,” she said. “I played some of it at a pretty high level, and when I got to UConn, I was lucky enough to play for Geno Auriemma, one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time, for men or for women. And I just want everybody in this room to understand something: I would have my son, Ryan, play on a Sam Winston team any day of the week.”

She paused and looked around the room.

“By the way?” she said. “Which one of us in this room didn’t do something dumb when we were young?”

Mr. Dichard got back up. Lucas thought he looked more annoyed than he usually did, which was saying something. Lucas hadn’t been around him all that much, but he’d been around him enough to think that Mr. Dichard went through life looking annoyed.

“Dumb is taking your parents’ car out without permission, Jen,” he said. “It’s not conspiring to fix college basketball games.”

Now Mr. Dichard was the one looking around the library.

“Does anyone else have anything to say?” he said. “Because if not, we should go ahead and vote.”

Lucas felt his phone buzzing in his pocket, and smiled.

Just then the library doors opened, and the rest of the Claremont Wolves came walking in.

Now Lucas stood up.

“We’ve got something we’d like to say,” he said.

THIRTY-FIVE

Sharif’s dad had brought some of the guys in his van. Mrs. Chen had brought some, along with Maria, who’d told Lucas she wasn’t missing this for anything. Billy’s dad had brought the rest of the team.

The players stood in front of the library, as if they were getting ready to play a big game. In a way, that’s exactly what they were doing.

Or maybe they were about to hold a board meeting of their own.

Lucas had thought about reading the speech he’d written the night before. But he knew he didn’t need notes. He knew what he wanted to say by heart. Maybe because he was speaking from the heart.

“Since my grandfather isn’t here to speak for himself,” Lucas said. “I guess it’ll be okay for me to speak for him.”

He looked at Mr. Dichard, who nodded, but didn’t look very happy about it. Then Lucas gave a quick look at his mom. She just smiled. He’d told her his plan about his teammates the night before. He’d shown her his speech before they’d made the ride over here. After she read it, she told him that if he even changed a single word, he was grounded.

“It’s an even better paper than you wrote for Mr. Collins, if you ask me,” she’d said.