Steve blinked down at me with his beady eyes. He released Tub, who flopped to the floor in a puddle of his own saliva. Steve turned. The basketball smacking slowed to the pace of the whale heart we’d listened to once in a biology class video. Time stretched out. I felt like one of those athletes caught in the trophy case for all of eternity.

“Ah, Sturges,” Steve said. “You want in on this, too? Great news.”

Over the years I’d taken my share of abuse from Steve Jorgensen-Warner, beginning with a legendary Indian burn in third grade and leading up to a sprained wrist freshman year after I’d “tripped” down the school’s back steps. None of those beatings, though, had been my fault. Even Tub, locked in fetal position, looked aghast.

“Oh, wow,” I said from the ground. “I should get to class. We should all get to class. Shouldn’t we? I mean, isn’t it time for class? I mean, wow.”

The Trophy Cave amplified my blather.

SMACK, SMACK! The ball sounded positively invigorated. It was a predictor of mood as reliable as a dog’s tail. A resplendent grin spread across Steve’s face as he came at me with the ball, dribbling behind his back and between his legs. The guy was in his element. Had there been a hoop, he would have dunked it.

All in all we got away lucky. We both got the “trash compactor,” this nifty procedure in which you are shoved into a locker far too small to fit a teenage human, then smashed repeatedly with the door until you somehow fit anyway. It’s more painful than it sounds. The coat hooks gouge your scalp, the sharp corners bruise your shoulders, and if you’re stupid enough to try to stop the door from slamming, you can break a finger. I’ve seen it happen.

Lucky for me, I’d been trash compacted enough to learn how to open lockers from the inside. I relaxed until I heard the smack of the basketball fade, and then let myself out. Tub was whimpering from the next locker, and I can’t say I blamed him. He was a big guy, and simple physics meant that his extraction wasn’t going to be an easy one. First I told him what he needed to do to jog the mechanism. That took a while because of the constant stream of swear words coming from the slots in the locker. The bell rang. I sighed. Now we’d be tardy.

Ten minutes later we were recuperating in the boys’ room. Neither of us had any intention of walking into class late with bloodied lips and elbows. So we took our time, washing our wounds with cold water and blotting them with scratchy brown paper towels.

“Those towels are for brutes,” Tub said. He ducked into a stall and came back with a fistful of toilet paper. He patted it against a scraped elbow. “Ah, now I’m being properly pampered. Is this a spa? Are we in a spa? When do we get the salt scrubs? The erotic hot-stone rubdowns? Jeeves, our itinerary, please!”