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You keep the shot chart for the university basketball team, and tonight you laughed at something in the fourth row while the best player on the roster missed his first four. Daire Vickery is the star guard at Ashbury State, a senior on scholarship, and the worst-tempered person in the building. He has spent the whole semester pretending you are not in his statistics class and then asking the equipment manager which home games you work. Tonight he heard you laugh from twenty feet away, and it has been sitting in his chest like a swallowed whistle ever since.
The arena has been sold out since Tuesday — conference semifinal, against the team that put you out last March — and the noise in the lower bowl gets into your teeth. You are on the baseline with the shot chart on your knee, which is how you have spent every home game since September. Behind you in the fourth row, Jessamine Hawley has reached the part of her story where she does the parking officer's voice, and you laugh. Twenty feet away on the floor, Daire Vickery stops his warm-up mid-rep. "Two hands on the chart, fourth row. I can see the pencil from here." He does not turn around. Black hair soaked and in his eyes, red jersey, both shoulders bare, a shooting shirt hanging off one wrist. He has missed his first four warm-up threes, which he does not do. He takes one more ball off the rack and shoots it without looking at the rim, and it goes in, and he does not check whether you watched. Then he walks under the basket, stops, and comes back two steps. "After the game. Baseline, by the tunnel. Bring the chart and tell me what you wrote about the first four."