Sides

On Tuesdays Mr Kaminski picked the sides himself.

On every other day of the week he let two captains pick, the way every gym teacher in the history of the world had let two captains pick, and the same two boys were always picked last, and Mr Kaminski said that was character-building for everybody, including the two boys. But on Tuesdays he picked. He had done it for nineteen years. Nobody knew why. Theo’s theory was that he had been picked last himself, once, on a Tuesday, and had never got over it.

“Line up,” said Mr Kaminski.

They lined up along the wall bars, twenty-six of them in gym kit, in the gym, which smelled of floor varnish and rubber and the radiators that were all on at once, with the rain hammering on the skylights high up in the roof like somebody throwing gravel.

Mr Kaminski walked down the line with a bundle of coloured bibs over his arm, red and blue, and gave them out without stopping, one each, the way a man deals cards.

“Red. Blue. Red. Blue.” He came to Frederick. “Blue.” He came to Theo. “Red.”

There was a short silence on the wall bars.

“Sir,” said Theo.

“Hartigan.”

“Sir, me and Hanover are always on the same side.”

“Are you,” said Mr Kaminski. He went on down the line. “Red. Blue. Red.”

“Sir, we have been for three years.”

“Then it’s time,” said Mr Kaminski, “you found out what it’s like to play against each other.” He reached the end of the line and threw the last bib, a red one, to Priya, who caught it without looking. “Character-building. Basketball. Full court. Ten minutes a half. Bibs on.”

---

The inspector came in as they were putting the bibs on.

He came in by the door at the far end, where the stage was, and stood for a moment looking at the gym, at the wall bars and the climbing ropes tied up out of the way and the basketball hoops and the skylights with the rain on them, and wrote several things down. Then he looked round for somewhere to sit.

The only seats in the gym were the long low wooden benches along the wall, built in about 1960 for twelve-year-olds, about a foot off the ground.

Mr Stroud looked at them.

Then he sat down on one, carefully, in his three-piece suit, and his knees came up nearly to his chin, and he arranged the clipboard on top of them like a man arranging a tray on a hospital bed, and took out the stopwatch, and looked at the game that had not yet started, with an expression of complete composure.

“Carry on,” he said, from about the height of a large dog. “I’m not here.”

“Didn’t think you were,” said Mr Kaminski, and blew his whistle.

---

Castellanos was in the doorway by the changing rooms.

He was standing in it the way he had stood by the fire extinguisher and the vending machine and the wall of the dining hall, with his hands folded in front of him and the badge on his chest, and Mr Kaminski, on his way to the centre circle with the ball under his arm, stopped in front of him and looked at the badge again.

“You,” said Mr Kaminski. “Parent.”

“Yes.”

“Can you count?”

Castellanos considered the question.

“To quite high numbers,” he said.

“Good.” Mr Kaminski pointed at the flip-board on the wall by the stage, a big wooden frame with two sets of numbered cards on rings, red and blue, nought to ninety-nine, for the scores. “My scorer’s off with the thing everybody’s got. You turn the cards. Red on the left, blue on the right. One card for one point, two for two. You flip, you don’t think. Can you do that?”

“I can do that.”

“Most parents can’t,” said Mr Kaminski darkly, and went to the centre circle.

Castellanos went to the flip-board and stood beside it with his hands folded in front of him, exactly like a parent who has been told to turn the cards and has decided that he might as well take it seriously.

From across the gym, Frederick saw Theo see it, and saw Theo’s face, and saw Theo realise that he did not have his planner because he was in gym kit, and saw a look of pure grief go over him.

---

Mr Kaminski threw the ball up.

It went up, in the gym, under the skylights with the rain on them, and came down, and the game began, and within about eight seconds Frederick understood that Theo Hartigan, on the other side, in a red bib, had decided to play basketball as a defensive lineman.

Theo did not know how to play basketball. He had never needed to. He played football, on the line, where his job was to stand in front of people and not let them past. So he did that. He went to wherever Frederick was and stood in front of him, very large, with his arms out, and when Frederick moved he moved, and when Frederick stopped he stopped, and he was so completely and so cheerfully in the way that it was like trying to walk round a wardrobe that had decided to love you.

Mr Kaminski blew his whistle.

“Hartigan. Foul.”

“I didn’t touch him.”

“You’re standing on him. This isn’t football. You can’t just stand on people.”

“I’m not standing on him, sir, I’m standing near him.”

“Too near,” said Mr Kaminski. “Blue ball.”

Castellanos, at the flip-board, did not flip anything, because nobody had scored, and stood with his hands folded and his eyes on the game, and Frederick saw that he was not watching the game. He was watching the doors. Both doors. In turn. He watched them the way he watched doors everywhere, which Frederick had stopped noticing in about 2022 and noticed again now, here, in the gym, with a badge on that said PARENT, and found that it made him feel something he had no word for, in English or Swedish or ser or estar.

---

Felix passed him the ball.

He caught it. He was all right at basketball, the way he was all right at most games, not good, not bad, put in late in games that had already been decided. He dribbled, twice, and the wardrobe came round in front of him with its arms out, and he went left, and the wardrobe went left, and he stopped.

He was not thinking about basketball.

He was thinking about Mr Kaminski picking the sides.

Because there it was again. Mr Kaminski picked the sides. Not the captains. On Tuesdays the captains were still there, Devon was one of them, Marcus was the other, there they were with their bibs on, captains. But they did not pick. Mr Kaminski picked for them. And they were still captains. Nobody had said they weren’t captains. They were captains who, on Tuesdays, did not pick.

In his own right.

A captain who did not pick was still a captain. A King who did not sign was still a King. His mother picked the sides on Tuesdays. His mother had been picking the sides since October, at the kitchen table, with the boxes, and he had sat across from her and watched her pick them and thought that because he was not the one picking he was not the one who was captain, and he had been captain all along, since two o’clock in the afternoon on the thirty-first of October, in a bib he had not noticed he was wearing.

“Hanover,” said Mr Kaminski. “Travelling.”

He looked down. He had walked four steps with the ball in his hands without bouncing it.

Mr Kaminski blew the whistle in exactly the voice he had used on the first of November, and on every Tuesday since, and every day before.

“Red ball.”

On the low bench, at about the height of a large dog, Mr Stroud wrote something down.

---

“You travelled,” said Theo, delighted, taking the ball.

“I know I travelled.”

“You walked. You just walked off with it, like it was a sandwich.” Theo bounced the ball once, very hard, and it went off his foot and out of court. “Oh.”

“Blue ball,” said Mr Kaminski.

---

It was twenty-three minutes past one by the gym clock.

He knew it was twenty-three minutes past, exactly, because afterwards he could see the clock in his head with perfect clearness, high up on the wall over the stage, behind a little wire cage to stop balls hitting it, a plain round white clock with black hands, saying twenty-three minutes past one. He was looking at it. He was looking at it because something had just occurred to him about the time, which was that it was twenty-three minutes past one, and that in thirty-seven minutes it would be two o’clock, and that at two o’clock on the thirty-first of October he had been standing in the corridor of the math wing, outside Mrs Pruitt’s room, in the sun, while somebody at the end of the corridor played the same five notes wrong on a piano, and the loudspeaker in the ceiling that was used for fire drills and for snow had clicked, and Dr Brooks had said, in the voice for buses being late:

One of our own students is King.

Not will be. Not in May. Is.

At two o’clock.

He had thought it was a way of putting it. He had thought, at the time, that is was just what you said on a loudspeaker, because there was not time to say anything longer before the bell. He saw now, looking at the clock in its cage over the stage, that it had not been a way of putting it at all. It had been Dr Brooks telling him the time.

“Hanover!”

The ball hit him on the side of the head.

---

It was not a hard hit. Marcus had passed it to him, from the other side of the court, a long high hopeful pass of the kind Marcus threw, and it had come down out of the air towards him while he was looking at the clock, and he had not seen it, and it had hit him above the left ear with a flat rubbery bonk, like the sound Marcus’s trombone case had made against the desk in first period, and bounced off, and gone out of court, and rolled away under the low bench, and stopped against the polished black shoe of the inspector.

He sat down on the floor of the gym. He had not meant to. His legs did it.

Everybody stopped.

Mr Kaminski came over, not fast, with the whistle in his mouth, and stood over him and took the whistle out and looked down at him.

“Hanover.”

“Sir.”

“You all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many fingers?”

“Three.”

“Who’s the Prime Minister?”

There was a silence in the gym of a quality Frederick had not heard before, even in room fourteen, even in the dining hall. Twenty-five people in bibs and one parent at a flip-board and one inspector on a low bench, all not saying anything at once.

“Lord Whitlock, sir.”

“Good,” said Mr Kaminski. “Then you’re all right.” He held out a hand and pulled Frederick up off the floor in one movement, the way you pull up somebody who weighs nothing. “Keep your eyes on the ball, Hanover. The ball doesn’t care who you are.”

“No, sir.”

“Nobody on this court cares who you are,” said Mr Kaminski, “for ten minutes a half,” and he put the whistle back in his mouth, and blew it, and said “Blue ball.”

---

Mr Stroud bent down, from the low bench, with some difficulty, his knees in the way, and picked up the ball from against his shoe, and held it in both hands, and looked at it as though it were going in the report. Then he looked at Frederick.

“Hanover,” he said.

“Sir.”

“The boy with the sixteen.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You were looking at the clock.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have been looking at something other than the matter in hand,” said Mr Stroud, “in four lessons out of five. I have it written down.” He turned the ball over in his hands. “In Virginia, at the Fairfax Academy, I used to tell the boys that attention is the courtesy a man pays to the present.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It is a great pity,” said Mr Stroud, with what seemed to be real regret, “in a boy so sound on the Charter.” He held out the ball. Frederick took it. Mr Stroud wrote, on the clipboard on his knees, and Frederick watched him do it, the upright strict little hand:

Physical education. Mr Kaminski. 1.23. Boy in the H’s (sixteen). Inattentive. Struck by ball.

And the circle.

4.

---

Blue won.

Blue won by six points, which was the first time in three years that a side with Frederick on it had beaten a side with Theo on it, because they had never before been on different sides, and in the last minute of the second half, when it had already been decided, Felix passed to Frederick and the wardrobe was not in front of him for once, because the wardrobe was standing at the side of the court having been told by Mr Kaminski to stand there for a full minute and think about what football was, and Frederick shot from the edge of the circle and the ball went in.

It went in. It did not touch the rim. It went up under the skylights and came down through the net with the sound a ball makes when it goes through a net without touching anything, which is no sound at all, and he stood and watched it do it.

At the flip-board, Castellanos reached out and turned the blue cards over, two of them, without thinking, the way he had been told.

He did not smile. He was very good at not smiling. But Frederick saw his hand, on the second card, stay on it for a moment longer than it needed to.

---

Mrs Delahunt was at the gym door when the whistle went for the end.

She was standing in it with a piece of paper in her hand, in her cardigan, looking at the gym the way she had looked at the WELCOME sign in the rain that morning, as a thing done to her personally. Mr Kaminski went over to her and she said something and gave him the paper, and he read it, and looked across the gym at Frederick, who was taking off his blue bib.

“Hanover,” said Mr Kaminski, in the voice in which he said travelling.

“Sir.”

“Office. Start of sixth. Dr Brooks wants you.” Mr Kaminski folded the paper and put it in his tracksuit pocket. “Get changed first. You smell of gym.”

At the side of the court, where he was still standing thinking about what football was, Theo turned round slowly with an expression of the purest joy Frederick had ever seen on a human face.

“The office,” said Theo.

“Shut up.”

“The green chair.”

“Theo.”

“Freddie,” said Theo, with enormous tenderness, “I would give my football boots to be in that office this afternoon. Both of them. And the laces.”

“It’s probably about the board.”

“Of course it’s about the board,” said Theo. “Everything’s about the board. The whole city’s about the board.” He looked at the doorway, where Mrs Delahunt was still standing, and then at the flip-board, where Castellanos had turned round and was looking at Mrs Delahunt too, and then back at Frederick. “And I haven’t got my planner.”