Ben rode home with his parents, telling Sam he’d be over later, they were doing the Saturday-night sleepover at Sam’s house tonight, the guys all fired up to watch the Bulls play the Heat on television, Derrick Rose against the Heat’s Big Three, LeBron and Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh.

As soon as he was in the backseat, before he even buckled his seat belt, Ben said, “I didn’t touch him.”

“I know,” Jeff McBain said. “I was going to come down and tell everybody that, I saw the whole thing, but then I remembered our deal.”

“Don’t come on the court unless I’m hurt,” Ben said. “And I better be hurt bad.”

“Your father decided to let you handle it,” Beth McBain said from behind the wheel, “whatever it was.”

“The ref wanted me to shake his hand,” Ben said. “I wouldn’t do it.”

His dad, in the passenger seat, turned all the way around, said, “Really? This guy really did get to you.”

“Yeah, Dad, he really did. He called me a choker, even though he wouldn’t admit it.”

“He said that for real?” Ben’s dad said.

“Yeah,” Ben said.

Beth McBain said, “And you couldn’t walk away this time?”

“No.”

“Because this guy has gotten to you,” Jeff McBain said.

“Big-time. Somebody that good — and I know how good he is, trust me — ought to know how to act. He doesn’t.”

“And that’s all?” his mom said.

They were at a stop sign. He could see her looking at him in the rearview mirror. Calm. Waiting. The way Lily looked at him when she didn’t think she was getting the whole story.

Ben thinking in that moment: Lily was the real elephant in the room.

Or this car.

But he didn’t want to talk about her right now, especially not with his mom. The best he could do was, “Mom, he started it,” knowing how weak that sounded.

“So it was all because of him starting it, and the way the game ended?”

Almost home. It was such a short trip from Darby to Rockwell, but sometimes it felt like they were going cross-country.

“All because I missed a stupid layup!” Ben said, his voice way too loud in the car, and now everything that had happened today, from the time he had missed the layup, the game and Chase and Lily, all of it, just seemed to eat him up all at once, so much that he felt his face getting hot, and his eyes, and thinking that it would be another horrible ending now, him starting to cry. In front of his parents, even from the backseat.

“Hey, bud,” Jeff McBain said, his voice soft, turned back around now, maybe seeing what Ben was feeling. “Everybody misses easy ones. You dropped an easy pass that would’ve won you guys a football game early in the season, and look how the football season turned out.”

Ben said, “We could have turned this season around today!”

“Sometimes you can just want something in sports too much,” his dad said. “And not just in sports, by the way.”

Tell me about it.

They were one shot away from being just one game behind Darby in the standings and now look where they were.

Ben went straight upstairs when they got home, closed the door behind him, wondering as he did if Chase Braggs had actually been right about him today. Wondering if wanting something too much in sports was just another way of saying you had choked your brains out.

 

Ben had a cell phone now, his parents had given it to him a month ago, having given in because so many other sixth graders at Rockwell Middle School had cell phones now.

But he didn’t carry it with him all the time, wasn’t texting friends every couple of minutes the way so many other kids in his class were, even though when Ben saw the incoming or outgoing texts, he thought they were mostly about nothing.

Sometimes he would text Sam or Coop or Shawn. Or Lily. But mostly if he wanted to talk to them, he’d just call them. And only if he actually had something to say. Ben had promised himself he would never be one of those kids who were checking their phones every minute or so, afraid they would be missing another incoming text about nothing.

One other thing with Ben McBain: He didn’t think it was against the law to have an unspoken thought occasionally.

But he texted Lily now. Not just because he felt like he had to explain what she might have thought she saw at the end of the game, but because he wanted to.

Or maybe needed to.

He couldn’t let her think he was the jerk. At Pinocchio’s, yeah, he had been, everybody heard what he said, everybody knew what happened. Just not this time. He had to make sure she knew what had really happened this time, even if Chase had already given her his version.

U around? Need to talk to somebody smart.

And waited.

Waited through dinner, trying to do the kind of phone check with his eyes he hated when he saw other kids doing it, looking down at the phone in his lap when he thought his parents weren’t watching, knowing he probably wasn’t fooling either one of them.

No message.

No message when his dad drove him over to Sam’s for the sleepover, no message back from Lily until Ben was walking up the front walk to Sam Brown’s front door.

Cant help u until u stop acting so dumb.

He waited until after lunch on Sunday to text her back.

Dumb, she’d said.

Not trying to be funny, that was pretty clear. Not talking about the kind of dumb that meant she was making fun of Ben or somebody else in the Core Four for doing what she called “Dumb Guy Stuff.”

Or Extremely Dumb Guy Stuff.

This wasn’t about a movie being dumb, or a song, or about dumb behavior from somebody at school.

No.

This time Lily had called Ben dumb and meant it, and that meant she did think he’d acted like a blockhead at the end of the Darby game.

Which meant she had gotten another version of it from the real blockhead — Chase — who’d started the whole thing and probably had left out the part about calling Ben a choker.

And Ben couldn’t let that go, not even with Lily, especially with Lily. Couldn’t wait until Monday and school to set the record straight with her once and for all. That was why he texted her now and told her — asked, actually — to meet him at the swings as soon as she could.

If calling him out as dumb was serious, so were the swings at McBain Field.

Those were the swings where their moms had pushed them as soon as they were old enough, the swings where they still went to have their best quiet time and their best talks, when they needed to have a talk.

This time Lily texted him back fast, asked him, like when? Ben’s answer went back just as fast.

Like now.