Tyrell kept his hands going like solving, but in fact, his math went back into seasons. Seventeen thousand seven hundred and seven points. Average 19.5 points per game. Restrict to playoffs, restrict to 1990 playoffs, and the number is 25.2. He was a free-throw man himself. That is where the variables pulled off, information clear and present, pure. You didn’t have other players poking into the percentages.
Mrs. Prince was walking around the room. She had everyone in fours, and she was saying, “I’m watching you.”
The problem he’d done for his group already, and they were rapping Young Jeezy, The Recession. On the table, there was graph paper. Questions at a level he was answering three years ago.
Joe rolled his shoulders and cocked his head. This way, that. Left and right. He had the beat stored up in his torso. “‘My president’s black.’”
“‘My Lambo’s blue.’”
Blue was his free-throw color in the mental graphs.
Tyrell was deep into something bigger.
He looked up with his hand on his chin. Thinking, thinking. The whole catalog of facts could be rearranged like Tetris. He was cooking new rankings. In his own body, he was clumsy. But his head was Magic. His head was Bird and LeBron. His head was Oscar and Michael. And he liked to watch. He liked to keep track. He would go on the computer on after-school program afternoons and look up the latest numbers, incorporate. He made tables. Pie charts.
Yellow rebounds. Pink assists. And other colors too.
“‘Bush robbed all of us.’”
“‘Would that make him a criminal?’”
“That gum I see, Mr. Williams?” Mrs. Prince said across the room. “Okay, that’s what I thought.”
Of the young guys, he was liking Russell Westbrook. This was a guy shooting fifty-four–eight at the free-throw line year one at UCLA, then seventy-one–three the next. Tyrell was thinking, this is a guy who will keep throwing the graphs.
He rubbed his hand over the carved-up desktop. FU-Q. Colored in blue.
Blue was also an OKC color. He liked blue. He liked OKC. He liked Russell Westbrook. And he hated Jason Kidd’s face.
He was trying to remember the MPGs.
“Stop looking at me,” Crystal said.
“I’m not.”
“Then who, Tyrell?”
“Russell Westbrook.”
She had her hands up and she was saying, “Nah.”
“Hold up, hold up, hold up,” Joe said. “Crystal looks like Westbrook?”
“Not like that.”
“Like what?” Crystal said.
Like what, he couldn’t say. There was nothing to explain it in the room. It was just another PS with its whiteboard glare and dried-out markers. It was just another year of two-digit fractions.
“Like what?” Crystal was saying. “Like what, Tyrell?”
Tyrell rolled his pencil on the desk. One edge and another and another. Hexagonal. Five, six, seven, eight sides.
“Saying you look like a man,” Joe said.
“That it, Tyrell?”
“Awful quiet now,” Joe said.
“Like what? Like what?” Crystal said.
He saw Omar turn around. He saw Derek pointing. He saw Mrs. Prince with her slow walk, meaning finish it up before I get over there. And where there were so many numbers, he couldn’t find the words, and the search of it swelled in him, pressed out from inside. He was tapping his foot. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. But the sound doesn’t connect. Something in him’s unplugged.
“Like what, Tyrell? You stupid?”
Joe was snapping fingers in front of his face. “Fat boy about to cry.”
His mother was always saying he should stand up for himself. She was always saying it feels good. But he couldn’t get a word in for anyone. He couldn’t find a silence.
“He’s about to blow,” Crystal was saying. “Look at him.”
“Miss Muñoz, Mr. Wood,” Mrs. Prince said. “Is that you volunteering to show us your work on the blackboard I’m hearing?”
“Sure is, Mizz Prince,” Joe said.
“Well then. I’m waiting.”
He watched Joe reach for the paper, but he was quicker. Tyrell slapped it up, stood. He ripped the paper and threw it on the ground. Throw down like someone just won the playoffs.
He could hear their vowels lengthen, all of them, every single and all together, and he was glad to hear the moan of a scene. It is the sound of him returning from the outside, from all of them. He was up high like a sugar rush until he felt someone clock him from behind.
“Who stupid now?” Joe was saying.
Then a game came back to him from somewhere deep, old retired voices. There were ways to measure the angles, the arcs. The fingers follow, suspended, even after the release. Fists in the air. Sunk shots. And the crowd was cheering.