I picked Mason up from his after-school program at four-thirty.
He’d made a poster in art class. GO KAYLEE, with a picture of a volleyball. It looked a lot like a pumpkin.
“It’s a volleyball,” he told me, before I could say anything. “I ran out of white.”
We got to the gym at five-fifteen. I was wearing my maroon booster club sweatshirt, the one with the volleyball on the sleeve.
Travis came straight from the shed in his fleece vest with the seed company logo on the chest. He sat down next to me in the front row of the bleachers without saying much.
The gym smelled like popcorn and floor wax. And that hot electrical smell the old scoreboard makes when it’s been on for an hour.
The booster club had hung maroon and gold streamers along every railing.
Each of the six seniors had a big poster on an easel by the scorer’s table. Her number. Her picture.
