Page 166 of ClickBack

“You knew the steps.”

“I know a lot of things I wish I didn’t.”

Terrence reaches for his microphone. “She hit the note.”

Nico looks at him. “Passing it on the way to another one doesn’t count.”

Bellamy turns toward her father. “Are you going to let him talk about your child like that?”

“Baby girl, I love you enough not to lie on camera.”

Von folds forward laughing. Mom covers her face. Bellamy looks out toward Cole, who is suddenly very busy reading something on his phone.

“I can do this entire show without any of you,” she says.

“Not this episode,” Von tells her.

She gives him a look, then brings him back to basketball. I stay near the rear wall, listening to my brother talk about expectations, about how fast a bad week becomes an argument that the team wasn’t that good in the first place. He doesn’t borrow anybody else’s explanation. He has lived enough of it to know what he means.

“You get two in a row,” he says, “and people start talking like the next one belongs to you. We still have to play. There are teams working right now because they’re tired of watching us at the end.”

Ronan points at him. “Exactly.”

Bellamy glances at her notes. “There’s another question people keep bringing you this summer.”

Von looks toward me before he answers. “Jay.”

“What do you make of the idea that you need your brother here?”

He sits back. “Need him to do what?”

“That’s what I’m asking.”

“We won with the men in this room.” He looks toward Cole, Ronan, and Nico. “I want to play with him. That doesn’t mean I’m waiting on him to make us a team.”

I look down at my shoes. I knew he had to feel that. Hearing him say it without protecting my feelings is better than I expected.

Terrence asks whether it was different when he was younger.

“Everything was different when I was younger,” Von says. “I couldn’t get a ride to the gym without this man telling me what I was going to work on when I got there.”

“You asked for the ride,” I call out.

“See?” He points toward the back. “Still got something to say.”

The audience laughs. He lets them, then looks back at Terrence.

“He took me places I couldn’t have gotten to by myself. Put me in games where nobody was going easy because I was his little brother. Then he’d get mad if I played like I was happy they let me in.”

I remember one of those rides home. He had barely spoken. I thought he was mad because he lost. When he finally started talking, it was about a man who had called him back onto the court by his own name instead of mine.

“San Antonio was mine,” Von says. “I got here, found my place, messed up, got better. Nobody could tell me Jay did that part for me.”

Bellamy nods. “Would having him here change that now?”

“No.” He looks at me. “I know what I did.”

Mom is sitting with her hands clasped in her lap. Giselle is beside her. I make myself look back at Von before I start thinking about all the games Mom watched from different cities, trying not to miss either of us.