Chapter 4 Chapter 4: Desert Silver

Sade's POV

Dominguez was twenty steps away, then eighteen, his head down over his phone, and I had nowhere to go but out the driver's side, straight into the pole light.

"Sergeant Dominguez! Sir, one second!"

The voice came from the players' entrance. Dominguez stopped and turned. In the side mirror, I watched the Ridgemont captain jog across the asphalt in his match kit and slides, the armband still on his bicep.

"Coach says to ask you about Jalen's car," he called, loud enough for the whole lot. "The team wants to buy it back from impound so the family doesn't have to deal with it. He said you'd know who to call."

"Son, I'm off the clock."

"Two minutes, sir. I'm sorry." He stepped sideways as he talked, so Dominguez had to turn with him, and the sergeant's back ended up to the car.

I didn't waste the two minutes. I clipped the photos back in order, set the folder with its tab facing the windshield, pressed the lock knob down, eased the door shut until it clicked, and walked away between the parked cars with my left sneaker flapping.

He caught up with me at the gate.

"You dropped this." He held out my shoelace, coiled around two fingers. "By the sergeant's back tire."

"Are you going to tell him?"

"Tell him what? That a girl lost a shoelace?" He had a light accent, half British and half something warmer. "Rashid Al-Mansoori. I captain the team your brother made look good."

"Sade," I said, because he was waiting for it.

"I know. Jalen talked about you so much the boys called you the Other Holloway." He smiled a little. "He said you were the better player. He said it like it hurt him."

He was standing close enough that I saw him breathe in, slow and deep, the way you'd smell bread through a bakery door. His brows pulled together as if the smell had come out wrong.

"Why did you help me?"

"Because I watched them fold his shirt into a bin tonight. And because Sergeant Dominguez has never looked hard at anything." His eyes dropped to my wrist and stayed there. He lifted his hand toward the bracelet, then stopped an inch from it and let his hand fall, as if he had changed his mind about touching a stove. "That's old desert work. You don't see silver like that outside the Gulf. Where's it from?"

"My mother."

"And where was she from?"

"Nowhere," I said. "She had nobody."

He nodded slowly, as though I had told him something completely different. Then he took a pen from his tracksuit pocket and wrote a number on the back of my hand.

"During the silence," he said, "did you hear the trees?"

"Everybody heard. The guy behind me said it was drunk boys."

"Did it sound like drunk boys to you?"

I didn't answer. He studied my face a second longer, then capped the pen. "If Port Sable is unkind to you, call me."

We buried Jalen in Dayton that Saturday, in sleet that couldn't decide whether to be snow. My whole team came in red jerseys with black tape on the sleeves, and Kenzie held my hand through the service. At the grave, I tapped two fingers on my silver and pointed at the gray sky. Nobody understood except Dad, and Dad walked back to the car.

That night, I put my phone on the kitchen table in front of him with the wrist photo on the screen. Then I swiped to the claw marks and the paw print beside the boot.

He looked at them for a long time, and then he pushed the phone back with one finger.

"Delete them," he said.

"No, Dad. I'm keeping them."

"Sade." His voice cracked down the middle. "Delete them."

"Water doesn't burn people. Dogs don't claw through car doors. Somebody took his bracelet, somebody did that to his skin, and you're on the phone at midnight talking about packs." I held up my left wrist with the faded pink ring still on it. "And I woke up with this at 11:52, the exact minute he went off that bridge. Explain that."

His face went gray. He reached across the table and closed his hand around my wrist, around the silver, hard enough to press it into the bone.

"Promise me," he said. "Wherever you're about to go, you never take this off. Not to shower, not to sleep, not for any reason any person ever gives you."

"Tell me why."

"Promise me first."

"I promise. Now tell me why."

He let go of my wrist and went upstairs, and I heard his door lock.

On Monday, I called Teresa Ruiz and turned down the national team. She was quiet for a while, then said, "This door doesn't stay open, Sade. Not for anyone." I said I understood, and she said she hoped it was worth it, and I said it was my brother.

Ridgemont took early enrollees in January if you finished high school by December. I doubled up on online classes and graduated from Carver Heights in an empty gym with the principal, Kenzie, and a sheet cake. The women's coach agreed to a video call. Coach Ngozi Bello had reading glasses pushed into her braids and a Nigeria national team mug on her desk, and she looked at me like a horse she wasn't sure she wanted to buy.

"I watched your bicycle kick. Very pretty. I do not care about pretty, and I do not give places for dead brothers, God rest him. Walk-on trials are January twelfth, six a.m. If you are late, do not come. If you are slow, do not stay."

"I'm not slow, Coach."

"Everybody's daughter is not slow." She leaned toward the screen. "We will see whose daughter you are."

Dad didn't drive me to the airport; Kenzie did. Before I left, I took his bolt cutters from the bin in the garage, the ones with red handles and Oakview Middle PE written on them in Sharpie, which he used every June to cut abandoned locks off the gym lockers. I wrapped them in a towel and packed them under my cleats.

Port Sable in January was gray and fifty degrees. My roommate in Hawthorne Hall, room 412, sat cross-legged on her bed with a laptop and a pen behind her ear.

"Oh my God. You're Jalen Holloway's sister. I'm Brooke Tanner, journalism major, Ridgemont Courier. Can I ask you like four questions? Not for the paper." She paused. "Okay, a little for the paper."

"No," I said, and dropped my duffel on the empty bed.

"Totally fair." On the shelf above our mirror, she had lined up six lipsticks like soldiers; the red one in the middle was called Cherry Riot.

By dinner, she had told me everything I hadn't asked. The men's soccer team needed a student equipment manager. The most dangerous person on campus was a senior named Marcus Ekwueme, the Young Sherlock Holmes, who everyone was sure wrote The Ledger, the anonymous blog that had gotten the swim coach fired and a hazing ring arrested.

"Ekwueme like the billboards?"

"Like the billboards, the stadium, and the forest. Same family." She lowered her voice. "Except he doesn't talk to them. Locals say the Ekwuemes run in the Hollow on full moons with no clothes on, which, ew. Coach Whitaker banned Marcus from the Den."

At nine, I walked to the Den. A laundry van sat at the loading dock, and the man wheeling bins had propped the steel door with a rubber wedge. A schedule beside it said: Laundry, Mon/Wed/Fri, 9 p.m. to 12 a.m. A howl rolled out of the pines while I stood reading it, and the laundry man looked up from his bins.

"Hollow's loud tonight," he said, mostly to himself. "You don't want to walk back past those trees after midnight, miss. Not this week."

I thanked him and crossed the road. I waited there until eleven-fifty, when he went out to the van to smoke, and slipped in.

The locker room was dark except for the green exit sign, and it smelled like bleach and wet fur. Locker nine said J. Holloway. Its seal tape had already been cut and hung in two curling strips, and the padlock dangled open.

At the far end of the room, a thin beam of light clicked off.

Someone had opened my brother's locker before me, and he was still in the room, standing in the dark, holding his breath exactly the way I was holding mine.