Dinner. Lace up. Face the basket. He was quick, but I could shoot. I grinned as the ball sighed through the net. I shot four more times. He got angry, but laughed all the same. He was always laughing.

Dinner. Lace up. Face him. I loved to run, but his hands were faster, and when I tripped from his crossover he walked back from the basket and pretended to mend my ankles. I told him to never tell anyone. He said he wouldn’t.

Dinner. Lace up. Face the basket. Sometimes Mama came out to watch. We played extra hard when she did, hoping for sunlight under that graying, messy cloud, but we never played dirty in front of Mama. We were good boys, with manners. If we made it without cursing, eggs and pancakes waited for us in the morning. It wasn’t often though. A.T. had some creative friends.

Dinner. Lace up. Face him. The game was stuck, and the sun was going down. He laughed between breaths. “Gotta beat the dark,” he said.

Dinner. Lace up. Face the basket. I wish I could be like him. The scholarship didn’t matter. A.T. moved like his paintbrush, and his feet made more purposeful pictures on the canvas beneath us than mine did. His hands shared deep conversations with the ball, and they understood each other.

Dinner. Lace up. Face him. He slept with it sometimes. He said the scent of leather was a reminder of all the times he’d beaten me, but I missed Dad, too. Blue, worn white lines, and older than me and A.T. both— it had spent a lot of time in Dad’s trunk before A.T.’s bed. We never used another ball.

Dinner. Lace up. Face the basket. A.T. straightened and motioned for a stop. “How far is too far?” he asked. I said I didn’t know. He just looked to the street, hands on his hips.

Dinner. Lace up. I practiced free-throws. He said he had something important to do.

Dinner. Lace up. Face the basket. He didn’t score a single point. He didn’t swear, scream, or laugh. He shoved past me into the house, the ball trapped under his arm.

Dinner. Lace up. Face him. We were both soaked through our clothes. The rain hid things, or washed them away, and in between its sheets we became animals, the ball bouncing around the rim more often to avoid our shoves, our sharp elbows, our black anger. We cursed like men and called fouls like boys, but we finished lying next to each other, our faces to the sky. He laughed then, and it filled us both. He was always laughing.

Dinner. Lace up. Face the basket. He was laughing when the bullets ripped through his face and shredded his chest. He was laughing as blood painted the air between us, arcing high like the basketball. He was still laughing even as pain filled his eyes, and then the laugh died in his throat as the rest of his body was murdered, and the sky was filled with screams and the screeching of a car.