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as always, listening to Dad say in a tired voice that we were doing just fine.
    It's been pretty funny, actually, watching all the Red Bend ladies try to figure out what to do. Normally when there's a big family tragedy—not to sound awful, but it's been a while now with Win, and I guess I'm a little too used to it—well, all the church ladies and town ladies get together and make a bunch of meals they take turns bringing over. Only in our house Dad does the cooking and is totally into it, probably because cooking for him is still new and exciting. And he made it known that we were okay without all that extra food. He'd even given a couple of ladies advice on seasonings, which went over about as well as it would have the other way around, and so now the ladies still wanted to help but hadn't a clue in the world how.
    We didn't say too much at supper, though I did ask Curtis how things were going and he said okay, and even admitted he got top score on a science quiz, which you could see made Dad's night, hearing that, and made me pretty happy too, that my brother's so smart and I actually got him to say it out loud. As we were cleaning up Mom called, which she does every night to let us know she's still Mom, and after she caught up with Dad, she said that Win wanted to talk with me.
    It should have been nice, the thought of Win getting his special headphones on just to talk to his little sister. But here's the thing: he didn't want to talk
with
me, really; he just wanted to talk
at
me. About practice and all the basketball things I still needed to work on. All I could think about was how much it must suck for Mom to be stuck with him all day long, Win probably on her case nonstop to strengthen her back and lose weight, which on the one hand is a good idea but it wasn't like she didn't have enough going on already. Although it really does make him happy, as happy as he can ever be, to boss folks around, and she'd probably put up with it for that reason alone.
    You really need to start thinking about college, you know." How does he
do
that? He's like a dog that can smell fear, only instead of fear he just sniffs out really awkward conversations.
    "Yeah, Win. I've got the letters already."
    "What letters?" he asked. If he were a dog, right now his ears would be sticking straight up.
    God, I was stupid to bring this up. "Nothing. Just—it's just some mail I got from coaches because of that dumb
People
thing. A whole bunch of them sent letters and stuff."
    Win can't move much, but still I could hear him sitting up straighter—sitting up mentally. This was just the sort of thing he'd work to death. "What do they say?"
    "I don't know, okay? I just got home. I haven't had time to open them yet."
    "Are there any scholarship offers?"
    "Yeah, right. No one's going to send me a scholarship like that—"
    "You don't know that," Win said sharply. "I know this guy who got written up in
Sports Illustrated,
a tiny article, and he got eleven—"
    "Yeah, well, this isn't
Sports Illustrated.
" The only reason that stupid article even got printed was because the
People
people thought it was hilarious that players from rival football teams were going out. It had been one of the reasons Brian and I had broken up, actually, that article. One of the bigger reasons. Which I bet the
People
people wouldn't care about even if they knew. "Listen—I've gotten letters like this before, okay? They'll just say that they're interested in me and I need to get in touch and blah blah blah."
    "Because
they
can't call
you,
you know."
    "I
know
that." Did Win know he was echoing everything Coach K already told me? "I know they can't call."
    "So you need to start calling them. Like tonight."
    "I
know!
Will you just—it's been a really long day, okay? My coach is already breathing down my neck about this stuff."
    "Because those Division I scholarships don't hang around, you know. I bet some schools have met their quota already. They only have fifteen scholarships