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total—"
    "I know, okay?"
    "Men's basketball only has thirteen."
    Okay, I didn't know that. That was kind of cool, actually, that women get two more than the men do. That for once women's sports is in the bonus. But I was nowhere near calm enough to absorb that little factoid, let alone discuss it or anything. "Can we please talk about this later?" Like never?
    "We need to talk about it now," Win said in his super-annoying reasonable voice. "I mean, this
is
your future."
    This time I didn't say
I know.
I thought it. In my brain I was screaming it; if I'd opened my mouth I would probably have broken his eardrum screaming. Instead I just nodded. And sighed this really huge sigh. "Yeah," I said finally. "Listen, I've got homework, okay?"
    "Keep me posted on all this."
    Like I had a choice. Like Win would ever let it rest. The whole month of November had been one giant Win pressure cooker, him going on and on and on about my training. Which had been good, really it had been, because it meant that I was now in great shape and super ready for the season, and it had also given us something to talk about, and had given Win something to think about beyond the fact he was going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, which is a pretty awful thing to be stuck dwelling on twenty-four hours a day. But that's why it had been so great to get home to Red Bend, because it meant getting away from Win. And now, because I stupidly mentioned those stupid envelopes, I was right back in pressure cooker land.
    So, even though I had a ton and a half of homework, I cleared off the kitchen table and dumped the bag of envelopes out. Win was going to call back—maybe even tonight, but definitely in the next few days—and he'd put the screws in me bigtime if I let something as important as this slide (which is how he would phrase it, not even considering the homework I had and the fact that just looking at the envelopes made me feel like crawling under the couch for the entire rest of my life). Then I sat back and stared at the pile.
    Curtis wandered in and caught me sitting there looking nine kinds of miserable. I figured he'd back out right away, seeing as misery isn't something he seeks out ever. But instead he took me completely by surprise. "What's this?" he asked, picking an envelope off the floor.
    "Basketball," I said, in the tone you'd use to say Projectile Vomiting.
    His eyebrows went up. "All these people wrote
you?
"
    "Yes, they wrote
me.
Why, is there something wrong with me?"
    "No, it's just..." He sat down. "You're thinking about San Diego?"
    "No, I'm not thinking about San Diego! That's like on the other side of the country."
    He looked up at me. "Then why is it here?"
    "Because they
mailed
it to me, pea brain—"
    "I mean, you should put it in a different pile. A reject pile."
    "Oh. Yeah." Since this was only the smartest thing I'd heard all week. And I felt pretty pea-brainish myself for not thinking of it.
    We ended up going through the stack, putting most of the envelopes into a cardboard box, and Curtis even wrote TOO FAR AWAY on the outside, just to make the point. He couldn't have been nicer about the whole thing, making jokes about Oklahoma and Arizona and all these other states I can barely find on a map. He even got our beat-up old atlas out of the Caravan so we could see where all these places were, and some of them looked pretty darn far. I mean, as much as I want to be out of Red Bend, I don't want to be out of it forever.
    We finally had about a dozen schools in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Michigan's UP, and Iowa and Illinois. And some of them were Big Ten schools, or other state schools like UW–Milwaukee and UM–Duluth. Plus smaller ones I'd never heard of although that doesn't mean much, but at least they were close, close as in a-couple-hours-of-driving close versus taking an airplane. Which is why for example the University of Michigan was right out, because I sure didn't want to have to fly over big old Lake