My serve hit the net tape and rolled back to my feet.
Third time. The tape made the same dry rasp each time, a zipper sound, the noise of a ball deciding it had better things to do. The ball came to rest against my left toe like a dog that wanted to go home.
"Pryce Is Right!" Brick's palm landed between my shoulder blades hard enough to move my glasses. "Next one, buddy. Next one's the one."
He said it every time. He meant it every time. That was the worst part of Brick Bannister. You couldn't even hate him properly.
I picked up the ball. Across the net, the other team's back row had stopped crouching. One of them was drinking water. A guy in a fraternity tank top had his hands on his hips, waiting for the next free point with the patience of a man at a bus stop.
The score was 9 to 14. We were Halvane Logistics. They were a dental practice from Evanston called the Molar Bears, and they were beating us with people who fixed teeth for a living.
"You got this, Owen!" Madison Hale was screaming from the left side of the court, both arms up, honey-blond ponytail swinging. "Literally you've got this! Let's go!"
I did not have this. The Molar Bears knew I did not have this. A seagull on the lifeguard chair knew.
Here is the thing about me and sports. In my head, every person on a court has a tooltip.
Brick: Bruiser. Hits very hard. Mostly air. Madison: Fast. Loud. Will dive into a concrete wall if you say there's a ball behind it. Hana Takeda: Reads the court like a spreadsheet. Disapproves of everything. Rafaela Costa: Don't look directly at her. Seriously, Owen. You'll serve into the net again.
My own tooltip has been the same since the seventh grade. Owen Pryce. Systems administrator. Can tell you why your laptop is slow. Cannot jump.
I'm thirty-two. I fix things for a living. Every person on this court had, at some point in the last two years, walked up to my desk with a laptop held out like an injured bird. I knew their passwords. I knew which of them saved files to the desktop. I knew Brick had once emailed the whole company by accident, and that he'd never told anyone who unsent it.
None of that helped me serve.
Hana came over from the right. She was small and composed, black hair cut at the jaw, three thin silver rings on her right hand. She didn't touch me. She looked at my feet and tapped two fingers against her thigh, the way she did when she was counting something.
"Your weight is on your heels," she said. "Incorrect."
"Got it."
"Forward. Like you want the ball."
"I don't want the ball. The ball knows I don't want the ball."
She considered that with the seriousness of an auditor. "Then lie to it."
She walked back to her spot. Madison caught her by the wrist on the way past and kissed her cheek without breaking off her cheering. Hana allowed this with an expression of deep tolerance and pulled her visor straight.
I put my weight forward. I lied to the ball.
It cleared the net. Barely. It dropped into the Molar Bears' front court. A woman in a knee brace dug it up without looking. The frat guy spiked it into the sand three feet from my right foot.
The sound it made was a wet thump. Sand sprayed my shins. It was still hot from the afternoon, the kind of heat that comes up through your soles and reminds you that the beach is a frying pan with a view.
"That's okay! That's okay!" Brick clapped twice, big hands, a sound like somebody dropping lumber. "Shake it off, team. We're here. We're right here."
We were nowhere near there. We were 9 to 15.
I should explain why I was on a volleyball court at all.
In June, someone had posted in the Halvane office chat for the Thursday league. Brick was captain. The team needed six. They had five. The message had come from Rafaela Costa, and it had said, in full:
Need one more body for Thursdays!! Anyone? Seriously anyone. I will buy you a beer.
I read it eleven times. I typed "I'm in" and deleted it four times. Then I sent it at 1:14 in the morning, which is when a man sends a message once he knows how it looks and has decided not to care.
She replied with a thumbs-up and a beer emoji. I looked at the beer emoji for a while.
So that was why. One more body. I was the body.
Rafaela was serving now. She stood behind the line with the ball on her palm, bouncing on the balls of her feet, and the sun lay all over her. Dark curls pulled back in a thick ponytail that had given up halfway. Deep tan from a summer of weekends on this exact sand. A gold anklet on her left ankle, thin as a chain on a pendant, catching the light every time she shifted.
She talked with her eyebrows. That was the first thing I ever noticed about her. A stand-up meeting, fourteen months ago. The VP of sales said the word "synergy", and both her eyebrows went up a quarter-inch and stayed there. Nobody else saw it. I had seen it and nearly laughed out loud.
I had been noticing things about Rafaela Costa ever since. It was not a healthy hobby.
She tossed the ball and hit it, and it went over the net like it had somewhere to be. The Molar Bears scrambled. They got it back. Madison dove for it, came up with a fistful of sand and a scrape on her knee, and the ball popped up off her forearm.
Rafaela was under it. She set it to Brick. Brick rose out of the sand like a building going up in time-lapse, all college-linebacker shoulders, and crushed it down through the Molar Bears' block.
10 to 15.
"Let's go!" Madison was up on her feet, sand on one cheek, bleeding a little from the knee and not caring. "Let's go, let's go, let's go!"
"Nice dig," I told Madison.
"I know, right?" She held up the knee like a trophy. "Blood counts double."
"That's not a rule," said Hana.
"It's a rule in my heart."
The Molar Bears' captain called for a check. It was a close call on the back line. Rafaela walked straight up to the net to argue it.
I'd seen her do this to clients. She didn't raise her voice. She put her hands together, prayer-style, and smiled at the guy like she felt sorry for him.
"Listen," she said. "Listen to me. You saw it. I saw you see it. You want to be the guy who wins on a lie? In front of your hygienist?"
The captain glanced back at a woman in a knee brace, who shrugged.
"Your point," he said.
Rafaela patted the top of the net like it was his shoulder. "Obrigada, querido."
She came back past me on the way to her spot, and her anklet flashed once in the low sun as she landed from a little hop. I watched it. I knew I was watching it. I made myself look at the score instead.
11 to 15. We needed this match to make the playoffs.
The trouble was me.
Set two was where I noticed the setter.
There's a thing you learn calling raids in an online game for six years. That's the part of a multiplayer game where two dozen players take on one huge boss together, and somebody has to tell everyone where to stand. Two in the morning, twenty-four strangers on voice chat, a boss with a pattern. You stop watching the boss and start watching its tells: the shoulder before the swing, the pause before the wipe. Everything has a rhythm, if you sit with it long enough. Almost nobody does.
I'd been the raid caller, and I'd been good. It was the only time in my life I'd been the guy people waited for.
The Molar Bears' setter was a wiry woman with a sunburned nose and good hands. She had one habit.
When the first touch came to her high and clean, she set it fast, on a one-count, to whoever was open. When the first touch came to her low and messy, she took a second to fix it. And every single time she took that second, she set it left. Every time. A two-count, a little hitch in her knees, and up it went to the frat tank top, who was six-four and enjoyed himself.
I watched it happen three times to be sure, then a fourth.
We were down 4 to 7. Brick yelled "Wake up, Halvane!" at nobody in particular. Hana was at the net in front of me. She was the best blocker we had, which nobody expected from somebody five-foot-three, because nobody ever watched her timing.
I moved up behind her between points and pitched my voice under the noise.
"Hana."
She didn't turn around. "Explain."
"Their setter. When the dig's bad, she takes a beat, and then she always goes to the tall guy. Left side. Always. Two-count."
She was quiet for exactly as long as it took to check my math against what she'd seen.
"You've been watching her."
"I've been watching all of them. It's the only thing I'm good at out here."
"That's not nothing." A pause. "It's also not a serve." Two fingers tapped her thigh.
"Always?"
"Four out of four. Five, if you count the warm-up."
"Acceptable."
The next serve came over. The Molar Bears dug it badly, a shank off somebody's elbow. The setter got under it. She bent her knees. Her hips hitched.
One.
Hana was already moving left.
Two.
The ball went up to the tall guy, and Hana Takeda, five-foot-three, met him at the top of the net with both hands like a shutter coming down. The ball went straight back into his own sand.
The tall guy stared at the ball, then at Hana. Hana fixed her visor.
Madison screamed so loudly that a man walking a beagle on the bike path stopped and looked around for the emergency.
"Oh my God! Oh my God, babe! Did you see that! Did everyone see that!" She grabbed Hana by both shoulders and shook her, then bit her lower lip hard, then laughed like she was embarrassed by how much she'd screamed. "That was so hot. Sorry. That was a sports hot. You know what I mean."
"I know exactly what you mean," said Hana, who looked pleased in a way only someone who knew her could see.
Brick called a huddle. He did this every three points or so, whether we needed it or not, because he liked having people around him in a circle.
"Okay, okay." He put his arms around Madison and me. He smelled like sunscreen and a sports drink the color of antifreeze. "That right there? That's what I'm talking about. I saw that setter. I saw her. You see how I've been watching the left? I told you. Watch the left."
He hadn't told anybody anything. He'd been watching his own hair in the reflection off the lifeguard chair's window.
Hana looked at me. It was a short look, but it had a whole spreadsheet in it. You going to say something?
I could have. Actually, Brick, I saw it. Five words.
I let it go. I always let it go. Someone takes the credit, and I tell myself what matters is that the play worked. In raids, it had been true. On a sand court in Chicago with a man's sweaty arm around my neck, it felt less true.
"Great call, captain," I said.
Hana's eyebrows went up one millimeter. Then she let it go too.
"Let's eat these guys," said Brick, and we broke.
We clawed it back to 21 to 22. One of their points came off my shin. One of ours came off Brick's forehead, which he celebrated as though he'd meant it.
At 21 to 22, the ball came to me. A soft first touch from Madison, high and lazy, rising over my head.
And Rafaela came for it.
She moved in under the ball, hands up, and set it. It was a perfect set, and I knew enough to know that. It went up from her fingers in a clean high arc toward the outside. It slowed at the top. It hung there for a second in the orange light, right where a hitter could come up and meet it.
She'd set it for me. Not Brick. Me.
Nobody else ever set me. Brick took everything he could reach, and Madison and Hana played as a unit. But Rafaela did. Once or twice every Thursday, she'd turn and put the ball up for the IT guy, high and generous, like a gift with no card.
I watched the ball rise. I watched it hang at the top of its arc.
I jumped late. I swung early. My hand closed on air a foot below the ball, and I came down on my knees in the sand while the ball dropped untouched on our side of the net.
The frat tank top laughed. A couple of his teammates laughed. Someone on the bike path laughed, which seemed unnecessary.
Madison and Hana didn't laugh. Brick laughed a little and clapped, "Good effort, good effort!" in the voice you use for a five-year-old at T-ball.
Rafaela didn't laugh.
She came over and held out a hand.
"Don't," I said. "I'll stay down here. I live here now."
"Get up. Your sand is my sand." She wiggled her fingers. "Come on. I'm not leaving you down there."
I took it. She had calluses on her palm from the court and a strong grip, and she pulled me up in one motion like I weighed nothing.
"Next time, O-wen."
She said my name in two parts. Oh. Wen. Slowly, as if she was pulling it out of something. Nobody had ever said it like that before. I didn't know what it meant. I wasn't sure it meant anything at all.
Then she let go of my hand and went back to her spot, and I stood there with sand in my teeth and the shape of her grip on my fingers.
We lost by two, 23 to 25. We'd needed one win to make the playoffs, and I'd been in the middle of both chances to get it.
Nobody said that. That was the point of a league like this.
"Good game," said Brick to everybody, loudly. "Good game, good game. We'll get 'em next week."
"There isn't a next week for the playoffs," said Hana.
"There's always a next week, Hana."
"That is not how calendars work."
The Molar Bears shook our hands under the net, and the woman with the knee brace told me my serve had "real potential". I thanked her. I think she meant it kindly. Dentists are trained to say encouraging things to people in pain.
Afterward we dragged the cooler to the edge of the court and drank cheap beer in the sand while the sky went pink over the lake.
The sand was cooling. Ten minutes earlier it had burned through my socks. Now it was lukewarm, and if you pushed your fingers down deep enough, it was cold.
Brick told a story about himself.
"So I'm in Milwaukee, right? Client dinner. Guy's a freight buyer, old school, hates everybody." He leaned in. He did the voice, a gravel growl. "'Son, I don't sign with salesmen.' Three courses. I don't pitch once. Not once. We talk about his boat."
"His boat," said Madison.
"His boat! Forty minutes on the boat. Steak comes. He puts down his fork. He goes, 'Bannister, you're the most natural salesman I ever met.'" Brick sat back. "Two point one. On a napkin."
"Did he sign the napkin?" said Hana.
"Babe. He signed the napkin."
It was a good story. Brick told stories well. He let the punchline land and grinned with all his teeth, and everyone laughed, including me, which annoyed me.
He wasn't a bad guy. That was the problem. He was handsome like a man on a cereal box. He was generous with his beer, and he remembered your birthday because he put it in his phone. Salesperson of the year three years running. As far as I could tell, he had never been bad at anything in his life. He didn't know what it felt like, and he didn't know he didn't know.
Madison had her head on Hana's shoulder. Hana was writing something in a small notebook with very small handwriting, the score maybe. Madison peeled the label off her beer in one long strip and turned to me.
"Okay but you should come to the thing after."
"What thing?"
"The thing. At the bar on Clark. The one with the ax-throwing." She bit her lower lip, caught herself doing it, and laughed. "It's, like, the whole sales floor. Rafaela's coming. Brick's coming. It'll be fun. You'll throw an axe. Everybody needs to throw an axe."
Hana didn't look up. "He'd miss the board."
"He would not!"
"He would miss the wall."
"Ignore her," Madison told me. "She's mean when she's happy. Come!"
"I can't," I said. "I've got early tickets."
It was true. I had nine tickets in the queue for 7:30 a.m., including one from Accounts Payable, flagged urgent, that said only printer haunted. It was also an excuse. Both of those were true at once, and I let them stand side by side and did not look too hard at either.
"Boo," said Madison. "Booooo."
Hana's two fingers tapped the notebook. She looked at me over the top of it. She knew what an excuse looked like.
"Next week," I said.
"Next week," Madison agreed, pointing her beer at me. "That's binding. Hana, write it down."
Hana wrote it down.
Rafaela leaned over from the cooler and tipped her bottle at me. Her eyebrows were doing something skeptical.
"Early tickets," she said. "What is an early ticket? Is it a train?"
"Somebody's printer is haunted. I have to perform an exorcism."
"At seven in the morning."
"Seven-thirty. Accounts Payable flagged it urgent."
"Accounts Payable flags everything urgent. They flagged my expense report urgent. It was a sandwich." She studied me. "You know you're allowed to have fun, querido. Nobody will write you up."
"I'm having fun right now."
"Liar." But she smiled when she said it, and clinked her bottle against mine, and turned back to Brick.
Rafaela was sitting on the cooler. Brick was sitting on the sand at her feet, telling her something with his hands. I couldn't hear it. I could see her face.
She laughed.
It was a real laugh, head back, curls shaking. One hand went to his shoulder for a second, an anchor more than anything else. Brick looked up at her the way he looked at a closing contract.
I looked at my beer. The label said it was brewed with "pure Rocky Mountain water". I read it twice.
When I looked up again, they were standing. Brick was folding the cooler's lid down and hoisting it onto one shoulder. Rafaela was brushing sand off her yoga pants.
"We're heading to the thing," said Brick. "Rafa's riding with me. Madison, babe, you guys coming?"
"We'll catch up," said Madison. "Hana has to change. Hana always has to change."
"I sweated," said Hana.
"See you there." Brick turned to me. "Pryce Is Right. Ball bag?"
"I've got it."
"My man." He punched my shoulder. It didn't hurt much. "Same time next week. We'll get 'em. We're right there."
Rafaela looked back as they walked away, once, over her shoulder. It might have been at me. It might have been at the lake. They went up the path to the parking lot, Brick with the cooler on his shoulder like a trophy, Rafaela barefoot with her sandals in her hand. Then they were around the corner of the bathhouse and gone.
Madison and Hana left five minutes later, holding hands, arguing cheerfully about whether a visor counts as a hat.
I packed the ball bag.
There were six balls. One always ends up in the long grass by the bike path, and I found it there, damp with dew, and wiped it on my shirt. I rolled the net off the poles so it wouldn't tangle. I shook the sand out of my shoes in two little gray streams, cold now.
The court was empty and the lake had gone the color of a bruise. Somebody's radio was playing on a blanket a hundred yards down.
I thought about Rafaela's hand pulling me up out of the sand. I thought about the set, hanging there at the top of its arc for me, for one whole second, and me underneath it, a foot too low and half a second too slow.
Next time.
My car was the last one in the lot except for a pickup truck under the light pole. A big one, silver, with a hitch on the back that had never hitched anything.
Brick's truck.
I sat behind the wheel with the door open and the dome light on. Through the windshield I could see two people in the pickup's cab. Brick sat in the driver's seat with his elbow out the window. Rafaela beside him, her feet up on the dash, her face lit blue by her phone.
She said something. He laughed.
The truck's lights came on. It backed out, swung around, and rolled past me slowly toward the exit. Rafaela didn't look over from her phone. Brick lifted two fingers off the wheel at me, a friendly little wave, the wave you give the guy who carries the ball bag.
I lifted two fingers back.
The taillights turned onto Lake Shore Drive and went north, toward Clark and the bar with the ax-throwing, and I sat there with the engine off until I couldn't see them anymore.
Then I put the ball bag on the passenger seat and buckled it in.
