Every Road Leads Back to You

The Late Bus

Chapter Three:

Interviewing him turned out to require patience Amara didn't know she had. Malcolm answered questions the way he apparently played point guard — giving up as little as possible, waiting to see what she'd do with it.

"Why engineering?" she asked, on day three, both of them stuck on the late bus after a rescheduled interview ran long. The bus smelled like rubber and old vinyl seats, and rain streaked sideways across the windows.

"Because numbers don't lie to you," Malcolm said. He looked out the window instead of at her. "You put in the right work, you get the right answer. Basketball's not like that. You can do everything right and still lose."

Amara wrote that down without looking at her notebook, the way she'd learned to when she didn't want to break whatever was happening.

"That's the story," she said quietly.

"What?"

"That's your five hundred words. Not the championship. That."

Malcolm turned from the window, and for the first time since Ms. Okafor had paired their names, he looked at her like she wasn't just the girl assigned to interview him.

"Nobody's ever asked me that before," he said. "Everybody just assumes I want the NBA."

"Do you?"

"I want the numbers to work out for once," he said, and Amara understood, with a small, unexpected lurch, that he wasn't only talking about basketball anymore. Outside, Eastbrook blurred past in the rain — the same streets she'd known her whole life, suddenly looking like the beginning of something she hadn't planned for.