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I put mine on top of it.

Twenty-four. Twenty-five. The second of Sato’s four goes up to the podium at twenty-seven, and stands there, and reads a name.

Not mine.

Another drop. Smaller.

Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two.

The commissioner comes back out and says something about tomorrow, and the music comes on, and the lights come up, and that’s the first round.

I’m still sitting there.

In the hotel restaurant after, my mom is very cheerful about it in a way that makes me want to put my head through the table. My dad doesn’t say anything. He orders a steak and cuts it into very small pieces.

My phone.

Barnes: First round overrated.

Kennebeck: Says the man not being drafted.

Barnes: I could be drafted if I wanted.

Kennebeck: You got suspended in March.

Me: Shut the fuck up both of you.

And then a minute later, Berwyn.

Berwyn: Sleep. Tomorrow.

I put the phone face down.

Tessa’s across from me with a plate of fries she hasn’t touched. She doesn’t say anything about the first round. She doesn’t say it’s okay or tomorrow’s going to be great or they’re idiots. She just pushes the plate across the table to me, and when I take one, she pulls it back and eats one herself and pushes it back.

She just eats fries with me. It’s the only thing all night that helps.

Saturday, the second round starts at ten in the morning, and nobody’s in suits anymore except the prospects who haven’t gone yet.

There are fewer of us. Half the section is empty. The kid from Minnesota went nineteenth last night, to a team out west, and he’s not here today. His seat’s just a seat. There’s gum stuck to the armrest.

I’m in the suit again. Tessa tied the tie again. She did it right the first time this morning and didn’t say anything about it, and I didn’t, either.

The second round moves faster. The teams don’t walk up to the stage now. They call it in from their tables, a man at a podium reads it into a microphone, and if it’s you, your family screams and you go down the steps and a guy with a lanyard meets you at the bottom.

Thirty-three. Thirty-four. Thirty-five.

Sato is sitting behind us now. One row up. I can hear her earpiece, a faint buzz, and the tap of her pen on her paper notebook, and every so often she leans down and says a number into my ear without anybody else hearing. Thirty-nine, maybe. And then it isn’t. Forty-two. And then they trade the pick, and Sato says huh very quietly in a way I don’t like.

My dad has stopped moving. He sits with both hands on his knees like a man in a waiting room. My mom has shredded two tissues. And Tessa isn’t looking at the stage anymore. She’s looking at me. I can feel it on the side of my face. I don’t turn and look back because if I look at her I don’t know what my face is going to do. Her hand is on my knee again. Her thumb moving, very slightly, back and forth on the navy wool.

Forty-four.

The Sentinels are on the clock.

Sato’s pen stops tapping.

At the Sentinels’ table down on the floor, Morley takes off his reading glasses. He folds them. He puts them in his shirt pocket. He stands up, and three other men stand up with him, and they walk to the stage, not to the podium, all the way up the stairs under the lights, the way they did last night when it was a big deal.