The Address That Doesn't Exist

The first letter asked future-Obi to do one specific thing, and I read it so many times I could have recited it. After the part about being alive, it said this: *I need you to go back to the Tully Street courts and shoot around for an hour. Just an hour. Don't bring anyone. I know by the time you read this you'll have a whole life and the courts will seem like a small thing, but the courts are where I figured out I was a person and not just somebody's kid, and I don't want you to forget that boy. He was okay. He deserves an hour of your year.* I knew the Tully Street courts. Everybody did. Two cracked half-courts behind the rec center, one hoop with a chain net and one with no net at all, and Obi used to disappear to them for whole afternoons back when I was small enough that his disappearing felt like weather, just a thing that happened to the house. I hadn't known they meant anything. That was becoming the theme of my summer: finding out which ordinary things had been load-bearing the whole time without telling me. So the next morning I delivered the letter. I walked to Tully Street with the envelope in my back pocket, and I stood on the cracked half-court for a second feeling deeply stupid, and then I picked up the chewed-up rec center ball from where it always sat deflating in the grass, and I shot around. For an hour. By myself. The letter had said *don't bring anyone*, and even though it was addressed to a man who didn't exist, I followed the instruction, because the whole point was to do the thing the boy in the letter wanted done. I am very bad at basketball. I want that established. I missed in ways that I think were almost impressive, ways that suggested a real creativity of failure. The chain net only rang four times in a whole hour and two of those were luck. But somewhere in the middle of it a thing happened that I had not planned for. A kid showed up. Maybe twelve, skinny, ball under his arm, and he stood at the edge of the court doing the math kids do about whether a bigger kid is going to be annoying about sharing. "You can have the other hoop," I told him. "The one with the net's cursed anyway." He grinned and took the netless hoop, and for the back half of the hour the two of us shot around in a comfortable nothing-silence, two people who would never see each other again, on a cracked court behind a rec center, on a morning that was now somehow part of the delivery. When I left I thought I was done. Letter one: delivered. But I went around the side of the rec center toward home and there was a corkboard there, the community kind, layered in flyers for guitar lessons and lost cats, and pinned in the corner, sun-faded almost white, was a flyer for a youth basketball league. With a tear-off tab at the bottom for the address. The address was on Tully Street. The flyer was, judging by the fade, ancient. And I knew, the way you know things in summer, that this was where the next thread went, and that the delivery of eleven letters was not going to stay as simple as shooting hoops for an hour. I took a tab. I texted Obi: *hypothetically, second question. did you ever play in a league.* Four hours later, predictably, he answered. But this time it wasn't one word. This time it said: *ada. what did you find. seriously. what did you find.* I looked at that for a long time. Because for the first time all summer, my brother sounded like the boy in the letters — not the easy face he showed the house, but the other one, the one who'd been hiding behind a stolen hoodie waiting sixteen summers to be read. I didn't answer him yet. I wasn't ready. But I folded the first letter back into its envelope, and I put the league tab in my pocket next to it, and I walked home in the heat already thinking about the second one.