The Perfect Shot

The chapter begins seven months after the murders in the spring. Brian is the first-person narrator, and he describes hearing a gunshot and feeling a gun in his hand. He has several flashbacks to different memories of Amanda and Cory. He remembers talking to Amanda about death shortly after her father completed a drug bust; it was a dangerous operation, and the children were curious about whether life really flashes before one’s eyes when they’re about to die. Brian then remembers playing basketball with Julius and the other members of his team. The scenes are fragmented and out of chronological order. The chapter ends with the rhythm of a basketball pounding against the ground.

It is the winter after Amanda’s murder, and Brian is sitting in his history class. His teacher Mr. Fortner scolds him for letting his grades slip, saying he needs an education even if he goes to college on a basketball scholarship. Brian used to put more effort into school and enjoyed playing music and working on community service activities with Amanda, but he hasn’t cared much about anything but basketball since her death.

Mr. Fortner announces the next class assignment: They will work in pairs to study a historical event or court case and explore how similar things have happened since then. He wants to impress upon the class the concept of history repeating itself. Then, he assigns everyone their partners. To Brian’s dismay, all of the basketball players are paired with non-athletes. Brian is paired with a quiet loner named Todd. His teammates have bullied Todd, but Brian never really participated, because of Amanda’s influence. Even so, he is not particularly excited to work with him. They must research the 1913 trial of Leo Frank, who was accused of murdering a teenage girl named Mary Phagan.

The basketball team heads to practice, complaining about how much time their history projects are going to take up. Their partners, who don’t care about basketball, are also annoyed, believing that the athletes won’t pull their weight. Julius’s partner, Leslie, is particularly displeased.

This scene introduces more members of the basketball team and the cheerleaders who hang out with them. Julius suggests to Brian that Ashley is interested in him, but he is still having a hard time letting go of Amanda’s memory. Brian teases Julius about Keesha, who has a crush on him, but Julius insists that the only thing they have in common is that they are both Black—he has a crush on a girl named Brittney, whom he has dubbed “Bright Eyes.” Julius asks if Brian wants to go get pizza with the team, but he knows that Todd is waiting to meet with him to start their project, so he declines. Leslie is waiting for Julius, too, but he goes to get pizza anyway.

Brian meets up with Todd after practice, and Todd shows him several books he’s already checked out for their project. One of them is about Leo Frank, and the other is about Mary Phagan. The picture of the girl on the cover triggers memories for Brian. He has a flashback to the previous summer when he watched fireworks on a blanket with Amanda on the Fourth of July. He remembers playing basketball earlier that day with Julius and kissing Amanda that weekend. He thinks about how he never perfected his three-point shot, just like he never told Amanda that he loved her. When he comes back to the present moment, Todd asks him which book he wants to read. He chooses the one about Leo Frank, preferring to avoid the one with the dead teenage girl on the cover. At the end of the chapter, Todd and Brian decide that it might not be that bad to work together.

Brian begins reading the story of Leo Frank. He lived in Atlanta and was working at a pencil factory in 1913. On Confederate Memorial Day that year, everyone else was out celebrating, but Leo went to work because he was a northerner and did not care about the fallen Confederacy. Mary Phagan came into his office to collect her paycheck before joining the festivities, but she never arrived at the parade. When her body was found later, everyone believed that Leo Frank killed her.

Brian gets a ride home from practice from a man named Mr. Garrett. They talk about the basketball team, and Mr. Garrett wishes Brian luck at the upcoming game against their biggest rival, Jackson. When he arrives home, he tells his parents about his history project. Brian’s father is annoyed that Mr. Fortner would assign such a time-consuming project during basketball season. His mom argues that school is just as important as basketball.

Brian has another flashback. Years ago, his father made beautiful, hand-carved guitars, and Brian traveled with his parents to craft fairs all around Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee to sell them and other small wood carvings. Someone stole some of his dad’s carvings, and the police accused him of making up the theft to make an insurance claim. After this, Mr. Hammet stopped selling carvings at fairs and started a construction company instead. This experience made him bitter, and Brian thinks his father’s investment in Brian’s athleticism stems from his inability to continue living his dream.

On the news that evening, there is a news report about the trial of Amanda’s father, Mr. Daine. Mr. Daine is a police officer and has been accused of killing his family. The reporter says that he pled not guilty and said he was playing basketball the evening that the murders occurred. Mrs. Daine, Amanda, and Cory were each killed by a single shot from a .380 shotgun, which is a kind of gun Mr. Daine owned at one point, but he said that he sold it long before the murders. Brian didn’t know Mr. Daine very well and didn’t particularly like him because he told Amanda not to spend so much time with him. Nonetheless, he doesn’t believe that he would kill his family.

Brian has another flashback to the day of the murders. Amanda and Cory asked if they could play basketball with him because they didn’t want to go to the pool with their mom. Brian was already playing with Julius and didn’t want to stop their game. Brian knew Amanda was angry with him for blowing her and Cory off, but he spent most of the afternoon focused on basketball. He remembers few details from that day. One detail he does remember, though, is when his ball bounced away and nearly hit a person who was jogging through the neighborhood. Brian did not recognize the jogger, who was wearing a gray jogging suit with the hood pulled up. They barely acknowledged Brian when he ran up to grab his ball. He did think it was strange that the person did not say anything and that their hood was pulled over their head on a hot August day, but he turned his attention back to the game. Soon after this encounter, Brian heard gunshots and Amanda’s father crying out, “They’re dead!”

Brian goes to his room and reads more about Leo Frank. During the trial, the prosecutor accused Frank of raping Mary Phagan before killing her, even though a medical examination showed that Phagan had not had sex with anyone. The prosecutor also pressured other factory girls to testify that Frank made inappropriate sexual advances toward them at work. An odd-jobs worker at the factory, Jim Conley, said that Frank had paid him to watch out for him so he wouldn’t get caught with a girl in his office. He also claimed that Frank told him that he had killed Mary Phagan and paid him to help dispose of her body. Frank was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. His wife insisted that he was innocent and never stopped fighting for justice for him. She wrote to the governor of Georgia, described the unfair trial Frank received, and asked him to intervene. The governor commuted Frank’s sentence from hanging to life in prison. The community was angry by this show of leniency, though, and they took matters into their own hands. They lynched Frank, carrying out his original sentence.

Brian flashes back to the night after the Daine murders. He remembers talking to an officer about everything he knew and saw leading up to the shootings. He told Officer Recks that he noticed a few people out exercising, including a jogger he couldn’t identify. He had a hard time recalling other details, partly because he had been so focused on playing basketball and partly because he was so distraught about Amanda’s death. He didn’t understand why the officer was asking him so many questions about when Mr. Daine came and went from the house. After the police finished questioning him, Brian blamed himself for not letting Amanda and Cory play with him and not being able to help them. Back in the present, he imagines what it must have been like for them to be in the car right before getting shot. He imagines Mary Phagan with them—they are all pleading with him to help them.

At school, Brian and Todd talk about their project. They have both read their library books about the case and are starting to think about the format of their presentation. They talk about making a movie like a murder mystery and enlisting the basketball team to act in it. Brian says they can avoid having them memorize lines by making it a silent movie, and they can put subtitles and music over the action. They agree to meet at Todd’s house that weekend. Brian tells Todd to hope that they win their basketball game that night because the team will be more likely to help with their project after a victory.