ACC Tournament, North Carolina vs North Carolina State (1975)

She didn’t care about basketball, but she loved it when Mr. Dyson pulled the TV cart into the classroom and put the game on. That meant she had two hours to draw in her notebook, look out the window without being constantly chastised. There were no stupid history questions and tests, a bunch of facts she didn’t care about any more than she cared about these boys on the screen running around with the ball. She was there, but free in a way. This was the lesson Mr. Dyson taught her. That sports was so important to some men they would ignore the work they had to do, the responsibilities, the usual social codes. Later, she would understand the football fanaticism of her husband and two sons because of Mr. Dyson. She would look forward to the NFL season because of Mr. Dyson. Some women saw it as locked-in obligations, cult rituals, occupied weekends. She knew it meant liberation for a while, from the week, from the obligations, from the tyranny of whatever was expected. She didn’t like Mr. Dyson, and he didn’t like her, if he even knew who she was. There was nothing either of them did that interested the other, and she was happy to get a B and not draw any attention to her. But, as her classmates started screaming because the game was over and one team had beaten the other, she knew that Mr. Dyson was teaching her about human behavior in ways that no other teacher was.

JOSEPH MILLS has published Bleachers: 54 Linked Fictions and several collections of poetry with Press 53, most recently Bodies in Motion: Poems About Dance. Mills is a faculty member at the University of North Carolina.