blast from the baptism by fire past

Standardized test day. After the first 50 minute bubble filling session, students hurry to get out into the sunshine away from the countdown of the ticking clock. They are outside for ten minutes, then twelve – I exit the stale air of the classroom, walked out to the cement courts where the boys are going up and down in sloppy mid-transition mode, looping passes picked off every other possession and the swift shift in momentum back to the other basket. They are untethered and know it, so I am unsurprised when my calls to come back inside fall on intentionally deaf ears. A student breaks away after a long rebound, loping down the court to the nearest basket. I am hot, zipped up in a sweater, impatient for the last basket so we can resume another round of drudgery. It doesn’t seem like April can end soon enough.
Two or three players are closing in on the ballhandler at acute angles, and he jumpstops and gives them a convincing headfake. Abram – 5’3”, longish hair that swings from side to side hiding his eyes – goes up for a block and moves slowly into the ballhandler, who understandably ducks a little into a compact shape to absorb the blow. Abram’s calves are near the other player’s hunched shoulders, until he tumbles over backwards and careens downward, the back of his head leading the way.
The sound, I suppose, is what I wait for. My heart is in my throat – the recognition of what is about to happen surges through me. the instant I see him tip past the fulcrum point, regular as a seesaw, I picture his head meeting the concrete – the downward angle is that severe. At the last possible moment he sticks out a skinny little arm which crumples underneath his weight. The sound arrives, not a crack really, more like the dull liquid impact of something overripe impacting a solid surface. Everything stops and comes back again in a moment: the exclamations of the other players, the cracked, terrified voice of the injured student entangled in his own words. I have been in motion for a bit, probably since before he met the concrete. It’s obvious something is broken, but I hope I will not encounter the slick protrusion of white bone that comes with a compound fracture. The others spread apart like elevator doors when I’m within five yards of the basket, and it’s obvious that the arm is no longer put together as God intended, but as far as I can tell it’s a run-of-the-mill break, which fact does little to assuage the kid experiencing it.
I take him by the right shoulder we fast walk towards the middle school entrance before doing a 90 degree right hand turn towards the high school entrance. A senior I know who’s just become a father courteously opens the door for us, and I yell to the secretary to call Abram’s mom as we move down the long corridor connecting the two schools. He’s sweating and shaking and crying, lathered up with nowhere to hide from the pain, and the 60 yard corridor takes us past classrooms where kids have gathered at the door to see from what origin the curse words and semi-coherent calls for help are coming.
“ow-we, ow-we, ow-weeeeeeeeeeeeee” is what I seem to recall most, though my memory on the matter is not gospel by any means. The docile, mousy nurse meets us in the doorway to her office and has me set the student down in a chair as she rummages for a bandage. She asks me to hold his arm as she wraps an airsplint around it, and it’s clear I have no choice in the matter. The kid has gone to some atavistic, sweat-induced state of rocking and shaking his head from side to side, which makes setting the break that much more difficult. Then I am relieved of duty by a higher up and walk back to the classroom, ready to begin the second stage of the bubble tests, wondering what self-delusive rhetorical trickery I had played on myself when I became convinced that I could enter into this without the slightest idea what I was doing.