The Catch Before the Catch

Soren missed the throw on purpose, just to see what would happen.

Maya's hand was already there. The ball smacked into her palm before she looked like she had decided anything.

"You weren't even watching," Soren said.

"I was watching you." She tossed it back. "You threw it weird. Your arm gave it away."

"My arm gave away nothing. I tried to throw it bad."

"And your shoulder dropped before you let go. So I leaned." Maya frowned at her own hand, turning it over like it belonged to someone else. "But I didn't, like, think lean. I was already leaning when I noticed I was leaning."

Soren stopped. He liked that sentence. He did not understand that sentence.

"Say that again."

"I caught it before I knew I was going to catch it." She threw the ball straight up and caught it without looking. "There. Did you see me decide?"

"No."

"Neither did I."

The yard was going blue the way it does right before the streetlights buzz on. Soren picked at the seam of the ball.

"Okay," he said. "Test. Close your eyes. I'll throw, and I won't tell you when."

"I can't catch with my eyes closed."

"That's the point. I want to know how much of catching is the eyes and how much is the part of you that already leaned."

Maya closed her eyes. Soren waited, then lobbed it gently at her shoulder. It bounced off and rolled into the grass.

"Nothing," she said.

"Now keep them open but I'll throw fast."

He snapped it hard, low, to her left. Her body twisted, glove-hand down, and the ball was in her fingers. Then her face caught up. The surprise arrived a full second after the catch, like applause after the song is already over.

"Whoa," she said.

"Your face just did that after. The catch happened, then your face went whoa."

"Because the catch was already done." Maya sat down in the grass. "Soren. The part of me that catches is faster than the part of me that knows."

Soren sat too. He pulled out the notebook from his back pocket and drew two boxes, a big one and a small one, with an arrow from big to small.

"Try this," he said. "How many things did you just notice when I threw? Out loud. All of them."

"The ball was low and left."

"Keep going."

"It was spinning, so it would curve. Your foot stepped, so I knew which way before your hand. The grass behind it so I could see the white. The wind, a little. The light's getting bad so the white mattered more." She stopped. "That's a lot. I didn't say any of that to myself. I just caught it."

"You couldn't have said it to yourself. There wasn't time." Soren tapped the small box. "This is the part that talks. The part that goes whoa. It's slow. It does, like, one thing at a time."

"And the big box did all the rest of it. The spin and the foot and the wind and the white. At once."

"Without telling you."

Maya lay back in the grass and looked up. The first stars were "How much is it doing right now," she said. "That I don't know about."

"Everything," Soren said. "That's the scary part. You're breathing. You didn't decide that. Your eyes just did a jump, a little flick, you didn't feel it. You're hearing the cricket and not the other cricket because the big box picked."

"I didn't pick the cricket."

"It picked the cricket for you. And it picked it before you'd have had time to."

Maya was quiet. Then: "So the me that talks. The whoa me. That's not the one running things."

"It's the one that finds out," Soren said. "After."

He looked at his two boxes. The little one looked very little now. He drew more arrows into the big box, so many they crowded the edge of the page, a snarl of them, all the noticing she had not noticed.

"My grandpa says think before you act," Maya said. "But the catch already happened. There's no before. The acting is the thinking. The fast thinking. The thinking I can't hear."

"Throw me one," Soren said suddenly. "Hard. I want to feel it."

She sat up and fired it at his chest before he was ready, and his arms came up and trapped it against him, and then, exactly like hers had, his face did the whoa, late, surprised at his own hands.

"I felt it," he said. "My arms knew. I found out from my arms."

"You found out from your arms," Maya repeated, and started laughing, because it was the strangest true thing she had heard all year. "Soren. We walk around all day thinking we're the one driving. And we're the one in the back seat. Finding out."

"Reading the report," Soren said. "After the big box already did it."

"How many things a day, do you think."

"More than you could ever count. Way more than you'd ever hear about."

The streetlight buzzed on. In the new orange light the ball was easy to see, and Maya looked at it sitting in Soren's arms, the thing his body had caught while the rest of him was still arriving.

"Throw it back," she said. "I want to not decide again."

Soren stood up. He didn't say when. He just threw, off the wrong foot, no warning, into the dark at the edge of the yard where the light didn't reach.

Maya's hand went out into the dark and closed.

Then, a half second later, she felt the ball already in it.