Kameleon Man. Kim Barry Brunhuber

at about five o’clock and call, “I got gyeme!” Usually everyone eventually lets them have the first game, except other Jamaicans or some of the feistier Haitians, and sometimes there are fights. Most of the Jamaicans know one another and rarely scrap among themselves, except the short, stocky one, who battles everyone.

      Now the Jamaicans have their track pants off, their beepers and cell phones stored in knapsacks or handed to girlfriends on the sidelines, and one of them shouts, “We got five. ’Oos runnin’?”

      “We have four,” Crispen says, counting us off. “Me, Breff, Biggs. Stace, you in?”

      “You need me?”

      “With you we have four.” He turns to the Jamaicans. “We have four. Let’s go four-on-four.”

      The tall one shakes his head. “We got five. We called game. Get one more.”

      Crispen turns to the four Haitians, who are changing on the sidelines by the picnic table. “Yo, we need one. We have four.”

      “We have four. You can run wit’ us.”

      Crispen shakes his head, still chewing his toothpick, and walks back. “What about that guy?” he asks, pointing to a black teenager shooting by himself at the other end.

      The teenager’s black, but different from the rest of us: bushy hair, flat face, purplish lips. A Somalian—a distant cousin of the Africans I see every Sunday morning on the famine relief shows. He’s wearing baggy knee-length shorts, and a wrinkled Chicago Bulls T-shirt that fits him like plastic wrap. It reminds me of the shirt that was always crumpled at the bottom of the lost-and-found box in elementary school, the shirt that never belonged to anyone.

      “The Somalian?” Augustus asks, pronouncing the word Smellian. “ You think he can play?”

      I’ve seen Somalians play soccer before in the park, their black tent-pole legs thumping the ball to and fro with surprising force, while their families sit on brightly coloured blankets and feed pigeons. But I’ve never seen one play ball before.

      “Doesn’t matter,” Crispen says. “He’s here and we need one more. Stace, go ask.”