When he burnt Frontal’s letter in front of her—a love offering? An act of abandon?—he was momentarily incinerating his reality, to float away and pretend no other shit was happening. Or had ever happened. That’s what Saturday night had been: beautiful, magical, mutual amnesia. But then came the memory hangover. And as he approached Kelly on the boundary of the cricket field, another wave of remembering broke over him. Lost amid everything else going on, he had overlooked the one person in this entire fiasco whose welfare was paramount.

As he came off the cricket field, Ben was confused. This morning, his parents had been competing to offer him driving time after practice. First his dad had suggested he would take Ben for a full hour and a half. Then Mum, one-upping and pathetic, had said she was dying to spend time with him. The divorce dividend, yeah, right. And now it looked like they wouldn’t have time to take him driving after all. They were heading back to The Lodge, both of them cloudy in the face after Mum had been in a heavy-looking conversation with Ms Oxenford. His dad drove and his mum rode in the passenger seat of the Car With No Name. Just like old times, their little family of three, nobody talking to anybody else.

‘Am I in trouble?’

Bad sign: neither of his parents answered.

When they got home, Uncle Carl was lying on the couch, speaking aloud and jotting in his poetry chapbook, acting like he owned the place.

He did own the place.

At the card table, reading about himself in the paper while pretending to listen to Carl, sat Daniel.

Ben’s mum stepped forward and placed on the card table, between the peanut bowl and a glass of water, a white pill bottle with an apricot-coloured lid.

‘Wait, what?’

Ben wasn’t confused anymore.

Uncle Carl was rabbiting on about surrealist literature, dropping names—Cervantes, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Dali—that used to suggest an encyclopaedic knowledge but now came across to Ben as just the same ones over and over.

He wished he’d figured Uncle Carl out before.

Kelly said, ‘Okay, enough three-unit English,’ and Carl fell silent, chewing the insides of his cheeks.

The awkwardness making him itchy under his armpits, Ben said, ‘I’m in trouble.’

Everyone looked at the Vyvanse bottle as if its time to speak had come. Kelly had taken one of the pink-and-white capsules out of the bottle and broken it open, fanning out its fine white powder on the card table like a burlesque dancer. Carl couldn’t take his eyes off it.

‘Darling,’ Kelly said, ‘you want Daniel to play in your cricket final, don’t you?’

‘Wait, what?’

‘And you know why he’s not playing.’

‘Um, because he was suspended after the …’

‘Time to come clean,’ Daniel interrupted.