Brent doesn’t answer right away and I can feel his gears shifting. Then he leans in to me, voice hushed. “I’m beginning to think you’re right about Optimal. Not about the waste. But there’s something funny going on in accounting. Now, this has to be confidential…”

“Of course,” I say.

“Optimal has been thinking of going public. It might be important. I’m trusting you.”

“Thank you,” I say, and mean it.

If Optimal is going public, why risk violating compliance laws, why risk investigation and censure? There must be something bigger at stake. More and more, I’m convinced that Optimal’s been using its power and connections to bully, silence, and sway—and to keep everyone who might investigate them looking the other way.

The thunderous noise of cheering and stamping shakes the stadium and sends a vibration all the way to my chest: it’s the end of another school year, the start of a long, brown summer. Brent turns and kisses me without warning. Today his lips are warm, and his chest is warm, and he smells like soap and grass shavings: a clean, hopeful smell. I try to find my way down into some good feeling, but the crowd is too loud.

—

After the game I lose ten minutes with Brent making an excuse for why I can’t go out for a drink. He kisses me again, but this time he lands it right on the corner of my mouth, as if he wants me to think it might have been an accident. By then, the players have disappeared and there’s a chokehold of cars funneling out of the lot.

I backtrack to the gym, hanging back near a picnic table scored with decades’ worth of carved-in graffiti. The kids are in no hurry to get home: dozens of them circulate in packs, like wild animals, visible only by the flash and wink of their phone screens in the dark. A group of girls hunker down in the grass not far from where I’m sitting, and a group of guys doesn’t leave them alone too long before arriving to spark up a joint and start passing around a water bottle that must be full of something else. Eventually, the stream of traffic onto County Route 12 slows to a dribble and the parking lot clears out. But the kids remain, disrupting the quiet with a Morse code of teenage shouting and laughter.

The football players, now showered and changed and carrying duffel bags, emerge from the locker room in pairs. But Monty comes out alone. I have to shout his name three or four times before he looks up, already scowling, as if he’s still on the field and expecting to take a blow.

But then his face clears and splits into the exact same smile I remember from when he was a kid.

“Hey, Abby,” he says, shyly, which is just how he used to greet me as a kid. As if all these years, he’s just been waiting for me to show up.