I don’t know what gets into me. I didn’t tell him a lie. I’m being honest. I try not to think about hypotheticals, and I try hard as hell not to think about hypotheticals when it comes to him. I told myself I wouldn’t fall back into his fabricated niceties, that I’d built myself up part by part, and yet there’s something in the way he almost sounds timid that forces me to crack.

‘I gotta take care of chores at home,’ I tell him, keeping my tone as even as possible. Give away nothing. ‘My mom’s got dance classes till seven. You’ll have to give it till the evening here if you want a word.’

‘I’m willing,’ he says far too quickly. ‘Where?’

‘Moonie’s.’ I toss my crosse from my right hand to my left and sling the bag of balls over my shoulder. ‘Eight.’

My truck rattles over dirt roads as I pull it into the driveway in front of our house, smack in the middle of the ranch. I spot my dad out back, fixing up a fence. Mumma’s probably in the barn with her five p.m. dance class chock-full of middle-aged South Asian women from as far as five counties out. I yawn, clamber out of the truck with my gear on my back, and lumber up the porch, nudging past the screen door with a forceful elbow.

There are houses back in Prosperity where Riders banners hang out on the front porch, bearing the logo with the two crossed sticks beneath the skull, old tornado cellars that have been multipurposed into lacrosse-theme man-caves, but our lacrosse flavour is a little less in-your-face. As I thunder into the house, I tap the first sport-adjacent relic you see when you enter: the framed photo of my first game, hanging on the wall in its wooden frame. It was taken way back when we would drive what should have been an easy fifteen minutes to Oklahoma City. Thanks to inner-city traffic, we ended up braving a thirty-to-forty-minute trip several times a week so I could play on a U8 girls’ team. I remember my mom had finally accepted defeat when I chose lacrosse over dance (a decision that was for the best, though, because frankly, I was, like my father, the definition of impatience).

I round the cramped hall to climb the narrow staircase up to my room. I’d love to collapse in my bed, but I’m still knee-deep in chores and have Instrumentation homework for days. I chuck my gear and backpack into a corner next to my desk and flop into my chair. It’s usually no difficult task to snap into work mode, at least not for me, but today, after the way I just let CJ Bradley back into my life like nothing he caused me in junior year had ever happened, focus isn’t in the cards.