“What about it?” asked the coach. He knew where Riggins was going but wasn’t going to let him get away without actually asking the question.

“I mean, what if I’m in there, and I’m feeling . . . what’s the word . . . objectified?”

I took it upon myself to answer his question. “Don’t worry, Riggins,” I said. “I’ve seen the object you’re talking about. Trust me, you don’t have to worry.”

That got a round of snickers and razzes.

“Yeah, yeah, very funny,” Riggins said.

And that was that. The coach had set the ground rules, and the team would live by them. I think they were actually relieved.

Practice that day was the same as always, and then in the locker room nobody bothered me. You’ll find this funny, but this new wrinkle in my life took up so much headspace that the bigger issue—the world-shifting one—had been pushed to my mind’s back burner. I’d noticed that once I acclimated to a new reality, it became dominant. As if all of the other worlds were receding toward some mental horizon—and the further away a world got, the less real it seemed. There were times that I had to remind myself how many worlds away from home I actually was.

While I don’t want to dwell on my grand out-fest any more than I already have, I think it’s worth noting how things went that night at home. As I’ve said, since becoming rich, family dinners were a rare thing. It was the same that night—there was takeout that we all ate in our own bubbles, on our own schedules. But as I grabbed a plate of food from the kitchen, both Mom and Dad were there, and the lack of conversation, while typical on other days, felt conspicuous today. I couldn’t stand it.

“Isn’t anyone going to say anything?” I asked.

My father turned to me. He didn’t seem angry, or judgmental, like I thought he might be; he just looked tired. “What do you want us to do, Ash?” he said. “Get out Hunter’s guitar and sing ‘Kumbaya’?”

To which I replied, “I . . . I don’t even know what that is.”

He sighed. “Listen,” he said. “This is how things are now, and we’ll all get used to it. We’ll get used to it, and everything will be fine.” Then he asked me if I had read the articles about “other football players like you,” which he had forwarded to me. I’d been avoiding email, so I hadn’t seen them yet, but I told him I’d read them.

“It’s just to show you that you’re in good company,” he said, with actual enthusiasm.

“One thing’s for sure,” my mom said. “With something like this, you find out who your friends are . . . and who you wish weren’t your friends.”