“If you ask me, she’d be better off with anyone else,” I told Angela. “Hell, she’d even be better off with Norris.”

Angela laughed at that. Katie with Norris would be a local production of Beauty and the Beast. Except at the end, the beast just transforms into a turd.

Angela tapped her fingertips against her lips—as if what she was thinking had just come to mind—which clearly it hadn’t. “If anybody would be better . . . how about you?” she suggested.

The last thing I needed at the moment was Angela playing matchmaker. “That,” I said, “would not help the situation.”

“Well at the very least, you should have a talk with Layton.”

“And say what?” I glanced over to the table where Katie sat with Layton and a few of their friends, who were couples. They seemed happy enough. “Seemed” was the operative word here. Layton himself was never actually happy. In his world, there was always something to find fault with.

“We’ll watch,” I suggested. “We’ll keep an eye on the situation.”

But Angela wasn’t too happy with that approach. “Why is it that guys just want to sit around and watch until something awful happens?”

She stormed off before I could have any sort of comeback. I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t like that. That sometimes you have to see where things are going in order to plan an effective strategy. That making vague accusations against our star quarterback could backfire—because there were way too many people who believed he could do no wrong. It would be different if Katie broke up with him. I would totally stand behind her—even in front of her—to protect her. But that wasn’t the train she was currently on. She, like the rest of our school, was on the Layton Vandenboom Express, and it wasn’t slowing down enough for her to get off.

Leo and I spoke after practice that night, for the first time since the revelation about me and his sister. Technically, it was only a revelation for me, because Leo already knew. But now I knew he knew, which was awkward. I longed for the time when nobody knew anything.

We talked sports first to break the ice. Leo reminded me that tomorrow’s game was an away game, and how the other team’s field had lousy turf. Slippery and hard on the bones.

“You know we’re okay, right?” he finally said.

“You’re sure?”

That annoyed him. “What is it with you, that you need constant reassurance now?”

“Because if it was the other way around, I might not be okay with it.”

“See, Ash, that’s the difference between you and me,” he said. “Me, I’m all magnanimous and shit, because I see the big picture. But you can’t see much of anything because you got your head up your ass.”