Her face falls. “I’m sorry. I was cheering for you. I wish I could’ve done a whole run for you. Watching you was really incredible.”

“You can make up for it now.” I cross my arms over my chest and watch her gaze follow. I have absolutely no boobs to speak of, which means my biceps might be proving to be good for something other than throwing fifteen-yard passes. “It’s never too late for a personal cheer.”

She waggles her eyebrows. “You may be testing me, QB1, but I always rise to a cheer challenge.” Her eyes dart to the bedroom door, which is wide open.

“They’re out celebrating me,” I confirm. “My mom and I moved here by ourselves while my dad stayed back with my brothers, so it’s usually just me and her, but he came out tonight to see my first game.”

“You didn’t want to go with them?” she asks. “Or … were you not invited? Don’t worry,” she says quickly. “I can empathize with the latter. My dad sucks.”

“No, no, I sent them off on their own. I didn’t feel like going out.” I don’t wanna get all sad sack about it, but from the way Amber nods, she gets it. “Anyway, thought they should have a nice date or whatever, since they haven’t seen each other all week. But I’m sorry your dad sucks. How sucky are we talking? I’ll come with you to egg his house right the fuck now, if you want.”

She laughs, lifting all the tiny hairs on my arms. “He sucks hard enough to deserve that, but his house isn’t close enough to egg, anyway. He was completely obsessed with the Blue Angels as a kid and decided that having a family would hold him back from his dream of flying, so he ditched me and my mom when I was still tiny to join the Air Force. He just left divorce papers on the counter, periodically checked in from around the world, and stopped doing even that when he got remarried. I did see him for my sixteenth birthday, so he could offload his old car onto me as a gift, but now he’s up in North Carolina. Probably not gonna see him again for at least a few years, if that.”

It’s so much more than I expected her to say, and so much shittier than I imagined, which makes it all the more shocking to me that this girl makes the choice to get out of bed every day and cheer. I feel like I should say something monumental, something that acknowledges what she’s trusting me with, but all I can manage is, “Wow, what a dick.”