“Do what?” Jason asked.

“You know, become a deep-sea diver and rescue the tefillin.”

Jason, apparently cured of his melancholy, rolled his bright blue eyes almost to the back of his head as he stood up and took her hand. “Stop being cheesy,” he told her. “Let’s go watch the seal show again.”

In the back of the crowd for the seal show, she found her chance to kiss him.

WHEN THE school year started again, Leora and Jason went their separate ways: she to the college newspaper office, and he to the soccer field. Leora had joined the newspaper staff on her parents’ advice—her parents, of course, were always checking on her progress, monitoring her to make certain she was normal, which she wasn’t—and she had found it suited her. She liked the rhythm of it, the busyness of it, the requirement to fill space with news when there wasn’t always news to fill it with. At one point a few years earlier, when Leora was still only rarely talking, her mother would often try prodding her to talk. When Leora insisted she had nothing to say, her mother would answer, “That doesn’t seem to stop anybody else.” At the newspaper, Leora was assigned something to say each day, thus obviating the need to say anything that she really meant. It was a pleasant arrangement, in Leora’s eyes. And it worked outside of the newspaper too. When people asked her what she did at school, the newspaper gave her something to say, something to be, without having to think about who she was. She worked at the newspaper.

Soccer might easily have been to Jason what the newspaper was to Leora—a label, whether a real one or not. But since Jason was a normal, ordinary person, he actually believed in it, mistaking the label for himself. During the season, he spent so many hours of each day on the field that he could scarcely imagine himself otherwise. And other people believed in the label too, reinforcing it, encouraging it. If someone mentioned his name on campus, it was almost always followed by the words “You know Jason—that tall guy on the soccer team?” Soccer was who he was. But all of that ended in September of Leora and Jason’s senior year, when Jason got his foot caught in an unnoticed animal hole on the field while pivoting for a pass, tore a ligament, and fractured three different bones in his foot and leg. Jason’s college soccer career was over. And so was Jason as everyone knew him, including Jason himself.

At first Jason pretended that nothing had happened, or at least nothing of consequence. He still limped his way over to the soccer field on most days to meet the team after practice. On most nights, he also still went to dinner with his teammates, bringing Leora along with him, and Leora noticed that he seemed almost energized by their little jokes about his leg, how they would pat him on the back and call him “Stump.”