A lot of little shows played out among the eighty or ninety people in the congregation every week. There were nose pickers, and throat scratchers, and nail biters, and ear diggers—and all of them wanted you to shake their nasty hands after service. Mom thought I was OCD the way I hit up that little bottle of Purell in her purse some Sundays. Mostly, it was funny to me. Seeing what I wasn’t supposed to see, and knowing what I wasn’t supposed to know.

“We praise you, Lord! We love you, Lord! We need you, Lord!” Newsome, barely taking breaths, kept at it. No sign of slowing down.

I couldn’t resist another peek, and was right back to eyeballing Kiera and her family. The way I was with her, you’d have thought she was a new girl. A transplant from some big city, here to shake up the status quo. Someone from another world. Like the movies. Naw, though. We were born in the same hospital, right here in Green Creek, Virginia.

I’d known her since kindergarten. Had a thing for her since kindergarten, when I was her leading man in the class production of The Wizard of Oz.

(I mean, she was Dorothy, and I was the Cowardly Lion, so there were three leading men if you weren’t counting the kid who played Toto—and I wasn’t; dude didn’t have any lines. Regardless, me and Kiera had obvious chemistry.)

So, what happened? A smooth brother like myself must’ve made a move sometime in the last decade, right. Right?

No. Because Kiera Westing had never been single. Nev. Er.

Actually, there was a brief window from kindergarten to almost the end of elementary school, but—I can admit this—I was more cowardly than lion during those years, and didn’t know we were working a deadline.

On Valentine’s Day during fourth grade, Devin Thompson hit her with some sick game. A homemade, purple “Do you like me? Yes/No/Maybe So” card. She circled yes, and they were like engaged all the way to sixth grade, where they realized they were different people with different dreams. By the time I heard about the breakup, later that afternoon, she was with Corey Thurgood, who wooed her with some lackluster trumpet play.

If she’d watched him drain his spit valves—think waterslide—something I witnessed during my brief stint as a band xylophonist, she probably wouldn’t have found it all that sexy. Neither here nor there. Corey was her boyfriend all the way to the summer before freshman year, when Corey’s mom got a job with some company in Chicago and his family moved, leaving Kiera heartbroken.

My family was doing the vacation thing down at Disney World in Florida, so the heartbroken part I got from a Qwan text. Girls, gossip, and b-ball, in that order, were life for him.

Qwan: Dude! K. Westing is a free agent. Get your game right.

Me: I’ll be back in 3 days.

Qwan: I suggest you start running now.

Three days later, in the airport waiting to board our flight to Virginia, an alternating soundtrack of J. Cole and Kendrick thumping in my headphones, I got the last text on the matter.