“It’s just—,” I start, but he won’t have it.

“Jesus, Mark. Do you have any idea how lucky you are? Do you have any idea how many other kids would kill to have schools clawing at each other to have you attend. To have even half of the scholarship money some of these places are offering you just to do what you love? To play football? How ungrateful . . .”

He keeps going, but I zone out a little bit. When I think back on how hard and boring I thought the application process was for colleges, I feel like an idiot. But it was the most important thing in my life at the time, trying to remember whether or not I’d sent off all the right transcripts and letters of recommendation. Now I realize there are much, much bigger things to worry about.

Dad keeps lecturing me. He’s normally a really nice guy. Good to us. Always there when I need him. The one thing he doesn’t like, though, is when he feels useless. When things get taken out of his hands or jurisdiction and he gets cut out of the loop. Then he gets cranky and starts to become a real dick at home.

I guess that’s something I must have inherited from him.

CHAPTER FIVE

ALEX DAVIS TEXTS ME AFTER DINNER. HE’S A wide receiver a year younger than me who was part of my close circle at Paradise High. Apparently his parents are out of town for the weekend, and he’s managed to score a whole keg. Everyone we know is going over there. “No open flames lol,” he says. I text Sarah to ask if she wants to go, but she says no, as I expected. Inviting her is just a gesture. Neither of us is really in the mood to party lately. Pick any Friday night in the years before Mogs invaded Paradise, and I would have been out with friends—maybe out with Sarah—partying at someone’s house or in a clearing in the woods that we’d circled our cars around. But now, I just don’t see the point. There’s an alien war that could break out here at any moment. When that happens, I don’t want to be trying to recover from my third keg stand.

My friends—my teammates—bothered me about my newfound lack of social life a lot at first. Then I told Sarah’s friend Emily that I was weirded out about parties ever since my house burned down. That’s not actually true, but Emily’s kind of a gossip, and pretty soon no one was giving me shit about staying home so much. Or at least, most people weren’t.