My calves screamed as I shot to the top, pumping my arms like the finish line had bottomless root beer floats.

After ten reps of the 100-meter or so hill, I jogged down and crouched on the crunchy grass, dizziness pumping through my veins. My dad frowned at his stopwatch.

“How am I doing, coach?”

“’Bout as well as any other nerd. Averaging twenty seconds. Next ten, I need you to beat that.”

“That’s a mile and a half of sprinting,” my chest heaved with each gulp of air, “and we didn’t warm up.”

“That was your warm-up,” he said.

“Gee, thanks.”

“Ready? Set . . .”

As the blood pounded in my ears, the hill seemed to laugh at what was to come.

My dad loved to call us nerds during practice. Carter had invented our unofficial name, Lords of the First-Strings. (The other options were Dribblers of Catan and Star Scores.)

“Pick your knees up!” he shouted as the top of the hill neared. “You’re running like your mom.”

My teeth clenched. If my mom knew he said things like that, he wouldn’t have a throat left to say them with, but I couldn’t exactly defend her honor when my delicate butt was being kicked into pristine shape.

After my next mile of sprinting, Coach Dad threw a soccer ball into the mix, running me for another hour. When he finally escorted me back home, I trudged up the stairs, in need of either an ice bath or fifteen hours of sleep.

Despite my moans and groans, and making my dad into the bad guy, the running had felt good. For the first time all week, thinking about the Clarkebridge tryout didn’t make me want to throw up and immediately change the subject.

About time.

RULE NUMBER 6

A bro shalt not swim in ‘street clothing.’ It’s too restrictive and you look ridiculous.

The next few weeks were a repetitive yet stressful whirl of extra practices with my dad, looking at my textbooks and then doing anything I could to procrastinate studying, cleaning more whiteboards in detention, hanging out with stupid Josh in my electives, and trying to ignore the fact that he was still going out with Eliza.

Austin, Carter, and I could hardly keep up with how quickly senior year seemed to be flying. Luckily, one evening in the second half of September, the party we’d been hyping up like it was to celebrate the end of the world finally arrived.

And it would change everything.

I drove to Jamal’s party wearing an old shirt and jeans. It was Saturday night, and the last official summer night before fall and darkness and gross cold. The rusty orange sunset gleamed above my steering wheel like magic. The evening had my absolute, full permission to go wherever it wanted.

Austin sat shotgun in my Mustang and our pump-up playlist blasted. The two of us had put it together when we were fifteen, and we played it on the way to every party, sports game, and general awesomeness we attended. It had become a sort of, you guessed it, tradition.