At dinner, football dominates the conversation. Aaron plays running back for the junior varsity football team, and in ancient times Scot was Colchis High’s star quarterback. Even now, he makes sure he never misses a game. It used to take me about five minutes to turn these family dinners into a bloodbath, but not now, not in a Colchis Rockets cheerleading sweater with gold earrings. It’s not so bad being neutralized, I find. You do get to eat.

“You’re awfully quiet, Serena,” my mother says when I finish.

“I don’t have too much to say about football,” I tell her, clearing my plate away. “So I’m just listening.”

“Do you understand the game?” she asks.

“No, but it doesn’t matter. Rack says she’ll watch the game and tell us what cheers to do.”

“Why don’t you ask Scot?” Mom suggests.

I’m dubious. “Ask him … what?”

Scot brightens up. “Anything.” He spreads his arms and looks around. “What do you want to know?”

I’d just as soon be upstairs starting my homework, since I now have about seven hours of it every night, but they seem to want me to know about football.

“Well,” I tell him, “we could start with what the point is.”

“First of all,” he says, “you have four downs to advance ten yards in a hundred-yard field. If you don’t get it in four downs, you lose possession of the ball.”

Mom beams at us.

“Advance where?” I ask.

“Down the field,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing.

“Oh.”

“With the ball,” he says.

Aaron gets into it. “The ball, Serena,” he prompts, with his mouth full of food. “The football. It’s that round brown thing that’s pointy on both ends. Both teams want it, only one team can get it. Get it?” He is shouting at me, like I’m deaf.

“Yes …” I say doubtfully.

“Each team is trying to get the football, so they can put it into the other team’s end zone,” Aaron explains. “That’s a touchdown.”

“Right. For six points?”

“You didn’t know that?” Scot asks. “Sit down. Football is complicated. It’s not like other games. It’s about relationships, and opportunities, and … dynamics. Sit down. Right there. Get her a piece of cake,” he directs my mother. “Or she won’t stay.” He snaps his fingers at her. “The cake.”

“I never paid attention to football,” I tell them. “I didn’t go to games, and I always got away with skipping out of pep rallies because Mom hates football.”

“I don’t hate football,” Mom objects, cutting me a gigantic slice of cake. “I just think—”

Scot waves away what she thinks and repeats what he said about downs.

“Scot,” Aaron says, “you can’t start with downs when she doesn’t even know what the basic object of the game is.”