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“She can’t help herself, she just has to cheer me on—oh, shoot! Brain freeze!” He pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut, as if it was the worst pain he’d been in all day.
    â€œYou drink those things way too fast.” Melissa turned to Dean. “I don’t play sports. I’m not coordinated.”
    â€œMaybe you just haven’t found the right sport.”
    â€œMaybe.” She nudged her brother. “Come on, you said you’d drop me off.”
    â€œYeah, okay. See you Monday, Coach.”
    They waved guilelessly, completely absorbed by the logistics of their evening and the politics of siblinghood. They couldn’t see Nicole’s ghost, and for that, Dean was grateful. Both the best and worst thing about working with kids was that they had almost no ability to imagine life beyond the age of thirty.
    Dean turned on the radio for the ride home, searching for WINQ, the oldies station he and Stephanie used to sing along to together. Once, they had been buddies, best friends. She had tagged along to every game, and sometimes even to practices, doing homework in the stands. She’d been three years old when he met Nicole, the young widow no one wanted to date—or maybe, the young widow everyone wanted to date but was too cautious to approach. Dean had no idea of her previous marriage. And neither did Stephanie. As far as she was concerned, Dean was her new father. He’d never pictured himself marrying a woman who already had a child, but after their first week together, he was already sitting next to her in a church pew, unwilling to be apart from her for any part of the weekend. He’d never fallen for someone so quickly, and it was exhilarating. When he and Nicole broke the happy news to Stephanie, she seemed confused. It took them a while to realize that she thought they were already married. They let her pick the wedding cake, and she chose to have it decorated with pink and purple flowers. She wore a ruffled pink-and-purple dress to match.
    Now Stephanie was a different kind of girl altogether. She didn’t fantasize about wedding cakes and she never wore pink. She had gone to her junior prom wearing a torn slip and aman’s blazer, her date a boy who was not the least bit interested in girls—a fact that unsettled Dean, though he was careful not to say so. Nicole was even more disappointed than he was. Stephanie had started high school on her mother’s path: a cheerleader, a churchgoer, a smiling girl with smiling friends. But she started to change at the end of ninth grade. Nicole noticed before Dean did; it began with her clothes. Stephanie stopped shopping with Nicole at the mall and instead went to thrift stores to find items that no one else had. New clothes led to new friends; that was how it worked with girls, apparently. The new friends weren’t bad—they were smart and polite—but they mystified Dean with their dark clothes, their dark looks, and their dark under-the-breath jokes. What did they have to be depressed about? There had been a war going on when he was in high school. He blamed the culture, the muddy-sounding music. He would watch MTV with Stephanie to try to figure it out. One of the singers mumbled so badly that his lyrics were put up on the screen, like subtitles. This guy wore a dress onstage. When he killed himself, Stephanie wanted to take a day off from school. An absurd request, Dean thought, not even worth acknowledging, but somehow it turned into one of her and Nicole’s bigger fights. Sometimes it seemed as if the two of them could not even breathe the same air. Dean’s policy was impartiality. Nicole thought he was taking Stephanie’s side.
    Dean turned onto Iron Bridge Road, a lane divided into two sections: one old, narrow, and badly paved, and the other new, wide, and smooth as a highway. Dean lived in the old section, where the road’s namesake, a