Saturday morning, Ellie's family was at the Lake End Sports Complex for Avery's soccer game. Ellie sat on the patchwork picnic blanket by their cooler, which she'd packed full of drinkable apple sauces and cucumber matchsticks for halftime snacks. Buying pre-cut carrot sticks would've made her life easier, but the cucumbers cut into thin slices might further convince the other parents she was unique and clever.

The green field gleamed with morning dew. Across the field stood Lake End's main playground, consisting of a slide, a set of monkey bars, a glider, a small climbing wall, and a tire swing. The Lake End Parent Organization had redone the playground just last year, so the playground equipment's paint still looked bright, barely weather-worn.

Dylan played with Talia on the tire swing, and Ellie hoped they would stay there.

She and Dylan had been walking on eggshells around each other since the previous Wednesday. She'd only told him what he'd needed to hear, and she might have gotten through to him.

Regardless, she really didn't want him to be at the soccer game, despite encouraging him to come in her oh-so-cordial tone. "You should really come," she'd told him that morning, sipping her coffee in haste, thinking the opposite in her head. "Your dad is a great coach. You should see him in action." Why had she done that? Hadn't she already learned that being in public with Dylan was a bad idea?

Was Clay a great coach? She wouldn't know. She didn't actually watch the practices or games, except when she watched them through her smartphone's camera screen, attempting to get a shot of Avery scoring a goal. She found soccer boring as fuck, and half the kids on the team would rather pick blades of grass or look up at the clouds in the sky—not exactly gripping entertainment. Although Avery understood the rules and managed to score many of the team's goals, Ellie still found herself not caring enough to pay attention, and it made her feel like a terrible mother. But that feeling, unfortunately, didn't prompt her to suddenly find kindergarten soccer interesting.

The most entertaining thing on the field was Trina, who looked like she felt far too self-important for a kindergarten coach. Running around with her huge breasts bouncing up and down, her rose gold whistle around her neck and her expensive-but-practical workout attire glimmering. Making expressions with subtle lust-filled hints at Clay, thinking Ellie didn't notice.

Ellie felt nearly positive they'd started sleeping together.

As she watched Trina give Clay what looked like a coach's pep talk before patting him on the shoulder, letting her fingers linger there for a moment, Ellie tried to feel something. Something that might indicate that her marriage meant more to her than she currently felt. Something like jealousy, rage.

But she felt nothing.

That wasn't quite true. She felt a sick pleasure at knowing she knew and knowing they believed her ignorant. It was a kind of pleasure that made her want to rub her hands together in deviance, like some sort of supervillain out of a story, because she was an orchestrator in this as much as they were, only she was invisible to them, a wizard behind a curtain. She hadn't known  if Trina would actually go for the bait; she'd felt certain Trina lusted after Clay, but she didn't know lust would be enough to propel her into an extramarital affair. 

Clearly, the bait had been too alluring for Trina to pass up; and clearly, Trina wasn't as perfect as she pretended to be. Ellie had guessed at one of that supermom's flaws, and she'd guessed right.

Ellie stopped observing Trina so closely, not wanting her, or Clay, to think she suspected anything.

But the sounds of Trina's voice still dominated all other sounds as she told the kids to gather and get ready, herding them efficiently in spite of their sheepish confusion. Trina was fierce, and Ellie admired that. Clay had good taste. Too bad Trina's attraction to Clay wasn't reinvigorating Ellie's own attraction, like Ellie had once thought it might. Maybe it was because she knew that, sooner or later, Trina would grow bored, like she had.

On the picnic blanket next to her, Ellie felt a disturbance. Dylan had sat down. "Where's Talia?" she asked him, her voice a little too sharp even for her own liking, and he nodded towards the playground.

"Don't worry," he told her, annoyed. "I'm keeping an eye on her." He sounded like he meant to avert her disapproval.

But he'd misread the situation, because Ellie didn't disapprove of him letting Talia play by herself. Mountain Springs was a safe town where a lot of parents did that.

She just didn't want him to be next to her. Because that meant she was going to have to introduce him to her friends, specifically to Lana and Melanie, whose children were on the soccer team.

But Lana and Melanie would meet Dylan sooner or later. It couldn't be avoided, and it probably didn't make a difference if it happened here or somewhere else.

Still, Ellie felt so anxious, so small and weak and shaky. For a moment, she felt slightly nauseous; but she would not feel nauseous, not now, because nausea meant puking. She might have heard whisperings of some third-grade puking episodes earlier in the week, but she would deny their existence.

Part of her wanted to get away from Dylan, like he embodied everything she'd run away from when she left Arizona. Which was ridiculous, she knew, but no amount of rational thinking could rid her of the feeling. She'd run away from those people who would see her and whisper, not from Dylan.

She spotted Lana and Melanie out of the corner of her eye. "Dylan," she whispered. "I didn't meet you until after I met your dad. Okay?"

This move seemed very risky. She'd meant to brief Dylan on the lie she'd been feeding her friends before he met them, but their argument on Wednesday had pushed that task to the back of her to-do list, and she knew he wouldn't understand, anyway.

It hadn't started out as a lie. Ever since she'd moved to Mountain Springs, she'd known that sooner or later, someone would ask one of a handful of a dreaded questions, including: how did she and Clay meet? But when she'd finally been confronted with this question, she'd been caught off-guard, and actually told the truth: "Oh. It's not a cool story. We met at a café." She'd left it at that, omitting the fact that she was a child and with her parents, who felt very excited to finally meet her best friend Dylan. Her dad and his dad hit it off right away, even when Clay let Dylan drink coffee in spite of his mother's protests about caffeine stunting growth. Clay certainly hadn't been sexually attracted to her then; he was many things, but not a pedophile.

That omission had been a lie in and of itself, and afterward, when Lake End parents started requesting Ellie on Facebook, she'd begun to unfriend many of her high school acquaintances and delete all photos that evidenced her wild-child life before Avery, changing her permissions so no one could ever tag her in a post without her approval. The task hadn't been pleasant, akin to deleting a part of her life.

Nobody here in Mountain Springs knew that part of her life existed, and she wanted it to stay that way. She didn't want Lana or Melanie to know that she and Dylan had been friends since second grade, because that made it all too easy for them to come to other realizations and imaginings, some that would undoubtedly be worse than the truth, some that would prevent her and Clay from staying members of Good Parents.

Dylan looked at her in disbelief. "Are you serious?" She looked at him pleadingly, seeing Lana's and Melanie's silhouetted forms getting closer.

He stared at her, face frozen, until Lana asked from above them, "Who's this?" failing to hide her intrigue.

Resuming her usual everything-is-great smile, Ellie looked up at Lana from the blanket. "This is Clay's son, Dylan."

"Your stepson?" Lana asked.

Ellie would never consider Dylan her stepson, but she nodded stiffly for the sake of technicality.

Dylan stood up politely, putting out his tattooed arm and smiling. "Pleasure. And you are?"

"Lana," said Lana, followed by Melanie, "Melanie."

"Nice to meet you both," he said.

Ellie stayed on the ground, watching Lana and Melanie from her sitting position; they studied Dylan with a little too much interest, just as Trina had done on the day she'd first met him. 

"You two looked pretty cozy on that picnic blanket," Lana said, looking at Ellie, who still hadn't stood up.

"My stepmom and I?" Dylan said. "We sure were." Ellie heard an edge to his voice she didn't like, and she felt the nausea creeping into her stomach again, and wished for anything to make Dylan go away. "Oh sh-crap," he said, right at that moment, looking off into the distance. "Excuse me, ladies; my daughter just fell off the slide."

Worried, Ellie wondered if she'd just inadvertently used mind powers to cause harm to Talia, but when she looked off into the distance, Talia looked fine. She'd already started playing again. She'd probably jumped off the slide purposefully, pretending to be a superhero or something. Dylan had probably just wanted an excuse to leave.

Ellie's head turned upwards towards Lana and Melanie again, who both watched Dylan intently as he ran the distance to the playground. She followed their gazes, realizing Dylan must have been aware of the eyes on him, because he maintained a better-than-good posture and ran quickly in spite of the fact that he was a smoker getting used to Mountain Springs' elevation. When he got to the playground, he swooped down to pick up Talia, hugging her and kissing the side of her head.

"That's his daughter?" Lana asked, she and Melanie sitting down to join Ellie on the picnic blanket.

Ellie nodded, thankful Lana hadn't spelled out her technical relationship to Talia.

"Where's her mother?"

"She doesn't have one."

"Dead?"

"Absent."

"How could a mother ever abandon her children?" Lana said in disgust.

"How sad," said Melanie. "I have so much respect for single fathers."

"Mmhmm," Lana nodded in agreement.

Oh, the humor and the hypocrisy: the two of them seemed to have absolutely no respect for Leah, even though Leah was a single mother, yet they had instant respect for Dylan. 

But Ellie didn't respect Leah either. It felt easy not to respect her, especially when her son punched other children and abused animals.

Ellie tried to watch the game then, but Lana continued to look toward the playground, so she found her own gaze wandering back there, too, to where Dylan hung from the glider, propelling himself across for Talia's amusement. 

"He's pretty edgy, isn't he?" Lana said.

"Is he visiting for the weekend?" Melanie asked.

"He is going to be living with us for a while," Ellie answered with a grin she tried to make look forced, an expression to indicate her displeasure. It felt like she should show displeasure, like any hint of pleasure might lead to assumptions about her and Dylan, assumptions she didn't want her new friends making. 

They both dropped their mouths, wide-eyed. Finally, Melanie spoke. "Well that's going to be a full house. I guess it's better than in-laws."

"I don't know how you'll manage," Lana said.

"Oh, it won't be that bad."

"That's not what I'm saying," said Lana, her tone mischievous. "I just mean I don't know how you'll manage to keep your hands off of him, and vice versa. You must be around the same age, right?"

Ellie didn't even know what to say. She'd wanted to avoid assumptions, yet assumptions were already being made.

The situation was almost laughable. Why? Because Lana was breaking a rule. Adult women in Mountain Springs didn't talk about sex. They would probably start talking about it once their children started having it, but they didn't talk about the sex they personally engaged in. Ellie assumed the husbands did, but the wives seemed to silently agree that sex wasn't a polite topic for them, that the topic needed to be kept private. Or at least that's what Ellie thought might be the bullshit philosophy behind the rule by which all the women seemed to abide.

Lana was not abiding by the rule right then. She had charged forward into even more taboo territory, insinuating things like infidelity and intra-family sexual relations.

Ellie had sometimes wished the mothers there would bring up sex, thinking that maybe it would show her they were real people.

She'd used to think real people were the people she grew up with, went to school with. She still talked to one of those girls—Michelle—on the phone, and they talked about sex. Ellie knew all about Michelle's most recent one-night stands, and Michelle knew Ellie's sex drive had gone from hyperactive to non-existent, because Ellie could be real with Michelle.

But not really. Casual sex and drugs and waitressing woes were all Michelle wanted to talk about. She didn't want to talk about the other aspects of life Ellie found very real, like marriage and children and healthy living. Michelle was no more real than the Lake End mothers; her reality just existed far away from theirs. And Ellie's reality existed somewhere in the middle, somewhere she had no one she felt comfortable talking to about everything in her life. Maybe Dylan could be that person, but she couldn't talk to Dylan about her relationship with his dad. That was strange territory, and it seemed like they had an unspoken agreement to leave it unexplored.

Even though Lana and Ellie had grown quite close, Ellie would never admit to Lana that her libido had pruned up. If she revealed that, the gossiping point of the Lake End moms might go from Trigger's violence to her lack of sex drive. Lana didn't exactly seem trustworthy.

Ellie wouldn't express any sort of interest in Dylan; she wouldn't give Lana the seed of such a juicy rumor. She could just imagine Lana saying, Ellie admitted to me that she has a hard time keeping her hands off of her stepson. Can you believe that?

And, truthfully, Ellie wasn't interested in Dylan like that.

When she looked at Dylan, she didn't see her stepson, but she also didn't see someone she desired.

She saw their history. A complicated history, true, but mostly a history of friendship that would be tarnished even more by any level of sexual entanglement between them.

She saw something that could have been, maybe, but that wouldn't ever be, not now. 

Melanie hit Lana right then. "That's her stepson you're talking about."

Stiff and unsmiling, Ellie told Lana, "I think I'll manage just fine." She could tell Lana felt like she'd crossed a line. The moment made Ellie swell inside, because she realized she'd earned the right to do that: to show other adults, who were much further into adulthood than she was, that they'd crossed lines. It felt empowering, like she and the other adults were on the same level despite their age differences. The silence that began then probably felt uncomfortable, but not for Ellie—she relished in Lana's discomfort.

Breaking the silence, Melania told Ellie, "There is something I need to tell you. I saw him—your stepson—the other day at pickup. He was talking to that girl. You know: the my violent kid needs free lunches but I can still afford cigarettes mom. You should warn him about her."

Great. Ellie thought she'd uprooted this seed before it started growing, but apparently not. Now, she had to worry about another potential gossiping point.

She told Melanie, "I'll talk to him," omitting the fact that it was  too late: Dylan knew about Leah, knew about her son's violence, and he might not even care.

That was the third reason Ellie didn't see Dylan like that. She saw him as someone who had the means to do better but wouldn't. Someone who had heart but lacked ambition. A good guy who would never be great. Maybe that was Ellie's lack of sex drive talking. Maybe the power she wielded now that she wasn't driven by desire allowed her to see people objectively, for who they really were. 

She saw Dylan as someone who had no ambition to surpass the lower-middle class, because he saw himself as someone who deserved women like Katie and Leah, women who were stuck in harmful cycles because they didn't have the means to change: the money, the education, the supporters prompting growth. Those were the women Ellie should feel sorry for, but she didn't, because it was easier not to, if she didn't think too hard about it. Life was too short to be anything but selfish. 

She wished Dylan would adopt this view, that he would acquire some ambition. He had access to the means for change. And now he was here in Mountain Springs to change his life, and he was trying to get with Leah. Ellie wanted to tell him there was a word for that: counterproductive.

All these thoughts made Ellie's brief gladness fade, and her anxiety returned, nausea included. Ellie looked at the cooler, remembered the cucumber sticks, and thought about cucumber puke.