He was not performing for the adults.

He had, I would later understand, long since given up on being chosen, and had decided instead to simply be left alone, which is a decision no sixteen-year-old should have had to make.

I would understand, much later, that his opting-out was not sullenness or despair, though it looked like both.

It was strategy, and it was self-protection, and underneath it was something I had no way of seeing yet — a loyalty so fierce that it had made him stop competing for a family on purpose, because the family he wanted was one he had already lost, and no new one could be allowed to take her place.

But all I saw that afternoon was a boy who had given up on being chosen, and all I felt was a fierce, sudden, irrational need to choose him anyway.