“You know, I called you because you’re the nicest person I know. I thought who isn’t going to give me shit? Jenny, Jenny won’t. Thanks a lot.”

She gasped, and then she laughed even more. There was no doubt in my mind she was reliving the events of my day in her head and finally enjoying the humor in them—the humor anyone could have when it wasn’t them that had embarrassed themselves in front of the media.

I pulled my phone away from my face and held my finger over the red button, imagining myself hanging up the call.

“Okay, okay. I’m fine now.” She did these weird breathing exercises to calm down before finally getting it together. “Okay, okay.” A weird wheezing noise came out of her nose, but it only lasted a split second. “Okay. So, he didn’t show up? Did they say why?”

Kulti. The entire afternoon had been his fault. All right, that was a lie. It’d been my fault. “No. They said he had some travelling issues or something. That’s why they made Gardner and I do the conference by ourselves.”

Cue my imaginary sob.

“That sounds pretty fishy,” Jenny noted, almost sounding normal. Almost. I could already envision her pinching her nose and holding the phone away from her face as she cracked up. Asshole. “I bet he was eating brunch and looking at ads of himself online.”

“Or looking up old footage and criticizing himself.”

“Counting his collection of watches—“ He’d had a watch endorsement for as long as I could remember.

“He was probably sitting in a hyperbaric chamber reading about himself.”

“That’s a good one,” I laughed, stopping only when the phone clicked twice. A long digit number with fifty-two at the beginning flashed across the display and it only took a second for me to realize who was calling. “Hey, I need to let you go, but I’ll see you at practice on Monday; your best friend is calling.”

Jenny laughed. “Okay, tell him I said hi.”

“I will.”

“Bye, Sal.”

I rolled my eyes and smiled. “See ya. Have a safe trip,” I said, right before clicking over to answer the incoming call.

I didn’t even get a chance to say a word before the male voice on the other line said “Salomé.”

Oh God. He was being serious. It was the way he said it, more choked rather than enunciated, all Salo-meh, instead of his usual “Sal!” that burst out of his mouth like I’d broken something irreplaceable. No one ever called me by my first name, much less my dad. I think the only times he ever had were when he meant business… as in the business of him trying to kick my ass when my mom thought I did something spectacularly dumb and wanted him to do something about it. There was the time I got into a fight during a game when I was fifteen and got thrown out. He never actually went through with any sort of real punishment. His idea of discipline was chores—lots and lots of chores as he secretly praised my jab when my mom wasn’t around.

So when Dad continued by saying, “Is this a dream? Am I dreaming?” I couldn’t help but laugh.

I pulled the covers down and away from my face to speak with him. The first thing I said to him was, “No. You’re just crazy.”

He was crazy. Crazy in love, Mom joked. As a total soccer snob, my dad was like most foreigners—he wasn’t a fan of U.S. soccer if it didn’t have me or my brother in the equation. Or Reiner Kulti, also branded as ‘The King’ by his fans and ‘the Führer’ by those that hated his guts. Dad liked to say he couldn’t help liking him. Kulti was too good, too talented, and he’d played on my dad’s favorite team for most of his career, with the exception of a two-year stint he had with the Chicago Tigers at one point. So there was that, too. The man owned four different types of jerseys: the Mexican national team jersey, each club or team Eric had played for, mine, and Kulti’s. It went without saying he wore Kulti’s way more often than someone with two kids who played professional soccer should, but I didn’t take it too personally.