Within minutes, Owen’s driveway is empty, and soon he’s racing down his front porch, dressed in a dark button-down shirt and a pair of gray jeans. His hair is wet; he must have raced through a shower. His keys jingle in his hands as he jogs to his truck and climbs inside, his engine roaring and his tires squealing from their rest.

It’s almost two, and my father will be pulling into the driveway any moment. He said he’d be home tonight, and I’m not so sure I want him to see the mess our neighbor left behind. I walk down the stairs to the kitchen and grab a large trash bag, pausing at the back door to gaze out at the shadows cast over my driveway by the bright floodlight. The ground is strewn with trash, piles of lazily crushed beer cans, and cigarette and pot butts. I can’t let my dad see this, and not because I care about Owen Harper getting in trouble, but because I don’t want to hear my father’s lecture about drugs, drinking, being out late—being a real teenager in general.

When I finally push through the back door, I’m too late, though, the headlights are sending new shadows over the drive as my dad pulls in. I’m already standing in the middle of the mess, so I bend down and start putting cans in the bag, my brain working fast at answers for the questions I know will come.

“Kensington?” So very many of our conversations begin with my name. And it’s never Kensi or Kens. It hasn’t been anything less than formal since the day I started playing the piano.

“Hey, how was the show?” I ask, buying myself time.

“Performance. Concert. Not show. This isn’t Broadway,” my dad says.

“Sorry, I meant concert,” I say, careful not to roll my eyes.

“It was good. We’re still having some trouble with the cellos. The replacements aren’t nearly as good,” he says, his voice growing fainter as he paces out into the middle of the mess. I’m done distracting now. “Kensington, what…is this?”

The funny thing is I know my father knows that this mess isn’t my fault. I don’t do anything wrong, and I’ve never been in any real trouble. I’ve been scolded, chastised for dreaming, for playing jazz during a practice session, for skipping a lesson, for not getting a scale just right, but serious trouble—like the kind you get from surmising the state of my driveway—that doesn’t mesh with me, and my father knows this.

“Yeah, well…” I say, looking over at the dark Harper house. “Our new neighbors…they kind of like to party? Well, or…at least one of them does.”

“I see that,” my dad says, kicking one of the crushed cans over into the Harper lawn. “But why am I dealing with the leftovers?”

“I don’t really know. I think it’s the basketball hoop,” I say, looking over my dad’s head at the rusted hoop and rotting wood backboard hung above our garage.

“I see,” my dad says, his hand rubbing the beard on his chin as he steps closer to the front of our garage. “This neighbor…the one that likes the hoop—is it a he?”

“Yeah,” I say, my voice a little hesitant, causing my dad to turn and look at me. “I mean, girls don’t really do this.”

“No…they don’t, do they?” my father responds, turning back to face the hoop. Almost a full minute passes, and I begin cleaning up the mess until I’m distracted by the sound of our garage door opening. My father slides out a ladder, and then goes to a stack of boxes in the back of the garage, searching through three of them before finding what looks like a ratchet set.

He brings the slender toolbox out to the driveway and picks out three or four sizes, then climbs to the top of the ladder, reaching up to loosen the bolts on the basketball hoop.

He’s taking it down. I think I knew he would, and I know deep down that’s why I told him—why I said everything just as I said it. It was all a delicate game of chess that I mastered for this very moment. Only I didn’t expect to feel nervous that Owen would come home suddenly. Worried that we would be caught.

And I certainly didn’t expect to feel regret.

That’s the emotion tripping me up most. Regret—is that even an emotion? Or is it just a result? I’m not sure, but I know my stomach is sick with it as my father finds the perfect fit, his arm pulling one side of the hoop loose from the backboard while he goes to work on the last bolt, the ache in my stomach traveling to my chest when the rusted ring finally falls to the ground. My dad steps from the ladder, folds it back up and puts it in its place along the garage wall. Then he picks up the hoop, carries it to the end of our driveway and throws it on top of the morning’s trash. In the morning, the garbage truck will haul it away forever.