Alex ambled all the way home from the lookout point, thoughts still swirling around the encounter he had with Lev. He'd triumphantly completed his mission which would secure his new friendship, and now he even had his first sleepover to look forward to. He had a lot of renewed excited jitters to keep in check, so he decided he could at least focus all the energy on finally unpacking for now.

He had texted Carsyn of his success moments after he was alone in the grotto, and she had replied: 'seriously lexy! Gotta admit I had doubts tbh, but you're a whole other level of impressiveness! Is that even a word? Whatever. Ok, you're going to tell me everything — tell us everything — but later tho. I've gotta work till later evening, and Eva and Ziro are busy with stuff right now too. We'll meet up later, i'll come get you!'

Alex couldn't deny his disappointment over having to delay his reveling with group, but he was kicking himself to remember not to turn into an anxious mess about it. He had moved across the border, came face-to-face with his year-long penpal, survived trials that felt like they had required more effort than any basketball game he'd ever played — he had done it all. This was happening. Things were changing. They would be different from all the rest. He would be different. And it wasn't all just going to suddenly fall apart.

"Finally, the Prior Pronghorn returns."

Alex grimaced as he shut the front door. "It's been months since I've even touched a basketball. Stop calling me that."

Grayson leaned against the wall of the kitchen door frame, a mug of coffee secured in one hand, the other hand hidden in a pocket of his baggy blue pajama bottoms. "You know I don't call you that because of basketball, I call you that because of how speedy you are in general, and pronghorn antelopes are the fastest animal in the world."

"Second fastest," Alex corrected and flopped back onto a greenish-blue sofa placed awkwardly in the center of the living room. He didn't like coffee, but he couldn't help but inhale the smoky aroma emanating from Grayson's mug.

"Fast nonetheless. You try looking up the fastest animals in the world that start with 'P'."

"I read somewhere that Peregrine Falcons are a thing."

Grayson sipped his coffee. "Not as catchy. Anyway, did you find this girl with a 'short fist and a short fuse?'"

Alex slowly sat up from the sofa and swiveled around to face the kitchen entrance. He'd forgotten that he still needed to confess to his father about his secret pen pal relationship. "Hey, dad, did you have breakfast yet?"

"I just whipped something before you came in," Grayson shrugged. "When you suddenly texted you weren't coming home last night, I thought you might be absent for the morning too eating breakfast wherever you were, so I only prepared enough grub for myself."

Alex nodded, slowly again. "Yeah no worries, I did eat already. But, umm, what are you having then?"

"I got out the pancake mix we packed, and luckily we still had a bag of chocolate chips leftover too."

Better now than never, Alex thought.

Grayson asked, "why?"

Alex took a deep breath. "Okay, so that girl, Carsyn Mitchell, I knew her since before we got to Vancouver. I met her a year ago." Grayson, speechless, lifted his hand from his pocket and switched the coffee mug over to it as he drifted to the vacant spot on the sofa. Alex continued, "well technically I didn't meet her in person then, but on this website called BeFriendMe.com. It pairs up people and exchanges their information so they can start being pen-pals."

"A pen-pal," Grayson repeated after a flimsy sip from his mug; the upper lip of his beard now partially dribbling with coffee. "Do people still do that? I mean, not that there's anything wrong with it. Writing letters, sending 'em back and forth — sounds exciting." Grayson glanced at his son, who had crammed himself against the corner of the sofa, gawking back at his father. "So you and this Carsyn girl have really been writing letters to each other for a year, but you only just saw each other for real yesterday?" Alex gave a craven head nod. "But why am I just hearing about this now?"

"To be honest, before we moved here I wasn't sure if I was ever even gonna tell...either of you," Alex said lowly, cautious in avoiding explicitly mentioning his mother. "I didn't know if you would like me talking to her. She's different from everyone else back at Well-Ridge. Not a fan of basketball, and she can be a bit...rough around the edges. When you told me we were moving to Riviam, I got nervous about seeing her for the first time and I thought I would screw something up, but we actually hit it off since then." Alex wriggled out of the sofa corner and moved to properly sit beside Grayson. "She's actually really great, dad. And, I don't want to hide her anymore."

Grayson's hand came down on Alex's deltoid like an axe being swung into the body of a tree. Years of woodworking had made Grayson's pats to the back feel more lethal than encouraging.

"I've always noticed something off whenever you were with those kids at your old school," Grayson started. "You never invited them over, and you usually came home early from those parties, even when we said you could stay out later at times." Alex tried not to flinch at the profoundly indirect mention of his mother; it was the first time in two months Grayson had acknowledged her existence outside of their divorce case consultations. "And then this summer you stopped talking to any of them all together...But, now you're telling me you've met someone you actually want to talk to? That you want to be around, that you feel so comfortable around enough to stay all night at their place? Lex, what I'm hearing is that this girl's interest in basketball is at the very bottom of her list of qualifications to be your friend."

Alex, optimistically shocked, stammered, "but-"

"But nothing. This girl could literally be a block of Australian Buloke on two legs — doesn't matter. You like her. She's the one. Go be with her then."

Alex mimicked Grayson's back pat with a less forceful one of his own as he smiled. "You could've put that in a much more platonic way."

With one free arm, Grayson shrugged off Alex's hand from his shoulder, then clutched the round of Alex's neck in a playful headlock. "Go meet people, people who you really wanna be around. People like Carsyn. Making friends is your number one priority here." He got up from the sofa in huff after a swift release of Alex's head. "How's that for 'platonic'?" he said while strutting away towards the kitchen.

Alex sent his hands to his hair to quell the minor disordered mess Grayson had created. "What's your priority then?" He wasn't entirely sure why, but he was fishing for another implicit 'Julia' name drop. If he were a therapist, his and Grayson's allusions to her just now would almost certainly be deemed as 'progress'.

"My priority is the shop," Grayson said from the kitchen entryway. "Business is gonna be up and running soon and me and Harry have been busting our behinds to make sure that happens as smoothly as humanly possible."

"Business that was doing fine back in The Big Easy?"

"Fine is not better. Try not to settle for fine, Lex. Words from a guy that's been running his own business for ten years! Now if you'll excuse me, my pancakes are getting cold. You should get to unpacking, but tell me more about this Carsyn later."

Grayson retired into the kitchen while Alex left the sofa to hunt for packaged boxes and containers with his name labelled on them.

His father's words were a fervid echo in his head as he did: Making friends is your number one priority. Alex was sure that had been his priority for the longest time already, or at least he had been wanting it to be, and now he was finally gaining ground with that desire.

It was happening. Things were beginning. He was changing. Everything would be different.