On the second tee, Mei-Lin drifted close enough that only Zuri could hear her.
"Ignore him," she said. Meaning Clifford, who had reappeared near the scoring tent with his arms folded. "He does that to everybody who isn't Brayden. Last year he told me my grip looked like I was holding chopsticks."
Zuri almost smiled. "What did you say?"
"I birdied the next three holes." Mei-Lin's mouth twitched. "Then I finished fourth. So maybe ignore him and also don't listen to me about revenge birdies."
Sebastian overheard and snorted. "Revenge birdies are the only kind worth making."
Brayden stood apart, rolling a ball under his shoe. He looked like a boy who wanted to be somewhere else and also wanted to win more than he wanted air.
The second hole was a short par four, dogleg right, trees pinching the corner. Zuri laid up with a hybrid to leave herself a wedge. Clifford, loud enough for the gallery of twenty parents and club members to hear, said, "Smart. If you can't reach it, don't try."
Penwell looked at him. Clifford shrugged, the shrug of a man who believed volume was a form of membership.
Zuri's wedge spun to four feet. She made the birdie. The gallery clapped the polite clap reserved for good shots by people they had not expected to like. Pop, on his stool behind the ropes, did not clap. He just nodded once, the way he nodded when a putt broke exactly as he had said it would.
V.
By the fifth hole Zuri was one under. Brayden was even. Mei-Lin was one over. Sebastian was three over and playing as if the course owed him an apology he was determined to collect in bogeys.
Golf, when it is told honestly, is a game of small recoveries. Zuri's fourth hole had been a mess — drive into the left bunker, thin escape, long putt left short, lag that lipped out for bogey. She had walked to the fifth tee with her jaw set and Pop's word in her pocket: *Tempo*. She hit a three-wood down the middle, a soft eight-iron to twenty feet, and two-putted for par that felt like a win because it was not another bogey.
Mei-Lin's arc that morning was quieter and sharper. She had grown up at a public course on the east side of the city where the greens were bumpy and the starters knew your name. Her parents owned a dry-cleaning shop. Her mother pressed shirts until ten most nights. Mei-Lin had learned to practice in the dark with glow balls and a headlamp. She did not talk much during rounds. When she did, it tended to matter. On the sixth green, after Brayden marked his ball with a coin that looked like it cost more than Zuri's shoes, Mei-Lin said to nobody in particular, "My coach says the green doesn't care who paid for the ball."
Brayden flushed. Sebastian laughed and then pretended he had coughed.
Clifford heard it. His face went flat. For a moment Zuri thought he might say something to Mei-Lin, and she felt a spike of protectiveness that surprised her. Then Clifford turned away and spoke into his phone, loud again: "Tell the board I'll be late. My son's in the final group. Yes. Final."
The implication hung there: *my son's*, as if the other three were scenery.
VI.
Sebastian Ruiz had not expected to be in the final group. He had qualified on the last number, a one-under in the morning wave that he still could not quite believe. His father worked construction. His mother taught third grade. They had scraped together the entry fee and a set of used irons from a cousin in San Antonio. Sebastian played with a kind of furious hope that sometimes outran his swing. On the seventh, a long par five, he crushed a drive, hit a fairway wood into a greenside bunker, blasted to eight feet, and made the birdie with a fist pump so big Penwell almost smiled.