Before the boy’s cleats tore up the Southern grass one last time, before he saw his father on the sidelines, creasing his Army uniform to wipe the dirt from his shoes, before his father left again, before the divorce almost happened. Before his mother moved him and his sister North to the town of The King Unwilling, of witch trials and psychoses on the old village hill. Before the boy faded out and withdrew, pressed his pen to paper, engraved his troubles in a yielding canvas. Before he was the variable in the Algebraic equations, before the brown-haired girl was the answer.