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The semester is six days old. Preseason has been running for a week. Two-a-days through October, and my shoulder is going to be fine before the first game, and I’m going to make sure of that without anyone’s help.

Everything’s fine.

Eventually I go back inside.

Chapter 4

Sloane

Ididn’t want to come to this party.

I want to be clear about that, for the record, because in approximately forty-five minutes I’m going to want to be able to say I told you so to three people, and I need the record to reflect that I said it first, here, internally, before everything went sideways.

Wren got the text from Cash at nine-thirty.

Raven House. First week thing. You’re coming.

This is how Cash Rourke communicates — declarative sentences, no punctuation, the grammatical style of someone who has never once in his life considered that the answer might be no. Wren, who has a complicated history with Cash that she describes as “we tolerate each other” and which the rest of us understand to mean something more layered than that, stared at the text for approximately four seconds before saying, “We should go.”

Margo was already finding her shoes.

June looked up from her book and said, “Is this a good idea?”

None of us answered her, which was its own answer.

So here I am.

The Raven House is the kind of house that’s good at being a party — big enough to absorb a crowd without feeling institutional, old enough to have character, the kind of porch and open layout that means the whole thing breathes. I’ll give it that. The living room flows into the kitchen and flows into the back porch, and someone has done the thing where you move the furniture to the walls and suddenly there’s a dance floor where a coffee table used to be. The music is loud but not aggressive. The kitchen smells like beer and, inexplicably, something that might be good pasta.

I’ve been here for an hour and twenty minutes.

I’ve spent forty of those minutes in the kitchen, which felt safe, and which has now stopped feeling safe for reasons I’m going to get to in a moment.

The other forty minutes I spent watching something unfold in the hallway between the kitchen and the living room that I was not trying to watch but could not entirely avoid, because the hallway is narrow and I was in the kitchen and the kitchen has a direct sightline to the hallway and nobody thought to close a door.

A girl in a white dress — dark hair, green eyes, the posture of someone who came here with a plan — cornered a tall blond guy I couldn't fully see and proceeded to make a scene that was trying very hard not to look like a scene. I know the girl. Bella Hastings. She's been a fixture of the Whitmore athletic social ecosystem since freshman year in the way of someone who treats proximity to athletes as a competitive sport — which is exactly how I know her and don't know him. Bella runs in Evan's circle; I've spent three years watching her hold court at the edges of football parties I got dragged to and never wanted to be at. The hockey crowd is a different country. I've never been to a game, never set foot in the Penalty Box, never had a single reason to learn the faces of the Whitmore Ravens. I keep to the theater building and the bookshop, and the bookshop's the one place the worlds might've overlapped — except its owner's grandson is apparently allergic to the place, because in two years of shelving Margaret's books and listening to her talk about him I have somehow never once been in the room when he walked in. So I know the girl in the white dress. The guy she's cornering is a stranger.

I didn't catch all of it.

I caught enough.

The blond guy kept his voice low for most of it, and then it stopped being low — not loud, exactly, but past controlled — and he said something about his own house and a party she wasn’t invited to, and Bella said something quiet and precise that I couldn’t hear, and then she left through the front door in a cloud of perfume that made it all the way to the kitchen.

Dramatic.

The guy turned around, and I moved my attention back to the drink I was pretending to be interested in, and that was the end of that.

Except now it’s past eleven, the kitchen has refilled with people I don’t know, and I want nothing more than to collect my roommates and go home to the Sailmaker and drink tea and not be at this party anymore.

I’m almost to the hallway when the front door opens.

The football team streams through it like they own the place, which is a bold choice for a group with a three-and-eight record last season and no visible path to improvement. I count six of them before I stop counting. They have the energy of people who go to parties as a unit because the unit is the point, filling the entryway with noise and shoulder-checking and the kind of easy volume that comes with being large and twenty and not yet aware that neither of those things is permanent.

I mutter, “Shit,” under my breath.

Because at the back of the group, unmistakable even at this distance, is Evan.

He hasn’t seen me yet. He’s laughing at something one of his teammates said, head tipped back, the laugh I used to think was genuine and have since revised my opinion on. He’s wearing the grey Whitmore Athletics quarter-zip he wears to every party, the one that I told him once looked good on him, which I now regret on a cellular level.