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“Hey.” He doesn’t crowd it. Wyatt never crowds anything. He just stands there, stick across his thighs, looking out at the rink like we’re both watching the same thing. “Where are you?”

“I’m here.”

“You’re not here. You’ve been somewhere else all morning.” He says it without any edge, which is the thing about Wyatt — there’s no trap in it, no angle, he’s just asking. “Coach has noticed. The freshmen have noticed. You okay?”

I could tell him. That’s the strange part. Of the three of them, Wyatt’s the one I could hand the whole thing to and trust it to stay handed — he wouldn’t make it a joke the way Cash would, wouldn’t file it for leverage the way Theo files everything. He’d just hold it.

But the plan with Sloane only works if it looks like the realest thing in the world, and it can’t look like that if four guys in a locker room know it’s staged. I’ve thought about this. The fewer people who know it’s a performance, the better the performance plays. So I don’t hand it to him.

“I’m just in my head,” I say.

Which isn’t a lie. That’s the thing. It’s the most honest sentence I’ve said all day.

Wyatt looks at me a second longer, reading it, and then he nods — accepting it, or at least accepting that it’s all he’s getting. “Okay. Well. Get it out of your head and into the rink.” He taps my pad with his stick. “It’s an exhibition, I know. Doesn’t count for anything. But we want this season, Beau. All of us. Last year still tastes like it tastes.”

It does. We don’t talk about the Harvard final much, but it’s in the room with us all the time, the way a loss like that gets into the walls — up two goals in the third and we let it go, watched it slip in the last eight minutes, stood on the blue line for the handshake line with our season ending in someone else’s celebration. I’ve replayed the last eight minutes more times than I’d admit. We all have. The whole program’s been hungry since June in a way that has a flavor.

“I know,” I say.

“So.” Wyatt pushes off. “Head in the rink, Cap.”

I get my head in the rink.

It holds for the rest of practice, mostly. O’Grady runs us hard — line rushes, then a brutal set of suicides that he frames as “conditioning” and we all understand as punishment for an exhibition team that played a step slow — and somewhere in the burn of the third sprint I lose the Sloane of it and become only a body doing work, which is the thing the ice does for me, the thing it has always done. By the time Coach blows the whistle and tells us to hit the showers, my shoulder’s screaming and my lungs are raw and my head is, finally, quiet.

It stays quiet for exactly as long as it takes to get to the locker room.

The room’s loud, the way it gets after a hard skate — guys peeling out of pads, somebody’s speaker going, the freshmen too gassed to do more than sit and breathe. I’m at my stall working my left arm out of the shoulder pad slow, careful, in the small private way I’ve gotten good at, when Theo drops onto the bench next to me.

Theo doesn’t sprawl. He sits the way he does everything, contained, taking up exactly the space he needs and not an inch more. He doesn’t say anything for a second. Then:

“You good?”

“I’m fine.” I get the pad off, set it down. “Just a little distracted.”

Theo gives me a look.

It’s a specific look. He holds it on me a beat, and then his eyes go — deliberate, like he’s making sure I see him do it — from me to Wyatt, who’s two stalls down, to Cash, who’s holding court near the showers about something, and back to me.

“You haven’t seen it,” he says. “Have you.”

I frown. “Seen what?”

Theo says, quietly, with feeling, “Fuck.”

He pulls his phone out. Thumbs at it. Turns it so I can see, and it’s the Whitmore U page, the campus account that posts everything — game schedules and dining hall outrages and whatever students send in that’s deemed shareable — and it’s a video, paused, and the thumbnail is Bella.

He hits play.

It’s short. Phone-shot, vertical, somebody’s apartment behind her, the lighting bad. Bella’s holding a drink and she’s loose with it, the looseness of a person a few past their limit who has been handed a microphone in the form of a friend’s camera and is performing for it. And she’s talking about me.

I’m not going to catalogue the whole thing. The gist is that I’m a douche — established — and that I think I’m God’s gift, and that the puck bunnies who chase me are chasing a marketing campaign, and then she leans in toward the camera with the air of someone delivering a punchline and says I’m “not even that good in the sack,” and the people off-screen laugh, and that’s where it cuts.

The video’s got a number under it that means a lot of people have already watched it.

I hand the phone back.

I’m aware of the room having gone a little quieter around me. Not silent — guys are pretending to do other things — but quieter, the way a room goes when everyone in it has already seen the thing you’re just now seeing and is waiting to find out how you’ll take it.