Page 9

I’m done with Evan. Permanently. Bringing wine.

The response is immediate — three phones, apparently held in three separate hands, all going off within seconds of each other.

MARGO : !!!!!!

WREN : Good.

JUNE : We have ice cream. Get here fast.

I start walking.

Behind me, the light in Evan’s upstairs window stays on for a while, and then it doesn’t, and I don’t look back to notice when it goes out.

Chapter 2

Beau

O’Grady runs us for an hour and forty minutes on the first day of preseason and then looks at us like he’s considering going longer.

He doesn’t. But he looks at us.

I’m the last one off the ice, which is not required of me and which I do anyway, because I’ve been doing it since sophomore year and at this point it’s either a superstition or a compulsion and I’ve stopped trying to figure out which. The rink is quiet by the time I hand in my stick — the overhead lights on their timer, the ice starting to settle, that stillness that a hockey rink has after everyone leaves it, which is a different kind of quiet than any other room I know. Louder in a way. Like it’s still holding the practice.

My shoulder aches in the way it’s been aching since March, which O’Grady doesn’t know about, and which I am going to continue to make sure O’Grady doesn’t know about, because it’s fine.

It’s probably fine.

I roll it once, twice, grab my bag off the bench.

Fine.

The Raven House sits on the east edge of campus, three blocks from Corbin and technically within walking distance of everything else, which is how we sold it to the housing office when they tried to put us in the athletic dorms freshman year. Four juniors, same house, third year running. The housing office pretends this is not preferential. We pretend we don’t know it is. Everyone is comfortable with the arrangement.

Cash is already in the kitchen when I get back, which means he showered in four minutes, which is physically impossible, and which I’ve pointed out to him on previous occasions. He dismisses it by saying he cleans fast.

“Please tell me you’re cooking,” I say.

“I’m not cooking.”

“Wyatt?”

“Wyatt’s on the phone with his mom.”

I drop my bag by the stairs and check the refrigerator. It has a block of cheese, a six-pack, and something in a Tupperware that I’m not going to open. “We need to go to the store.”

“We need to go to the store,” Cash agrees, making no move to go to the store.

He’s sitting on the counter with his phone, scrolling. Cash Rourke has the energy of a person who is always slightly moving even when he’s sitting still — dark hair, usually too long, currently still damp from the shower, permanent bruise under his left eye from something that happened in July that he gave me three different versions of and which I eventually stopped asking about. He was home in South Boston for most of the summer, which for Cash means he was in about twelve places at once, all of them slightly questionable.

I grab a water bottle and lean against the counter opposite him. My shoulder makes a small complaint that I ignore. “How was your mom?”

“Good. Great.” He sets his phone down. “She got promoted.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He’s not quite smiling, but it’s in there somewhere. “Regional manager. New England.”

“That’s huge.”