Page 140

“Morning.”

She flops back down. “What time is it?”

“Seven-forty.”

“Why?”

She drags herself up eventually. She drinks the water on my desk, the one I brought back from Koda’s, all of it, and then goes through my drawer without asking and pulls on a hoodie over my T-shirt that comes down to the middle of her thighs. “I’m taking this.”

“Okay.”

“I have that lecture, and it’s freezing in there.” She pulls her hair out. “Also, I’m dying. I have to write a response to the reading by five, and I haven’t read it. That’s a me problem.”

She finds her jeans and hops around getting into them, talking the whole time about the paper, about how Bianca’s roommate is allergic to strawberries of all things, which she thinks is a sign, and about Kenzie being weird about Paige. I don’t tell her about Koda’s room at three in the morning. It’s not mine to tell.

I’m waiting for something else, and I don’t know what. Some acknowledgment. Some version of hey, about last night. It doesn’t have to be an apology. I don’t want an apology. There’s nothing to apologize for. I don’t know what I want. She doesn’t bring it up once. She isn’t avoiding it, either; it isn’t sitting in the room being avoided. It just isn’t there at all, because for her, nothing happened last night. She said a nice thing to a guy she likes sleeping with, and then she slept great. She meant it.

She comes over and leans down and kisses me at the desk with one hand on my jaw, and her mouth tastes like my toothpaste. “Seven o’clock tomorrow.”

“Doors at six. Sit behind our bench. Three or four rows up.”

“Okay.” She’s grinning at me. She taps my cheek twice with two fingers, light, the way you’d tap a dog’s nose, and heads for the door with her boots in her hand. “Have fun at your six a.m.”

“It’s at four.”

“It’s at—” She stops in the doorway. “Four? In the afternoon?”

“Yeah.”

“So you got up at six for no reason.”

She’s standing in my doorway in my hoodie with her boots in her hand, waiting for an answer, and I don’t have one.

“Go to class,” I say, and she goes.

Practice at four is short. The day before a game, Berwyn doesn’t run us into the ground. I’m half a second off the whole time. On a breakout, I put a pass on Rafe’s backhand instead of his tape, and he has to reach for it. Ten minutes later, I come across the middle and don’t see Koda cut behind me, and the puck goes into the corner and dies. In the neutral zone drill, I get to the spot a beat early and have to wait, which lets the guy behind me catch me, and we start over. At this level, half a second is the whole job.

Rafe fans on a one-timer off my feed, and I say something about it. I don’t even know what. It isn’t what I’d normally say. He skates past me and says, “Great pass,” and he’s right; it wasn’t.

At the water break, Koda glides over to the boards next to me and takes his mouthguard out. He has circles under his eyes down to his cheekbones. He got maybe three hours of sleep.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “How was Theo’s?” he says, grinning with his whole face, and puts his mouthguard back in. Fucker.

At the end, Berwyn runs the exhibition lines. Second stays second. Greeley takes the third-line draws, which he’d take against anybody, and on the second-to-last rep, he wins one clean against me off the wall and doesn’t say anything about it, doesn’t chirp, doesn’t look at me. He’s the last one off the ice. I’m at the gate with my helmet in my hand, waiting for the guy ahead of me to move, when he comes up behind me.

“Big night tomorrow,” he says.

I don’t answer.

“Who’s coming?” he says. “Family?”

I look at him. That’s all I do, for about a second and a half. Then I step through the gate, and I’m four steps down the rubber when I hear him say, real friendly, to nobody in particular, “Should be a good crowd.”

I keep walking down the tunnel without turning around, and he doesn’t follow. Whatever he came to get, he got it off my face in a second and a half, and he’ll keep it. In the room, I sit in my stall with my elbow pads still on longer than I need to.

My dad calls at eight. I’m at my desk with the reading open, and Rafe’s in the shower, and the phone lights up on the wood. Dad.