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“You’re angry.”

“Yeah. I’m fucking angry.”

“So don’t stand in a parking lot and make some decision you’re going to—”

“Go home, Dad. And don’t call.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Try me.”

I walk off. I’ll find my own ride, or I’ll walk. I hear his truck start, and I turn around in time to watch it roll out of the lot, and I watch him drive off.

I walk back to campus. It takes an hour, and it doesn’t fucking help.

The rink is open until nine on Sundays for open ice, with nobody on it but two figure skaters at the far end. I get my gear and go. I skate until my lungs burn and my legs are gone, blue line to blue line, hard stops both ways, for thirty-five minutes. It doesn’t touch it.

So I go down to the weight room. Sunday night, nobody there but a wrestler and the grad assistant on his phone. I do the sled, six trips with three plates and four with four, pushing until my hands slip off the uprights and my vision goes spotty at the edges, and then med-ball slams against the rubber wall until the grad assistant looks up, and I keep going. It doesn’t touch it.

The bag is in the back corner by the mats, and I put my forearms and shoulders into it without wraps for about four minutes. It doesn’t touch it either.

I shower until the water goes cold, standing with both hands flat on the tile and my head down, and I get dressed and walk back across the quad in the dark. My body is finished. There’s nothing left in my legs at all. And my head is going exactly as fast as it was in that booth.

Rafe’s light is on in our room. I don’t want Rafe. I don’t want Koda. I don’t want to call my mom, who doesn’t know I’m not talking to him yet and will find out when he gets home. I don’t want to say one word out loud about any of it to anybody, ever. I walk past our door.

One.

Two.

Three.

I knock.

It takes too long.

I knock again. When the door opens, Kylie has her hair up, a pen in her hand, and she’s wearing the hoodie she took Friday. Her face when she sees it’s me is not a happy face.

“You,” she says flatly, and stands in the doorway and doesn’t move out of it. “So you can knock on my door, but you can’t eat breakfast with me.”

I don’t have anything for that. I don’t have anything for anything. She looks at me for a second, and something in her changes. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look okay.”

“I’m fine.”

She folds her arms.

“Where’s your roommate?” I say, which isn’t an answer to anything.

“Library. She’s been there all day.” She’s still looking at my face. “Nash. What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s—”

I kiss her. I get my hand around the back of her neck and walk her into her own room with the door still open, and for about one second, she’s stiff, actually mad. I can feel it in her whole body, and then she kicks the door shut and grabs the front of my shirt with both hands and kisses me back.