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Greeley comes out of the kitchen behind me with his lip split and his shirt untucked and puts his arm around her shoulders. She doesn’t move out from under it. She’s still looking at me with disgust.

From the front room, Paige calls, “Kylie! We’re going!”

Greeley looks over the top of her head, right at me, and smiles with blood in his teeth.

I go out the front door and down the porch steps into the cold, and I don’t look back at the house. Behind me, the door bangs open, and Koda comes out laughing so hard he has to hold the railing.

“Kennebeck.” He’s wheezing. “Kennebeck, your mouth.”

Rafe comes out right after him and doesn’t say anything at all. He walks down the steps toward me with his hands in his pockets. My knuckles are bleeding, my heart is still going, and the girls are catching up because Koda is walking fast.

“Holy shit,” Paige says. “Are you okay?”

I keep walking.

“Okay!” Koda announces to the street. “Where are we going?”

“Home,” I say.

“No.” Koda points at me with the hand that isn’t on Paige. “You just got us thrown out of a party at ten-forty. We are not going home.”

“There’s a diner on Beall,” Paige says. “It’s open all night.”

“Diner,” says Koda.

“I’m not going to a diner,” I say.

“You’re bleeding,” Rafe says. “They’ve got napkins.”

Down the sidewalk, Kylie stops walking, turns around, and looks at Paige with an expression I can feel from ten feet away. “Are you serious?”

“It’s pancakes, Kylie.”

“I want to go home.”

“Nobody’s going home,” Koda says.

9

Unfortunately, There Are Pancakes

Kylie

The diner on Beall has been open since before any of us were born and looks like nobody has cleaned the ceiling since. The vinyl booths are a red gone brown at the edges. The laminated menu has forty items on it, six of which are pancakes. The waitress takes one look at seven people coming through the door at eleven at night and points at the big booth in the back without a word.

Koda gets there first and slides all the way in. Paige goes in after him, which apparently makes them a unit now, four days after she got his number in a room full of people. Kenzie and Bianca take the other side, and Rafe drops onto the end of their bench without asking, and they both shift over about four inches to make room they didn’t need to make.

There’s a table pulled up against the open end of the booth with two chairs. Nash takes one, which leaves me the other. I stand there holding my coat long enough that Kenzie says, “Kylie, sit,” and I sit down directly across from the asshole with a split lip and blood dried on his chin.

“Great,” I say.

Koda and Paige keep the table talking, or mostly the girls do, because I’m not saying a word, and neither is Rafe or Nash. Rafe hands his menu back to the waitress without opening it. He answers Bianca in one word, and then in one word again, and when she asks what year he is, he says, “Freshman,” and looks at the door. He looks at the door twice in five minutes. Kenzie keeps trying. She asks where he’s from, and he names a state. She asks his major, and he says he hasn’t picked. She asks if he likes Woodbury, and he says it’s fine, and that’s the end of it. It isn’t shyness; I’ve seen shy. He doesn’t want to be in this diner. He’s a jerk with an attitude, anyone can see that a mile away, but I don’t hate him.

The food comes fast: pancakes for Paige and Kenzie, a grilled cheese for Bianca, an omelet the size of a shoe for Koda, and coffee for Nash, which is an insane thing to order at eleven-fifteen at night.

Kenzie leans across the table with her fork. “Okay. Serious question. Do all hockey players have anger problems, or is it just Nash?”

“It’s just Nash,” says Koda, with his mouth full.