Page 54

I look up at his satisfied face. He grins, sits back, and goes back to his laptop like a guy who just put a puck in the net and is skating back to the bench.

Blondie comes around the corner twenty-five minutes later with a bag over her shoulder, her laptop under her arm, and a coffee from the place on campus. She’s in a Woodbury sweatshirt with her hair up, scanning the room the way you do when you’re meeting somebody you’ve only met once.

Greeley lifts a hand. “Kylie.”

Her face goes warm and relieved when she sees him. Then she takes two more steps and sees me, and all of it comes down like a gate.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”

Greeley watches this with pride.

“Why are you here?” she asks me, looking at nobody else.

“I’m signed in.”

“You’re signed in.” She looks at the clipboard, then at the grad student, then back at me, putting it together, and her face softens into something worse. “Is this a punishment? Are you in study hall jail?”

I don’t answer her.

“You shouldn’t have punched someone,” she says, dropping her bag on the chair beside Greeley. “They should make you write an essay.”

Greeley leans back in his chair, easy as anything. “Hey. Come on.” She turns to him. “It was my fault too,” he says with a shrug and a small, rueful thing with his mouth that I’d love to punch again. “I said something stupid. He reacted. It happens. We’re both in here now, so.” He gestures across the table at me, generous, like he’s introducing me to a room. “We’re good. Right, Kennebeck?”

Kylie looks at me. There are eight feet of table between us, a grad student with headphones on, three weeks until official practice, and one sheet of paper with my name signed on it.

“Right,” I say.

“See?” Greeley says. “It’s fine. Sit down. You’re making the swim girl nervous.”

Kylie glances at the girl from the swim team and sits down next to him, looking at him like he’s the only reasonable person in this building.

“That’s very mature of you,” she whispers.

He grins at her. “It’s just hockey.”

She smiles and looks at me again. I hold her eyes a beat longer than I mean to, then go back to my laptop. It’s just hockey.

Twenty minutes pass, and I read the same sentence a dozen times. Kylie has her notebook open with highlighters. She’s actually studying, which surprises me. Her chin’s propped on her hand. I don’t look at her again, but I can see the outline of her and Greeley past the edge of my screen. At one point, he gets up and comes back with two waters and puts one in front of her, and she thanks him.

A little later, she pushes her laptop toward him and covers her face with both hands.

“Which one is it?” Greeley asks, looking at her screen.

“It’s this—” She points. “The prompt says discuss an example, and then the next line says compare, so is it one example or two? Because if it’s two, I’ve written the entire thing wrong.”

Greeley reads it and tilts his head. “That’s badly worded.”

“Thank you.”

“I’d do one. It says an example.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Just do one. It’ll be fine.”

It’s two. The second line says compare, which means two. She’s going to lose points on it, and she’s going to be furious that she took advice from this guy. I don’t say anything. I’m not going to be the guy across the table correcting her homework, so she’ll think better of me. She’d take the wrong answer from him over the right one from me, and based on everything she’s got, she’d be right to.

The grad student takes her headphones out. “That’s time.”