Page 6
“And I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.”
She goes to brush her teeth. No questions, no head tilt, no oh my God, what happened. When she comes back, she sets a bottle of water on the corner of my desk without a word and slips her headphones on. I crawl onto my bed still dressed and turn my phone facedown. It buzzes against the blanket. Stops. Buzzes again.
There are a few things on the wall from whoever lived here last year, and I stare at it until it blurs. I tell myself I’m not going to cry, and my chin wobbles anyway. My breath catches, hitches, catches again, and I roll onto my side and press my face into the pillow, and it comes. I keep it quiet, swallowing every sound before it gets out, and I don’t even know who I’m being quiet for. Tessa has headphones on. Half the floor is still out. Evan is blocks away. I just can’t stand the thought of crying.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until white sparks go off behind them. I love him, present tense, and that feels like its own kind of betrayal. I’m friends with his friends. His mom texts me. I know what he orders everywhere we eat. Three years of my life have Evan threaded through almost every part of them, and twenty minutes ago his hand was on another girl’s waist, a girl he told he was single.
Staying in tonight. Except he didn’t. He knew I was going out with girls from my floor, and he still ended up at a party a few blocks from my dorm, with her.
My hands come down off my face. Did he think I wouldn’t be there?
The question stops my crying. I stare into the dark and let the next one come. What if tonight wasn’t a mistake? What if he wants to be with her? I see them again; his mouth on hers, his hand at her waist, his eyes closing when she said single, and I roll onto my back.
By one in the morning, Tessa’s breathing has gone slow and even across the room, and I’m still awake. The only light is the thin line under the door and the glow of my phone when I finally turn it over. Seven missed texts. Three of them are just my name.
Evan: Kylie.
Evan: Ky.
Evan: Ky, please.
Evan: I’m sorry.
Evan: It wasn’t supposed to happen.
Evan: Let me explain.
The last one came in nine minutes ago.
Evan: Please talk to me.
I read it twice. I don’t type anything back, and I don’t block him either. I set the phone on the mattress beside me, screen up, and lie there in the dark watching it glow until it goes black on its own.
2
The Question Mark Is Personal
Nash
The captains have me centering the second line before any of us have touched a puck, and the whole locker room knows what that means. It’s on the whiteboard in the hallway in blue marker, in Cal Dannebrog’s blocky senior-captain handwriting: KENNEBECK, between BARNES and WALESKA, with a question mark next to my name like a dare.
Two lines down, on the third, it says GREELEY, no question mark at all. The second-line center spot belonged to a senior named Hollis last year, and Hollis graduated, and for two weeks of captain’s skates everybody in this building assumed it was going to Declan Greeley, including Declan Greeley.
Then I showed up.
It’s 6:52 on a Friday morning. Dannebrog called this skate at eleven last night in the team group chat, the night of the biggest welcome-week party of the year. Seven a.m., voluntary. Nobody on this team has ever treated one of Dannebrog’s voluntary skates as voluntary. I got four hours of sleep, most of it after standing outside Corvin at midnight waiting on a burrito that never came while a girl screamed at her boyfriend, and then at me.
Greeley is in front of the board with a coffee he isn’t drinking. We’ve skated together for fourteen days. On the third one, I took the puck off him in a battle drill and walked around him in front of everyone, and he hasn’t said a word to me since that wasn’t meant to cut.
“Enjoy the loaner,” he says, without turning around.
“It’s not a loaner.”
“It’s got a question mark on it, Kennebeck.”
“So does your career.”
