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“Doesn’t matter.”

“Then no.”

“It’s a thing at a girl’s apartment. Off campus. A friend of a friend of Paige.”

I look at him over my laptop.

“It’s not about Paige,” he says.

I huff. “It’s about Paige.”

“It’s a little bit about Paige.” He picks at a thread on Kennebeck’s comforter. “She’s gonna be there. I need a reason to be there that isn’t her. If I show up alone, it looks like I showed up for her.”

“But you’re going for her.”

“See, that’s why I need a wingman.”

“Why do you need a wingman?”

“Because you’re the scary one.” He points at me. “Next to you, I look like a fucking saint, man.”

I think about it. I’ve spent two weeks doing three things. Hockey. Class. Not looking at a little blue dot and then looking at it.

“Fine,” I say.

It’s a small apartment with Christmas lights stapled up around the windows and a lot of people I don’t know standing around holding cans. Paige is in the kitchen, and she doesn’t look at Barnes. He spends the first hour very carefully not looking at her back, which takes him a lot more effort than it’s taking her.

I stand by the window with a beer. A girl with a nose ring asks me if I’m on the hockey team. I nod. She asks what position. I tell her. She asks if it hurts when you get hit. I say sometimes. She says she’d die. I say probably. She doesn’t know what else to say, so she drifts off to somebody more interesting. That’s fine. It’s boring. It’s a good kind of boring. Nobody wants anything from me. Nobody’s asking me what I think about the draft or my father or what happened to my face. It’s just a hot room and bad music and a beer going warm in my hand.

At some point, I take my phone out.

I don’t think about it. My thumb just goes there.

Corvin.

“You tracking somebody?”

Barnes is next to me. I didn’t hear him come over. He’s looking at my screen.

I lock it. “No.”

“That was literally a map.”

I glare at him. I want him to drop it.

He looks at me for a second. Then he shrugs and drinks his beer and looks back across the room at the kitchen, where Paige is laughing at something somebody said, with her head thrown back.

“She’s not even looking over here,” he says.

“No.”

“She knows I’m here, though.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know?”

I look at Paige. Then at him.