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He looks at me for a long time.

Then he turns around and goes out and slams the door so hard the whiteboard falls off its hook.

Nobody says anything.

Barnes still hasn’t looked up. He hasn’t said a single word since he came off the ice. Not one. He’s just sitting there with his gloves in his lap and blood on his jersey, looking at the floor.

That’s what bothers me. Not Berwyn. That.

Greeley’s at his stall across the room, pulling off his shin pads. He looks over at Kennebeck. At the ice on Kennebeck’s eye.

“Good thing Vandercook likes idiots,” he says.

Kennebeck is up off the bench before Greeley finishes the sentence.

I get a hand on his chest. I don’t push. I just put it there.

“Shut the fuck up, Greeley,” I say.

Greeley looks at me. Then at my hand on Kennebeck’s chest. Then he shrugs and goes back to his shin pads.

Kennebeck stands there breathing under my hand for a long time. Then he sits back down.

On the bus later in the dark with Barnes asleep or pretending to be asleep two rows up with his hood over his face, I say to Kennebeck, “Stop letting him get you going.”

Kennebeck turns his head and looks at me with one eye. The other one’s swollen almost shut.

“Says you,” he says.

Fair.

“We have too much to lose. Not fucking worth it.”

We get back to Corvin at two in the morning.

Tess is in the hallway on the floor outside her door in a pair of my sweatpants and her coat, with her laptop on her knees and a mailer half taped next to her. Like she was working. Like she just happened to be sitting in a hallway at two in the morning.

She watched it. I know she watched it. Kylie would have had it on in their room. They would have been screaming.

She gets up when she sees me. She closes the laptop. She comes down the hall.

I get ready for it. Are you okay. Oh my God, your face. What happened.

She stops in front of me. She looks at my face for a long time. The butterfly strip. The swelling coming up purple under my eye. My knuckles.

“You look stupid,” she says.

I stare at her and almost grin. “Thanks.”

She takes my chin in her fingers and turns my head to the side toward the light and looks at the cut under the strip like she’s checking a seam. She doesn’t say oh, baby. She doesn’t say anything soft at all.

“Did you win?” she says.

“Yeah.”

The corner of her mouth goes. She lets go of my chin. Then she looks past me down the hall where Nash comes out of the stairwell and Barnes walking up to his floor with his hood up.

“Paige is pissed,” she says.