Chapter 2
two
ROWAN
I use my keycard to scan in, flip on the overheads one bank at a time, and pick the corner by the squat rack. Then I get to work, enjoying the fifteen minutes each day when I don’t have anyone else’s problems to solve.
Fifteen minutes later, on schedule, my phone lights up on the bench.
I pick it up, brace my elbow on my knee, and hit accept. “Hi, Dad,” I say.
“Weight room?”
“Yep.”
“Good.” A pause. “Been working on your slapshot like we talked about? You need to be putting a clean release on film by Thanksgiving, because if you want development camp invites…”
I sigh, then I’m thankful he doesn’t hear it. “I know, Dad. I’m working on it with the coaches and they’re saying there’s a lot of improvement since last year…”
“Good, good. How’s the team looking?” He barges on ahead, because even phone calls with his son are a checklist item for Daniel Hale. “And Gavin?”
“Team’s fine,” I say, because that’s the easy truth, then pause because things with Gavin — the captain — are harder to explain. “Gavin’s Gavin. He’s fine.”
“Mm.” There’s a pause. “A leader can look fine for a long time before he isn’t, Rowan. Make yourself the next man up, because that’s the whole game in sports and in business.”
“Yeah.” The words are coming out on autopilot now. “I hear you.”
“Good. Have a good session. Talk later.”
The line clicks off before I can say anything back, and I set the phone face down on the bench. What I didn’t tell him is that I’ve generally been the next man up my whole life, including for Gavin these past few months.
I could tell my father that, but I won’t.
Because if I tell him, he won’t think, good. He’ll think bar cleared, and the bar will move. Because if you hand Daniel Hale a win, he makes the game harder, until there’s a level you can’t ever beat.
I load another plate and get back to work.
The door buzzes about ten minutes later, and Sebastian walks in ahead of everybody, wearing a gray hoodie that’s seen better decades, his face doing the thing where he wants a conversation but doesn’t want to look like he wants one.
“Hey,” he says. “Wanted to catch you.”
“Caught me.”
He sets his bag down. “Theo’s talking transfer portal.”
I don’t move. “He’s a freshman, Seb. He reported three days ago…”
“I know, man. I’m just telling you. He’s worried about ice time.”
“Freshman,” I repeat. “Three days.”
“Right. I know that. He doesn’t.”
We’re two guys who’ve been through a few seasons’ worth of shit together. He isn’t asking me to do anything, but he’s telling me because he knows I will. He still lives at Ironwood House — the team share house — so he hears things I don’t.
“Okay,” I say.
He nods, relieved, and heads to the rack. Halfway there he stops and half-turns. “Also…”
“Mm.” I brace for impact.
“Can you cover the Shelton paper?” he says. “I picked up an extra shift at the pro shop…”
The Shelton paper is a day-one, week-one group assignment that a particularly sadistic professor emails his students before the first class. It’s non-negotiable — worth 20 percent of the grade — and something not a single person in the class wants to do.
Seb reads my silence as reluctance. “I need it. I’ll owe you.”
“You don’t owe me,” I say. “I’ll do it.”
“Appreciate you.” He says it to the floor.
“Go lift.”
He goes, we both start lifting, and the others come in over the next twenty minutes.
Luca comes in first, talking on the phone: “—and then she goes, my name isn’t Madison, it’s Madeline, and I had to pull out of her and scramble…”
He drops his bag and kills the call, then swings straight into the weekend postmortem without checking whether anyone asked. Within ninety seconds he has proposed a party, organized a coffee catch-up, and relocated Thursday’s team dinner.
Nikolai arrives next. “Good morning,” he says.
Two words, which is basically a sermon from him, spoken in a Russian accent that makes every phrase sound like a small formal event. He’s wearing black everything, an expensive watch, and the expression of a man who has accepted he’ll need to get sweaty this morning but isn’t too happy about it.
“Morning,” I say.
He nods at me, then takes the bench farthest from the noise.
It’s just the four of us for a few minutes, then Mason strolls in with an iced coffee he absolutely should not have in here. He clocks the NO FOOD OR DRINK sign, clocks me clocking him, and sets the cup down directly beneath it with a small, pleased smile.
I roll my eyes and go back to my lift.
The others filter in, and soon the room is full and noisy.
But even as I’m mourning the loss of my tranquility, I smile when Theo cracks a joke at Luca that actually gets a laugh, then spends the next sixty seconds visibly cataloging where everyone else is in their warm-up.
He’s trying too hard to fit in, which explains the transfer angst.
The last to arrive is Gavin — the captain — with headphones in, hood up, and a total refusal to make eye contact as he heads to the bench on the far side of the room. A year ago he’d have walked in first with coffee for everyone in the room and a joke ready to fire.
“Good morning, Captain,” Luca calls out, not looking over.
Gavin doesn’t look up.
“He’s meditating,” Mason says, to the room. “Give the man space.”
“He’s been meditating since April,” Luca says. “Okay, Saturday, we are doing a thing.”
“We always do a thing,” Mason says.
“This is a themed thing,” Luca says.
“No,” Niko says, from the cable machine.
“Niko. I haven’t said what it is yet.”
Niko sighs. “I am saving us time.”
“Theo!” Luca turns on the freshman. “You’re on the ballot. Theme?”
Theo half-sits up from his stretch. “Uh — toga party?”
The entire room groans.
“Toga party was my first thought,” Luca says. “Let’s go with elevated toga.”
“That’s every toga party,” Mason says.
“No. Every toga party is togas, but drunk. I am talking emperors, with grapes and laurel wreaths.”
“Where are you getting laurel wreaths in Vermont?” I say.
“Rowan, that’s a logistics question,” Luca says, sighing. “We are in the dreaming phase.”
“It’s not long until Saturday,” I say.
“It’s Monday. Plenty of time.” He pivots. “Seb. Back me up.”
Seb, mid-set, does not look up. “No.”
Luca flags me down with both hands. “Rowan. Deciding vote. Ironwood, Saturday, Roman emperors, but hot. Think low lights, my playlist, and a regrettable number of freshman girls ready to get drunk and have wardrobe malfunctions. You with me?”
“I’m with you.” I shrug.
“He’s with me!” Luca pumps his fist in the air.
“He’s with you,” Niko says, “because it is not worth arguing.”
I grin and return to the weights, getting through another set before I notice Gavin isn’t lifting. He’s lying on a bench, AirPods in and eyes closed. I walk over, sit next to him, and wait. He must know I’m there, but he takes his time opening his eyes.
He slides one earbud out. “What’s up?”
“Theo’s thinking about the portal,” I say. “Someone needs to talk to him.”
“Mm.”
“He’s barely started in the program, Gav,” I prompt.
“I heard you.”
“Do you want to talk to him?”
He puts the earbud back in. “You talk to him. You’re better at it.”
His eyes close again, so I shake my head and scoff, then go back to my workout. The guys keep going with the shit-talking, but I’m focused on the next job, the next thing to solve, and exactly when to do it.
I catch Theo at the dumbbell rack as the session’s winding down, putting the forty-pounders back on the wrong hooks. I put them on the right hooks without making it a thing, and he notices anyway.
“Sorry, man,” he says.
“All good.” I smile. “Settled in at Ironwood alright?”
“Yeah.” He hesitates, as if weighing up how much to say. “I’m — you know. First week.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m probably just in my head,” he says.
“About?”
“I don’t know what the rotation looks like,” he blurts out. “Like, will I get ice time?”
“You’re not playing the first four games,” I say. “Maybe six.”
His jaw sets.
“Okay,” he says, but his tone tells me it’s not okay.
“It took me two months freshman year to get a real shift,” I say, giving his shoulder a squeeze. “The guys ahead of you are the guys ahead of you for reasons that matter for about eight weeks. After that, your own performance will start to matter more. But don’t talk transfer portal in week one.”
“Okay.”
“If you still feel this way in a few months, come find me.”
He nods, shoulders dropping half an inch. “Thanks, Rowan.”
“Yep.”
I turn to grab my towel, but Mason is right there. “Team dad,” he says.
“Shut up.”
Seb catches my eye, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to.
I finish before the rest of them because I started before the rest of them, and now I’m starving. A quick check of the campus dining app tells me that Benny’s Bagels has a line out the door, so I take a quick shower, say my goodbyes, and then head out for the dining hall.
The quad is a circus, which I should have expected for nine in the morning on freshman move-in day. There are families with hand trucks, parents peering at building numbers like they’re hieroglyphics, and eighteen-year-olds pretending to be adults.
Then I see her.
She’s ten steps ahead of me, heading toward Sterling House and carrying a duffel bag and a box. But the first thing I notice is her walk. Chin level, shoulders set, moving like someone who has decided today is going to go well whether today likes it or not.
I adjust my line to overtake on the left, but then the strap on her bag gives.
My arm goes out on reflex even though there’s nothing to catch. The duffel lists and hits the ground, then the zipper gives, and the bag opens in the middle of the courtyard.
It’s like an explosion of underwear.
She freezes. A breath, maybe two. Her shoulders go up, and I see the decision settle on her face: don’t react, don’t acknowledge the situation or anyone else, just pick up the bras and panties and go. Then she crouches, starts scooping, and laughs.
Just once, one note, low.
It’s like something escapes out of her, animating her whole face, and she looks fun and cute in a way I haven’t let myself notice in a girl in a hell of a long time. But then she banishes the laugh, and it’s like her whole frame stiffens.
I don’t remember deciding to go over, but when I open my mouth, it takes her two full seconds to register what I say as a joke — actual count, one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi — before she fires back something fast and a little rude.
I have to work not to laugh out loud in a public quad at a stranger on move-in day. So instead, I crouch and help her pick up her things, folding the ones that need folding, because I have a sister and I’ve been doing the laundry for years.
We volley, and the back-and-forth is at a pace I haven’t hit in a while. She’s quick, and every time she lands something good, she half-flinches, as if being funny violates a rule she’s set herself, and then she goes a little faster to cover the flinch, which makes her funnier.
Halfway through, she says something she regrets out loud. She regrets it before the sentence is finished. “Don’t,” I say — low, involuntary, closer to a please than I’d like — and I watch it land on her face.
It’s a flicker she decides not to show.
I pretend I don’t feel it catch me too.
Finally, after our quick-fire exchange, she bundles the duffel’s flaps over and stands. Her thank-you comes in a different voice from the one that just told me to stuff a pair of panties in my mouth. It’s neutral and volume-controlled.
When she turns to leave, I tell her to wait. To my surprise, she does, but I lose the courage to ask for her number — the first girl I’ve wanted to ask in a while. But she’s waiting for me to say something, so I scramble to find something else to say.
“Welcome to Halden,” I say.
Stay away from her, I tell myself, as I walk away.
I’ve got the Shelton paper, Gavin to deal with, a sister I need to make sure has arrived in one piece, and a freshman I just talked off a ledge. And that’s just the items at the top of the list, because there’s always more, so there’s no time for dating.
But I can’t help but replay the laugh, that one second before she caught herself, bright with the ridiculousness of it.
I smile at the thought.