Chapter 3 #2
First beat: I see the same boy from the courtyard. Same dark hair that’s now damp from a shower, same blue eyes, and same shoulders I’ve thought about every day since the incident.
Second beat: I notice the well-worn navy Halden Hockey hoodie he’s sporting as he sits at the table reserved for the hockey guys.
Third beat: I realize those are the same shoulders I watched drive a Briarhaven forward into the plexiglass while I stood up and shouted for blood.
I’ve heard about him all week, and all along Ivy was talking about the boy I never thought I’d see again. He’s Rowan. Everything snaps together, and I stand there flushed badly enough that I’m probably contributing to the window fog.
He’s looking at Ivy, his face softening around the eyes as he smiles at her.
But then his gaze moves to me, and his face goes careful. Not blank — I know blank — but a kind of chosen indifference. But he must remember me, because you don’t forget the girl whose underwear you folded, even though he’s acting like I’m a stranger his sister brought along.
Ivy doesn’t notice the shared look and pulls me forward. “Rowan, Sloane. Sloane, Rowan. Sloane is my roommate. Rowan is the alphabetizer.”
Something shifts behind his eyes when Ivy says my name — a flicker of interest he’d been holding back — and then it’s gone, replaced by that same steady quiet he’d held since the moment he saw me.
It’s almost like he’s choosing neutrality and letting me react — or not — to the realization about our first meeting.
“Hi.” I try the Halden Girl voice, and it comes out fine, even pleasant. “Nice to meet you.”
He looks at me, then his mouth inches up at one corner. “Ivy has told me absolutely nothing about you…”
I blink, not sure where to take it.
Ivy’s head snaps between us. “Why are you both being weird?”
“We’re not,” we both say at the same time.
“You are,” she says, looking at Rowan. “You don’t smirk at people you just met.”
He shrugs.
Ivy turns on me. “And you… I don’t know… but something’s not quite—”
“Everything’s fine…” I try.
Her eyes shoot wide. “Wait, no!”
“Yes,” I say, immediately regretting it.
“Rowan is courtyard guy?” She scoffs. “My brother folded your panties?”
“Guilty,” Rowan confirms.
“Oh my God.” Ivy puts both hands over her face. “I don’t know who I’m more embarrassed for. Him, for touching his sister’s roommate’s panties on day one. Or you, for — Sloane, you told me that story and I comforted you and it was him the whole time—”
“Can we stop saying panties?” I say.
“We cannot,” Ivy says through her hands. “This is the worst.”
Rowan watches his sister spiral with the patience of someone who’s seen this more than a few times before. Then he looks at me, like he’s checking whether I’m okay with all of this, and figuring he’ll shut it down if I’m not.
“Take a seat if you like, Sloane,” he says, while Ivy keeps going.
I pull out a chair two seats down from him on the opposite side and try to come to terms with this new development, but thinking time is at a premium because the brass bell over the door keeps going and the table keeps filling.
First to be introduced is Seb, who’s big and heavy-shouldered in a cracked leather jacket.
He drops into the chair next to Rowan with a grunt.
I try to say hi to him, but he gives as little back to me as I give to the rest of the world, and I’m left wondering if it’s something I did or if he’s like that with everyone.
Then Theo, sandy-haired with a grin that expects to be liked.
“Hi, I’m Theo,” he says to me.
I smile back at him, and he seems genuinely pleased.
Then comes the human hurricane, Luca, curly-haired and oozing good vibes. He sits, then sizes me and Ivy up. “Hi. New people. Emperor’s toga party. Saturday. Ironwood. You are both coming. But there is a complication.”
“There always is,” Rowan says.
Luca scoffs. “The one party supply store in the state of Vermont that stocks wreaths in any useful quantities burned down this week, throwing all my planning into chaos.”
“Burned down,” Ivy repeats.
“All the wreaths,” he says. “Gone.”
“Can’t you just skip the wreaths?” Theo asks.
Luca looks at him and raises an eyebrow. The silence is deadly.
“Right,” Theo says. “Sorry.”
Luca continues, “You cannot have an emperor’s party without wreaths.
You just have a toga party, and a toga party is a 2007 fraternity staple and totally beneath me.
So I had to order one hundred and fifty synthetic laurel wreaths on , and now I’m being tracked by the algorithm as someone who’s into ceremonial foliage—”
“Laurel is not foliage,” Rowan says, without looking up from his mug. “It’s a shrub.”
“Don’t you start,” Luca says. “I remember the last party…”
“I hung one streamer crooked,” Rowan says.
“It was a load-bearing streamer.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“It held the entire color story together, and you hung it at an angle—”
Another player folds into the chair across from me, lean and pale and in no hurry. He takes one look at Luca, mid-rant, and says, to no one, “Someone hurt him…”
“That’s Niko,” Theo tells me. “He barely talks. But when he does—”
“I only made an observation,” Niko says.
“—it’s usually like that.”
For all his stillness, his eyes go once to the girl behind the espresso machine — half a second too long — before they come back to the table. I catch it, even though I don’t think he means anyone to see it.
Rowan’s voice comes low, just for me. “You’re keeping score of who’s winning the back and forth between the guys.”
“I’m being polite,” I say.
“You’re keeping score.” He leans in a little closer. “Let me guess. Luca’s winning, and Theo’s last — but he’s trying the hardest, so…”
I should give him the easy shrug — the oh, I’m not really paying attention. Instead, I hear myself say, “Luca’s not winning. He’s just loud.”
His eyes lift to mine, and for a second we just hold there, fighting the same grin and both losing it. It’s the truest thing I’ve said since I walked in, and I’ve handed it to a boy I’m supposed to be keeping at arm’s length.
So I look away first.
Then Luca reopens his case against the wreath suppliers.
I’m laughing. Genuinely laughing, face relaxed, shoulders down. Nobody’s looking at me because the spotlight is entirely on Luca’s unraveling supply chain, and the relief of not being observed lets me settle into the noise around me.
During the chaos, Rowan catches the eye of a passing waitress and tilts his head toward me. She comes over and I order an oat milk latte with honey, grateful someone noticed. But when I look over at him to thank him, Rowan is already back in the conversation, not looking for credit.
As I wait for my latte, I watch him. He’s doing something with his coffee cup — rotating it a quarter turn every few seconds, perfectly even, like a clock he’s winding — as his eyes stay on Luca.
But even as he follows along with the conversation, I can tell he’s thinking about other things as well, never really relaxing.
As if to illustrate it, every time the noise at the table tips toward being too much, Rowan says one quiet thing, a name or half a sentence, and the group recalibrates without knowing it. He’s managing all of them, all of the time, and I don’t think any of them notice.
“Is it always like this?” I ask him instead.
He glances over. “Usually.”
“And you just… sit here.”
“I drink coffee.” He lifts his mug. “They do most of the rest.”
“Modest.”
“Accurate.” He shrugs. “I like it.”
The exchange — the speed of it, the dryness — warms me more than the coffee does. I can tell he feels it, too, because he smiles into his coffee, even as my latte finally shows up. It makes me want to keep pushing, to see what happens. I probably shouldn’t, but I can’t resist.
“Ivy said you’re boring,” I say, testing.
“Ivy says a lot of things.”
“She said you alphabetize your protein bars.”
“I group them by flavor family.” He says it without inflection. “There’s a system.”