5. Chapter Five
Stanley
The bench is empty, and the locker room’s a zoo, and I’m in the best mood of my entire life.
Two goals. A helper. The club’s man in the building watching me do exactly the thing he flew in to watch. And the move that landed so clean, I can still feel it in my teeth. Now I can enjoy a true Hawthorne House after-party with a cold beer in my warm house with my best friends.
“What did I say about the stick?” Benson calls out.
“It’s a good one,” I agree.
I’m packing my bag, half-listening to Benson talk about what it’s like to break in a stick. Speaking of sticks, I reach for my gamer where it lives on the rack.
My hand finds air.
I look.
The slot’s empty.
There’s a one-second skip in my chest, a little hitch, the kind you get when you reach for the next stair, and it isn’t there.
I scan the rack. I count. I count again, slower, because counting twice is how a reasonable person handles this.
I go down the whole row, sled to sled, nameplate to nameplate.
I check the floor. I duck my head into the staging area where the equipment guy racks them during the handshake line.
My favorite hockey stick is gone.
Across the room Blue’s chirping Percy about something. Mickey comes flying out of the showers screaming with a towel around his neck and nothing else. Benson’s still going about the house, and nobody notices that I’ve gone quiet. I clap Drew on the shoulder and tell him to hurry up.
I don’t tell a soul.
Because there’s only one person in this entire building who would take my stick. And she went missing as soon as the buzzer went off. Yeah, I saw her walking down the steps like a sneaky link.
I sling my bag over my shoulder, and I go home to host a party.
Damn me for switching sticks between plays. Now she has my baby.
The house fills up fast, thanks to the girlfriends of the house opening the doors before we even got to the property. The other week, Blue mentioned he wasn’t drinking, so Rowan and Percy adopted it, and now three of the Hawthorne brothers are spending the night sober.
I grab Benson by the neck and lift my beer. “Just you and me, Reeve.”
He hits his beer with mine and takes a long sip.
Some freshman in a Pack jersey makes the mistake of surveying our kitchen and announcing this is a “super lame senior year” for a hockey house.
I throw an arm around Rowan’s neck and pull him into my chest. “Don’t you worry about us, buddy,” I tell the freshman, solemn. “Some of us are still men.”
Rowan elbows me in the ribs hard enough to fold me and walks off with his water.
The music comes up. The house starts breathing the way it only breathes after a win, that warm loud hum, bodies everywhere, somebody’s already spilled something sticky by the stairs.
And I’m drinking faster than I normally would.
I’m three deep when Gianna looks at me with a mischievous glance.
I lift my hands. “You wanna play?”
“Sing for us, Stan! We’re bored.”
I lift my beer. “I don’t like being told what to do unless I’m naked.”
I take a backhand to my abs. I groan, clenching my stomach as I look over at Benson.
“That’s my sister you’re talking to.”
“You––” I groan, trying to catch my breath.
I look around the room and catch Blue opening the front door and kissing Melly. He takes her hand and pulls her to the stairs. When they take the first step, I step towards Gianna and steal the phone from her palm.
“I got you, G,” I nod, searching for the song on YouTube.
The party falls silent of music, and what’s left is just people talking.
“Baby Blue,” I shout, and my voice echoes in the room. There’s no way he’s missing that.
He stops in the middle of the staircase and nods.
I press play on the video and look at Melly.
“Melly, girl. This one’s for you.”
Melly smiles when a random song starts playing. “What is this?”
“Shh,” I say, putting out a finger. “This is a commercial.”
I nod, waiting for the song to play. When I look down, I realize I can hit skip ad. I hit the skip button, and Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun starts blasting through the speakers.
The crowd breaks into a loud roar, and we all start jumping to the beat.
Melly smiles up at Blue and makes a face, trying to pull him back down to the living room.
“This is for you, Melly!” I shout, pointing at her. “Don’t let that man take you upstairs!”
Gianna, Mara, Penelope, Mila, and Lucy start singing and dancing, screaming at Melly to come back down the stairs.
Melly ignores Blue and starts jumping around the living room with her friends.
Blue rests on the stair’s railing and watches her for a minute.
I turn the volume up just a little bit more since we’re all vibing.
I turn and see the entire team singing along. All except the sober ones.
By the time Melly has convinced Blue to join us on the ground level, it’s my time to shine. I step onto the coffee table and start belting out, “Some boys take a beautiful girl and hide her away from the rest of the world.”
I reach for Melly’s hand, pulling her up on the table with me. She sings with her hand on her chest, “I wanna be the one to walk in the sun.”
Blue stares up at Melly with a gentle smile. He’s so whipped.
Gianna jumps on the couch with Mara and Mila. They shout, “Oh, girls, they wanna have fun. Oh, girls, just wanna have––”
I point at Blue and sing, “That’s all they really want. Is some fun.”
The entire house is singing the lyrics with us.
Gianna and Mara are jumping up and down on the couch.
Melly hops on the ground and starts dancing around Blue.
Lucy and Benson are singing the lyrics in each other’s faces.
I look at the single, sober pucks of Hawthorne, and they don’t seem to care, but the rest of the hockey team is belting it out with us.
When the song ends, Gianna throws me a high-five. “I love you for it.”
“House rule number three,” I shout over the next song playing, which is no teammates’ sister (self-explanatory, cardinal sin).
She shoves my chest. “Get over yourself, Stanley.”
I smirk, and when I turn to her left, I see Lucy. Just the girl I needed to talk to.
“Lucy. Lucy. Lucy.” I take both her hands. “The woman. The genius. The single reason Benson didn’t get benched. Listen to me. I need you.”
“Stanley.” She’s already fighting a smile, which means I’ve already won. “You’re drunk.”
I close my eyes and release her hands. “There’s a woman named Diane, and she has a folder, Lucy, a folder with my name on it. I need a tutor.”
“Okay,” she says. “Is it for math?”
Benson watches me over her shoulder. Him and I are eye-to-eye in height. I look at him for a brief moment and then look down at her.
I shake my head. “Don’t do that to me, Lucy girl. Don’t do the thing where you have boundaries.”
“What subject is it for?” Lucy asks.
“Philosophy.”
Benson tightens his grip around her stomach and chokes on his beer. He covers his mouth with the back of his hand, cackling.
“You’re failing philosophy?” he laughs into his hand.
I ignore him. “Lucy?” I flash her my best smile.
She looks at my face and turns red.
“No, no,” I say, back pedaling. “Don’t be embarrassed. I’m very teachable.”
“I only tutor math, Stanley,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“What if I get on one knee?” I say, starting to climb down.
Benson grips my arm, keeping me upright. “Find your own girl, Stan. Damn. You can’t be getting on your knees for my girlfriend.”
I steady myself and look at Lucy. “So, will you?”
When she doesn’t answer, I attempt to drop to one knee just for fuck’s sake. Benson is strong enough to keep me up. Gianna and Mara are rolling with laughter as they watch me.
“Stay on two feet, Stan,” Benson demands. “Two feet, buddy.”
I grip his shoulder. “Come on, man. You and I in the NHL playing against each other. I can’t wait for it, man. I need help with the class before it gets back to Fuller. I failed the fucking quiz on Tuesday.”
Benson leans back and says, “Baby, just tell him yes so we can move on with our night.”
Lucy nods. “Okay, yeah.”
I grin. “Really?”
She nods.
I fist bump her. “Fuck yeah.”
Benson rolls his eyes and then blocks her from my view.
Okay, moving on.
Gianna and Mara are still giving me eyes, so I walk over to them because I know I’m their favorite person at every Hawthorne House party.
Benson’s little sister has been hockey-adjacent her whole life and is one of the boys for most of it, which means she’s the only woman I trust to be properly mean to me.
“G. I need advice. Woman advice.”
I grab her by the elbow and steer her into the corner by the pantry.
She doesn’t even blink. “Christ. Who’d you piss off?”
“This chick.” I lean in. “She’s pure evil, G.” I stare straight into her eyes. “She wants war. She stole my stick.”
Mara throws her head back and laughs. Mila’s here too. I don’t know when that happened.
Gianna nods slowly, deadpan, zero context, sipping her drink. “It’s your dick, buddy. Do what you want with it.”
“My — no. My stick. Hockey stick. Linwood walked into the —”
But the girls are already gone, drifting back into the party with their drinks, leaving me standing in the corner alone, holding a warm beer, betrayed by the institution of friendship.
Rowan makes the mistake of walking past me with a glass of water.
I take his whole face in both my hands. “Buddy. Buddy. I need you to help me look for something. Will you help me?”
He closes his eyes like a man accepting a prison sentence. “Yeah.”
“Atta boy.”
I pull him toward the door. He doesn’t fight it, because Rowan stopped fighting me sometime around sophomore year and has been living a more peaceful life ever since. And off we go, out the front door, into the cold.
“What the fuck are you making me do, Stan?” Rowan barks as he follows me down the sidewalk in front of our house.