1. Chapter One
Percy
I learn within the first ten minutes of college that everybody brings too much stuff.
Plastic drawers stacked four high. Desk lamps still boxed.
Laundry baskets loaded with folded towels.
Mothers carry pillows against their chests like they’re carrying newborns.
Fathers sweat through polo shirts and pretend they don’t care that their sons are already ten feet ahead of them, already halfway gone.
I have one duffel at my feet, a backpack on my shoulder, and goalie gear in the bed of Josh’s truck.
That’s it. That’s everything.
Josh kills the engine and doesn’t get out. Neither do I. For a second we sit there looking at the house through the windshield.
It looks nothing like the dorms we passed coming in.
Older. Bigger. Two stories of brick and white trim, a porch sagging on one side, a mailbox leaning off its post at an angle somebody’s clearly hit with a car and decided to live with.
Bikes chained badly to the railing. Upstairs, a hockey stick is jammed under a window sash to hold it open.
Music thumps through the walls loud enough to reach the curb.
Josh exhales through his nose. “Well. Looks like a dump.”
I glance at him.
His mouth twitches.
I don’t answer, because I don’t know what to say.
My stomach has been in a fist since we crossed onto campus.
It got worse passing the rink — squat gray building, banners down the side, WOLVES in letters two stories tall — and worse again when Josh pointed at some brick building and said that’s probably where you’ll have classes, like it was normal.
Like it was a thing that was going to happen to me on a Tuesday.
By the time we turned onto Hawthorne, I’d started counting.
In for four. Hold for four. Out for six.
Mary taught me that at the kitchen table when I was fifteen, both of us up at two in the morning with the lights off because I couldn’t stand them on. She counted out loud with me for a week. Then she stopped counting out loud and just tapped the table. Then she stopped tapping.
It works fine when you’re in a kitchen.
It doesn’t work when the whole street looks like a life somebody handed you by mistake.
Josh leans forward and rests both forearms on the wheel. He’s quiet long enough that I know something’s coming, which makes me want to get out of the truck before he can start.
“You got your schedule?”
“Yeah.”
“House key?”
“Yeah.”
“Phone charger?”
I look at him.
He looks right back. “Mary said to ask.”
I nod.
“Good.” He nods at the house. “You call if you need anything.”
Three houses down, two girls are hauling a mini fridge up a walkway, arguing about which end is heavier. Neither of them is right. I watch them instead of him.
“I mean it,” Josh says. “You don’t have to wait till something’s on fire.”
I look at my hands in my lap. My knuckles have gone white on nothing. There’s nothing in them.
He opens his door. I open mine.
The front door of the house bangs open and two guys come out backwards carrying a couch between them.
The one at the front is dark-haired and thick through the shoulders, built like he was born for hockey. The one at the back has longer hair he keeps blowing out of his face, and he’s laughing so hard the couch is visibly in danger.
“Left,” the dark-haired one says.
“My left or your left?”
“There’s one left, Stanley.”
“That’s factually incorrect if we’re facing each other, Benson.”
“You’re killing me.”
The long-haired one — Stanley — clocks us at the curb. His whole face opens up.
“Freshman?”
Everything in me stops moving.
It’s a stupid reaction. It’s a word. It’s a completely normal word being shouted across a lawn, and my body reacts like a door slammed. Heat rolls up the back of my neck and pools under my jaw. My hand finds the strap of my backpack and stays there.
Josh turns his head at me. Barely. A quarter turn.
Stanley says, “You Deveroux?”
I nod.
He grins easily. “Yeah. I know a goalie when I see one.”
I nod again, which is not an answer to anything.
He beams. “Hope you’re better than the one we’ve got.”
The dark-haired one drops his end of the couch on the porch boards with a flat wooden bang.
I flinch.
It’s small. It’s a fraction of a second, my shoulder jumping toward my ear and coming back down.
Nobody sees it. There’s no reason for it — a couch hit a porch, that’s all that happened, that’s all that happened — but my heart is going in my throat, and the back of my mouth has gone metallic and for half a second I’m not on Hawthorne Street at all.
I’m nine years old in a kitchen in Sherbrooke listening to a cabinet door and doing math on how long I have.
Reviens.
I come back.
The whole thing takes less time than a breath. Josh is still walking toward the tailgate. Stanley is still grinning. The world didn’t notice I left.
That’s the part nobody tells you. You can be gone and standing right there.
“Stanley,” the dark-haired one hisses, like he’s embarrassed on behalf of the entire house.
Stanley shrugs. “What? Goalies are weird.”
The second Josh walks to the back of the truck, both guys straighten a little, like they finally realize an adult is around. Josh gives them the same once-over he gives everybody, which is quick, blunt, and impossible to read.
“You boys live here?” Josh says.
“Yes, sir.” The dark-haired one comes down the path with his hand already out. “Benson Reeve.”
Josh shakes it.
Benson turns to me. “Benson Reeve.”
He puts his hand out again like he didn’t just say it. Like I’m entitled to my own introduction. I look at his hand for a beat too long. Then I take it.
“Percy Deveroux.”
“Welcome.”
That’s all. No grin. No performance. He lets go and steps back and gives me the six inches of space back, and something in my chest unclenches by maybe two percent.
“I’m Stanley.” The other one’s already moving. “Stanley Ermington. Right wing. Future pain in your ass. Current pain in his.”
Benson doesn’t dispute it.
Stanley sticks his hand out. I shake it. He’s got a grip like he’s trying to win something.
Then he looks past me into the truck bed. “That all your stuff?”
My shoulders go up before I can stop them.
Josh doesn’t look at me.
“Gear’s heavy,” he says. “You offering?”
And that’s it. Question gone. Redirected so smooth it barely happened.
Four years of that. Four years of him stepping into a gap half a second before I fall in it, and I still can’t say thank you.
I’ve had approximately fourteen hundred opportunities.
Stanley’s grin flickers into something quieter for half a second, then snaps back into place. “Obviously. I’m a generous man.”
“He’s not,” Benson says.
“Generosity is in my blood.”
“Ignore him when possible,” Benson tells me.
“You can’t,” Stanley says. “I’m everywhere.”
A third guy fills the doorway, bigger than either of them, hair wet, towel over one shoulder. He takes in the couch — half on the porch, half in the walkway, fully abandoned — and then Stanley.
“No.”
Stanley points at him without looking. “Rowan Laurens. Defense. House moral support.”
Rowan’s eyes come to me. “Goalie?”
I nod.
He lifts two fingers off the towel. “Nice to meet you. Got something on the stove or I’d help.”
Then he’s gone.
I stare after him into the dark of the house.
The tailgate drops behind me, and I turn. Josh has already started dragging my gear bag toward him. I move for the big one on reflex, but Stanley’s faster.
“Jesus.” He gets one hand on the strap, lifts it four inches, and puts it back down. “What’s in here, bodies?”
“Pads.”
Stanley’s face lights up like I gave him a gift. “He speaks.”
I don’t have anything for that either.
Benson takes the other end. “Come on. Your room’s upstairs.”
Josh has my duffel before I can reach it.
“I can get it.”
“Yeah,” he says, and carries it anyway.
I turn away so I don’t have to watch him do it and hitch my backpack higher on my shoulder, which accomplishes nothing except giving my hands a job.
Inside, the house smells like old wood, sweat, coffee, and somebody’s burnt toast. It opens right to the living room. The floors are scuffed from years of shoes and gear bags, the walls covered in framed photos. I keep my eyes moving because stopping on any of it feels dangerous.
The living room is chaos. There’s a sectional that looks overused, a coffee table covered in remotes and empty Gatorade bottles, and a TV on a small TV stand. Someone has taped a printed NHL schedule to the wall. Someone else has drawn a mustache on three of the headshots.
“Kitchen,” Stanley announces, pointing through the door as we pass. “Most important room in the house. If you leave dishes in the sink, Rowan cries.”
I glance into the kitchen and look at the table. We walk past the door and then my eyes catch the whiteboard with writing on it.
HAWTHORNE HOUSE RULES
1. No falling in love before the draft.
2. No serious girlfriends in the house.
3. No teammates’ sisters.
4. No locker room romances.
5. What happens at Hawthorne stays at Hawthorne.
I slow without meaning to.
Stanley notices and doubles back. “Ah. Sacred text.”
Benson keeps walking up the stairs with my gear. “Don’t start, Ermington.”
“Don’t worry,” Stanley smirks. “You’re going to swear on your life not to break those rules. Just like the rest of us did when we moved in.”
I look at the whiteboard again.
No falling in love before the draft.
It feels like a joke. It probably is a joke. The guys who live or have lived in this house have gone pro? I haven’t even thought past next week.
Stanley claps a hand on my shoulder, shaking me from my daydream. I go still. He either doesn’t notice or pretends not to.
“I have vowed my life to these rules.”
I stare at him.
He grins. “You break these rules, and we’ll twist your balls.”
“Stanley,” Benson says from the stairs.
“What?”
“Stop scaring the freshman before he finds his room.”
Stanley drops his hand and raises both palms. “Fine. Break the house rules, and you’ll find out, freshman.”