1. Chapter One #2
I follow them upstairs. Before the draft. Josh walks behind me with my duffel, slower than usual. When we reach the second floor, Benson pushes open a door at the end of the hall.
“Here.”
The room is small. A bed on the far end. A desk and dresser. One window looking out over the side yard and the narrow street beyond it.
Benson sets my gear bag down against the wall. Stanley drops the stick bag beside it, breathing hard like he just carried a body up three flights instead of one bag of goalie equipment.
“Room’s all yours,” Benson says. “Stanley’s right next to you. I’m on the other side. Rowan’s downstairs. And across is Blue Golding’s room.” He looks at Stanley. “Blue came yesterday, so he’s at the rink right now. Freshman like you. He’s a forward. Quiet guy.”
Stanley snorts. “All the freshmen are quiet this year.”
Benson ignores him again. “It’s a good room. Gavin Carroll was in this one last year. He’s playing in the league now.”
I look at the walls.
They’re just walls. Off-white, a nail hole up near the ceiling where somebody hung something. Pinholes in the walls above the desk. The fan has years of dust on it.
Some guy slept here and then went pro.
Some guy slept in this exact room, in a house with a joke on the kitchen wall about the draft, and then it happened to him.
My stomach turns over.
Josh sets my duffel on the mattress and keeps one hand flat on top of it. He’s scanning the room the way he scans everything — outlets, window latch, smoke detector, the gap under the door. Checking for what’s wrong with it.
And for one stupid second, standing in a room a guy left to go play in the NHL, I want him to find something. I want him to straighten up and say no, and pick the duffel back up, and take me home.
Home.
I catch the word on its way through and it lands wrong, the way it always does, like putting weight on a leg that isn’t there.
Stanley rocks back on his heels. “We’ll let you unpack. House meeting at six. Dinner after. Somebody bought chicken. Nobody knows who’s cooking it.”
“That’s comforting,” Josh says.
Stanley points at me on his way out. “Freshman. You and Crayola across the hall are on dinner.” He winks at Josh. “Tradition.”
Benson grabs the back of Stanley’s shirt and steers him toward the hallway. “Come on.”
Stanley lets himself be dragged. “If you hear screaming, don’t panic. That’s just Hawthorne.”
Then they’re gone, their voices fading down the stairs.
The room goes quiet. Josh and I stand there with my life between us in one duffel bag.
He clears his throat. I hate that sound.
“Mary put something in the front pocket,” he says. “Don’t forget.”
“Okay.”
“She said there’s a towel in there too.”
“Okay.”
“And snacks.”
I look at him.
He shrugs. “Don’t look at me. I told her you’re not seven.”
My mouth moves. Almost. Not enough to call it anything.
Josh sees it. His face does something small and I have to look away from him and out the window instead, at the street, at the cars, at literally anything with a horizon on it.
Down there, families are still unloading. A mother wipes her face with the back of her wrist while her son studies the sidewalk very hard. A father hugs his kid one-armed and hits him too hard on the back twice. Somebody’s brother is being yelled at about a box. Somebody honks. Somebody laughs.
Everybody down there has people, showing up with folded towels and desk lamps, taking pictures to post about on social media.
And I have Josh, standing in a room that’s too small for the two of us, trying to work out how to walk out of it without making it strange that four years just ended in a doorway.
Four years in his house. The place the paperwork calls a foster placement and the school calls a residence and Mary calls, without any apparent difficulty, home. Placement number six. The one that didn’t end.
He’s the reason I’m standing here. Not part of the reason. The only reason. There’s no version of this where he isn’t, and both of us know it, and neither of us has ever said it out loud.
“Call,” he says.
“I will.”
“No, you won’t. That’s fine.”
Something goes tight under my sternum, high and mean.
He sighs. “Try to, Pers.”
That one I can do. “Yeah.”
He nods once. Then he reaches into his jacket and comes out with a piece of paper folded into quarters.
“It’s nothing, kid.” He holds it out.
I take it. I don’t open it.
Josh looks like there are ten things stacked up behind his teeth. I watch him swallow every one of them and pick something else instead.
Then he reaches over and takes the back of my neck in his hand, palm heavy and warm, thumb along the tendon.
“You earned this.”
My throat shuts so fast I nearly choke on nothing.
I look at the floorboards. There’s a knot in one of them shaped like a comma. I look at it very hard.
“You hear me?”
I nod.
His hand tightens once. “You didn’t get lucky. You didn’t sneak in. You didn’t fool anybody. You worked your ass off, and you earned it, Percy.”
My fingers close around the paper until it bends.
Say it.
Two words. Two syllables. Six letters. I’ve said harder things to worse people in worse rooms with a caseworker taking notes on a clipboard.
Merci.
I can say it in French. It sits right there behind my teeth, whole and ready.
Say it in English, you coward.