3. Chapter Three #2
He steers me toward the fridge, where Drew is standing with a guy I recognize from practice but haven’t met — dark hair, the kind of guy who walks into a room and has it easy.
“Freshman,” Stanley says, dropping me into the gap between them like a chair he’s brought to the table. “Theo Marsh. Theo, freshman. Percy. He’s a goalie and he’s better than Kowalczyk and we’re not saying that out loud yet.”
“Deveroux.” Theo puts a hand out. “Heard about you.”
I shake it.
“He doesn’t talk,” Stanley says.
“Cool,” Theo says, and lets it go, and I decide I don’t hate him.
Drew’s not listening to any of us. He’s watching the hallway that goes back toward the bathroom.
“She actually came,” he says.
Theo looks. “Who?”
“Ventura.”
Theo’s whole posture changes about two degrees. “Penelope’s here?”
“Ivory brought her.” Drew tips his cup. “I told her to.”
“You told her to,” Theo smirks.
“I did,” Drew says. “For you. Because I’m a team player.”
Theo laughs.
“Something spilled on her,” Drew adds. “Whole front of her dress. Ivory’s got her in the bathroom.”
“That’s a shame,” Theo says. “Terrible. Maybe I should help her out of it.”
My heart pinches in my chest. Penelope Ventura. I look at the floor I just cleaned.
“Don’t,” Stanley says.
“I haven’t done anything.”
Stanley points the neck of his beer at him. “She’s too good for you.”
“Obviously she’s too good for me.” Theo shrugs, easy, no bruise on it at all. “She’s too good for everybody in this house.” And he says it like it’s funny.
Drew laughs. Stanley says something back. The conversation keeps moving without me in it, the way conversations do, and I stand there holding a wad of wet napkins and let the sentence go all the way down.
She’s too good for everybody in this house.
He said it as a joke, but he’s right. It’s none of my business, but I know what he means immediately because I saw it.
Before I knew her name, before any of this, in the eight seconds I had my hands on her — I saw the dress, the way it was cut, and the way she stood in it.
I saw a girl take a ruined evening and make it small on purpose so a stranger wouldn’t have to feel it.
The difference between me and Theo Marsh is that he can say that sentence out loud and laugh at it, because for him it’s a joke about a girl.
For me, it’s not that funny.
“I’m gonna go say hi,” Theo says.
“Say hi,” Drew says, and howls.
Somebody in the living room howls back, and then the whole house is doing it, forty guys baying at a ceiling, and Stanley throws his head back and joins in at a volume that removes about a year from my life.
I look toward the hall. She’s walking out of it with her friend still talking at her. The front of the navy dress has gone dark from her collarbone to her hip where somebody’s tried to work at it with a hand towel. It looks worse than it did before. Anybody could see it from across the room.
She’s got one hand resting flat over it.
Not hiding it. Just resting there, the way you’d hold a hand over a bruise while somebody talks to you about something else.
And then she looks up and her eyes catch mine.
Straight through the room, over the top of about nine people, no searching, like she’d already known where I was standing.
Everything in me goes still. I feel it in my throat.
Actual pressure. Over a dress. I don’t know what my face is doing, but she holds it.
One second. Two. Then Ivory says something, and she turns back to her, and that’s it.
That’s all it was. I don’t know what I wanted it to be.
Then Theo’s there, one hand on the wall beside her head, saying something that makes her friend, Ivory, laugh.
Penelope isn’t laughing. She’s listening, though. Head slightly tipped, hand still flat over the front of her dress.
I put the napkins in the trash and go find the stairs. Somebody’s making out at the top. Somebody else is hanging over the railing yelling at the living room.
My door shuts, and the sound drops by about half.
I stand in the dark with my back against it.
The bass still comes up through the floor.
It’s in the soles of my feet. Hawthorne House doesn’t know how to be quiet.
I get the wet shirt off over my head and it takes a layer of cold with it.
My collarbone’s sticky. I throw it into the mesh hamper Mary made me pack, which I told her I did not need, which I have now used four times in a week.
I find a clean shirt and throw it on. Then I sit on the edge of the bed with my elbows on my knees and look at the floor.
I got what I wanted. Quiet room. Nobody in it.
It doesn’t help. Because now the whole thing is running on a loop with commentary, and the commentary is not kind.
A dress like that is — what. A hundred dollars?
I don’t know. That’s the thing that’s actually crawling on me.
I don’t know what a dress like that costs, because I have never in my life been in a room where anybody would tell me.
And I keep coming back to the same eight seconds.
Her hand on my forearm. The nails. The ice in the fold of the fabric at her waist. Désolé, out loud, in a kitchen, like an idiot. And her soft voice saying it’s okay.
She had every right to make that into something.
I gave her a free shot and she didn’t take it.
I can’t work out why that’s sitting on my chest heavier than if she’d just yelled at me, except that I think I know exactly why.
I have never once collided with a person off the ice.
I keep a few feet between me and everybody, always.
It has never failed before. Tonight it failed.
Tu ne regardais pas. I was looking at the floor so nobody would talk to me.
There’s a knock at my door, so I sit up. “Yeah?”
The door opens four inches, and it’s Blue Golding, the other freshman, who moved in the day before I did and has said maybe sixty words to me total, which is roughly fifty-eight more than I’ve said to him.
“You good?”
“Yeah.”
He looks at my shirt. “You changed.”
“Yeah.”
“Stanley?”
“No.”
“Shocking.”
I almost smile.
He stays in the doorway. He looks around the room — bare walls, one duffel still half-unpacked in the corner — and then back at me, and then down at the floor where the bass is coming through.
“Too much?”
I nod once.
He leans his shoulder into the frame.
“Same.”
I look up at him.
Downstairs somebody yells Stanley’s name. Then there’s a crash. Then Benson, at a volume that carries through two floors, “Are you kidding me?”
Blue stares at the wall for a second.
“The side door’s better,” he says. “Nobody uses it once the keg goes out.”
“Side?”
He nods. “Past Rowan’s bedroom door.”
I didn’t know that one existed, so I follow him out.
We walk down the stairs, down the hall, and out the side door.
The side step is cracked concrete tucked between the house and the hedge.
Two people fit if neither of them is precious about personal space.
The air out here is cold enough for Blue to shiver.
It smells like wet leaves, spilled beer and, faintly, somebody’s cigarette.
Blue sits down first. I sit at the other end and leave a foot between us.
Neither of us says anything for a while, and it’s the easiest four minutes of my night.
Through the window we’ve got a cross-section of the living room, like a dollhouse with one wall off.
Stanley talking with his whole body. Benson nodding along to the music with a beer, not saying much, watching everybody.
Rowan standing at the edge with a cup, which appears to be his entire personality at parties.
Four seniors folded over each other laughing at something.
Somewhere in there is Theo, and somewhere in there is a girl in a navy dress, and I make myself not go looking.
The crowd starts shoving back. Stanley’s got both arms out, herding people toward the walls, and two of the upperclassmen are helping him clear a lane.
“Looks like the year’s off to a good start,” Blue says.
Stanley climbs up onto the couch.
“What’s he doing?”
Blue murmurs, “I don’t know.”
Stanley does a standing backflip off the couch.
He lands it. The whole room comes apart — forty people converging on one guy, and the sound gets through the window.
“Wow,” I say.
“Yeah.”
The team’s jumping. Stanley’s jumping in the middle of them with his shirt half over his head. Then the entire house screams, “Shots,” in one voice and stampedes for the kitchen.
“They do this every home game, apparently,” Blue says.
“Yay.”
It gets a short laugh out of him. Something in my chest lets go about a quarter inch.
I turn away from the window, put my head back against the siding, and breathe in air that hasn’t been used.
In for four. Hold for four. Out for six.
Tomorrow there’s lifting at six. Next week there’s classes. Then there’s ice, a whistle, and eighty feet of rink. I can make it to that.
Something goes over in the kitchen. Glass, from the sound of it.
Benson roars, “Stanley!”
Blue doesn’t move.
“Welcome to Hawthorne,” he says.
I nod.