7. Chapter Seven
Percy
I’ve been here for three weeks now, and I haven’t slept a full night since I got here.
It’s not the bed. The bed’s fine. It’s that the second the house goes dark and quiet, the voices start, and they don’t stop.
You should talk more, man. Why doesn’t this kid ever say anything?
Goalies are weird. Loosen up. Have a beer.
Say something, Deveroux, Jesus. They’re little things, most of them — stuff the guys tossed off and forgot about by the next drill.
But my head doesn’t forget them easily. They stack up in the dark and loop, one on top of the next, until my skull aches with the whole pile of them, and the ceiling might as well be a scoreboard running my issues back.
So one night I quit trying to sleep. I unzip the front pocket of my bag and pull out a paperback.
It’s written in French. There’s a sad-looking man on the cover.
Mary had a thing for buying me French-language novels.
She said it was to keep the language alive in my head, but I never told her that I think in French –– that it’s my first language and my father’s voice in my head.
He’d scream at me in French. It was easier for him to talk shit to me when nobody in America understood what he was saying.
I smack the novel on my palm and take it downstairs.
I know the guys are going give me shit for it, but when I stay in my room for too long, studying, Stanley barges in here and talks my ear off.
The guys clock the book by the end of the week.
Deveroux and his little French novel. Stanley builds a whole routine around it.
He can’t believe I can speak French. For some reason, people learn that you speak another language and a different set of respect is thrown your way.
You must be smart. You’re so posh. Say this to me.
What is it like in your brain? All the questions you can possibly think of, Stanley has asked.
He is the loudest in the house and not sorry about it.
I take the same chair at the dining table every morning and every night, and the guys give me hell for that too, and I let them, because after a few days, the spot is mine and I like that it’s mine.
One night, Stanley drops into the chair across from me, mid-rant about how he should’ve picked a school with a beach, somewhere warm, somewhere that isn’t “cold-as-fuh-Michigan.”
Benson is at the counter taping a stick, and without looking up he says, “You’d drown inside a week,” and Stanley takes it as a compliment.
Rowan snorts from the couch and doesn’t look up from his phone.
Then Blue comes in, pulls out the chair on my left and sits.
He says nothing at all, and the two of us just stay quiet in the middle of Stanley’s noise while he goes on about a beach nobody’s ever taking him to.
Sitting with the novel in my hands is how I learn the house.
Benson’s the one I’d call if I got into something.
He’s serious most of the time, but he’ll land a joke so flat and so late you don’t see it coming.
But he’s genuine and caring like he genuinely gives a shit about you.
Rowan keeps to himself and has a colder sense of humor than anyone expects out of him.
He shows his respect in a different way than I know.
He’s made me toast and coffee countless times.
I didn’t know how to accept it at first, and now it’s just a given.
I still don’t know what to do with that.
And Blue — Blue’s the one I’d call if I needed to get bailed out of jail.
He barely talks. I get the feeling he’s carrying something of his own he doesn’t set down either.
But he took the seat next to mine and never gave it back, and some nights that’s the entire conversation.
Then it’s three months in, and I still haven’t played a single hockey game.
Practice is fine. It’s only that all of it bends toward Cole — his senior year, his last real shot at going pro — and that’s how it should be.
I take the third net down at the bad end and I watch him run live reps and then I take my own, and the pucks get in on me more than they stay out.
Every one of them measures the exact distance between where I am and where I’d have to be to matter.
I’m not ready. I know I’m not ready. Some nights that sits fine, and some nights it sits like a stone in my chest.
The strange part is school. I never gave a single damn about school in the past, and now I’m acing all of it.
Midterms come back with numbers next to my name I’ve never seen before.
It isn’t that I got smart. It’s that I’ve got nothing else here.
There’s no drama. No running from my life.
No trying to impress my foster family so they don’t hand me back to the state.
None of it. Josh was right about everything.
I’m building a life here. Now, it’s just a quiet room, a dining table, and a stack of hours I don’t know what to do with, so I pour them into school, and it turns out that it fucking pays off when you put in the work.
Hawthorne loves to throw parties, and I’ve got those figured out, too.
If I don’t have a drink in my hand, Stanley won’t let it go, Benson starts asking if I’m all right, and Rowan watches me all night with that worried line cut between his eyebrows.
I learned that weeks ago. So I hold one beer that I can’t fucking stand to drink, and I make it last until three in the morning.
It buys me the quiet to sit in my chair and be left mostly alone.
It only stops working when Stanley’s had too much, because then he won’t get out of my face.
It’s a cold night in December when Hawthorne throws a celebratory party for winning our home game. I’ve got the book open and the warm beer beside me when Stanley drops into the seat across from me, three drinks past sense, and points his cup. “You’re the definition of mystery, Deveroux.”
I turn a page as he looks at Blue sitting next to me.
“Golding and Deveroux. The mysterious men of Hawthorne.” His eyes narrow, delighted with himself. “You ever killed a man, Percy?”
It gets a sound out of me before I can stop it, a tsk.
He snaps his fingers, and half comes out of the chair. “Fellas — fellas — I got a reaction out of the goalie.”
I drink the beer I hate so he’ll have less to say about the fact that I’m not drinking it.
Benson’s beside me with his elbows on his knees, and Stanley swings the whole table into one of his speeches — the boys of Hawthorne, here to play, here to turn pro, not here to end up like Faulkner across the room with his tongue down some girl’s throat.
“Rule number one, boys.” He lifts his cup and goes around the table, and when he gets to me, he doesn’t skip me.
He looks at me the same way he looks at Benson, like there’s a version of things where I go pro right alongside him, and my gut pulls tight, because I know exactly what I am — third string, a year off a real minute, maybe two — and he’s not looking at me like that at all. “Swear it.”
Benson knocks his cup to his. Rowan lifts his. Blue and I raise ours at the same second without looking at each other, and it’s stupid — a drunk kid’s oath about not falling in love before the draft.
Then Stanley smirks. He swings his cup toward the couch across the room, where Faulkner’s got the girl half in his lap. “And to not ending up whipped like that sorry bastard Faulkner over there.”
Half the room laughs. Drew doesn’t.
He comes up off the couch, the girl sliding off his knee, his neck already going blotchy red. “The fuck did you just say, Ermington?”
“You heard me.” Stanley doesn’t lose the grin. He looks like a man who’s done this a hundred times confidently.
Drew says across the room, “Say it to my face.”
Stanley keeps the smirk as he crosses the room. He walks right up until Drew has to tip his chin to keep the eye contact, because Stanley’s got a few inches on him. He pats Drew on the cheek, once lightly. “Put your dick back in your pants and maybe you’ll have a future, brother.”
Drew slaps his hand away and steps into him — and I’m up out of my chair fast enough that people look at me. But so is Benson. So is Rowan. And Blue. The four of us rise at the same second, no word, no signal, and end up standing at Stanley’s back in a line.
Drew’s eyes go down the wall of us, and the fight leaks out of his face. “What the hell is this?”
Stanley laughs and drops both hands onto Drew’s shoulders, folding the whole thing into a joke before it can turn into anything else. “Relax. Nobody’s swinging on anybody.” He steers Drew back a step. “You’re too pretty to bleed.”
Stanley lets go of him, turns, and climbs up onto the coffee table like the last thirty seconds never happened. “Who’s doing a keg stand with Stan the Man?”
The half of the party he hasn’t insulted yet roars back at him, and then he’s off the table and carving through the crowd toward the kitchen.
Rowan chuckles. “Can you believe he’s calling himself that?”
“Better than cup,” Benson says.
Rowan tilts his head. “Why would he call himself cup –– oh.”
“Yeah,” Benson says as Stanley jumps over the couch and runs over to the keg with the entire party chasing after him. “We should make sure he doesn’t––”
Rowan nods. “Yeah.”
Blue looks at me. I shrug. We follow.
The next Hawthorne party is two weeks later, and final exams are close enough now that my head won’t shut off.