15. Chapter Fifteen #2
The kitchen settles. Benson’s staring at the table like he’s working out long division in his head. Percy is still watching me, which is more unsettling than anything Benson’s said. Blue is scratching the back of his neck.
“Okay,” Benson says. “Worst case scenario. Go.”
Blue says, “Coach finds out it’s fake. What happens to you?”
I make a small explosion with my hands and the accompanying sound effect. “I’m done for. He never forgets, he never forgives, and he talks to everybody.”
“So you start your career with a target on your back,” Percy says.
“Correct.”
Benson nods once, the way he nods before a face-off. Then he leans forward and plants his forearms on the table. “We’re going to help you.”
I put both hands flat on the wood. “Boys. Whatever is said at this table, in this fraction of time, never leaves this table. Aspen would end my life. She has the means and the motive, and she keeps a notebook.”
“Does she like you?” Blue asks.
I laugh, full and easy. “She loves me.”
Benson and Blue look at each other.
“How much does she hate you, Stan?” Benson says.
“Fellas.” I press a hand to my chest. “I just told you she loves me. You don’t need to worry about a single thing. I’ve got this completely handled.”
“You do not have this handled,” Blue says.
“I got it.”
“Stan, you are spectacularly fucked.”
“Then it’s a good thing,” I say, standing up and pointing at the whiteboard mounted on the wall, “that we’re a hockey team and I am very, very good at drawing up a play.”
Nobody moves for a second.
Then Blue, because Blue can never resist a project, gets up and lifts the whiteboard off its hooks and carries it over and props it on the back of a chair, the Hawthorne House Rules still written across it in my own handwriting in permanent marker.
I look at the rules. I look at the room.
“Stan,” Benson says as a warning.
“It’s a living document, Reeve.” I uncap the marker. I draw a center circle, two nets, and a little stick figure with a number eleven on its back.
“That’s me,” I narrate. “Obviously the handsome one.”
“Why are there nets?” Rowan says.
“Rowan, we are breaking out of our own zone under forechecking pressure, and the forecheck is two NHL families and a head coach. Stay with me.” I tap the board.
“Thursday. Connecticut. I land. I walk into the Linwood house. Objective: be the boyfriend they’ve been praying for, for one dinner, without leaving a single fingerprint that says it isn’t real. ”
“You’ve eaten at that table a hundred times,” Blue says.
“As a guest.” Percy, quiet. “Not as the boyfriend. The whole table will be watching the two of you the way they’ve never watched you before. Every look. Every time you don’t touch her. Every time you do.”
I point the marker at him. “See, this is why Percy’s on the top line.
Percy gets it.” I draw a little eye on the board and label it COACH.
“Rule one. We never get caught not knowing each other. Married couples finish sentences. We don’t have to be in love, we have to be fluent.
I need her coffee order, her mother’s middle name, the thing she’s allergic to, and one fight we’ve already had, because real couples have had those. ”
Benson stares at me. “You’re actually good at this.”
“What do you bring?” Rowan says. “To the house. You don’t show up to Coach Linwood’s empty-handed.”
I write WINE??? on the board and put three question marks because I do not know anything about wine.
“Pie,” says Blue. “Everybody loves the guy who brings a pie.”
“He can’t bring a store pie to a coach’s house,” Percy says. “It reads cheap.”
“Then he bakes one,” Blue says.
“I’m not baking a—” I stop. I write PIE (BAKE???) under the wine. “Rowan. You quit cooking, but you remember how. You’re on pie.”
“Absolutely not,” Rowan says. “I have said from the start of this conversation that I am not implicated. I will deny this meeting under oath.”
“Rowan’s on pie,” I write on the board.
“I’m not on the board, Stan—”
“And the tie,” Benson says, like he’s been holding it. “You’re wearing a tie, and you’re going to keep your mouth in check for one dinner, and you are not going as yourself to Coach Linwood’s table.”
I gasp. Genuinely. From the soul. “Reeve. Who am I if I’m not myself? You’re asking me to walk into the lion’s den naked.”
“You are going to get yourself killed,” Benson says.
“It’s going to save me,” I say, and I write BE YOURSELF on the board, and then, because Benson is looking at me, I write a small (carefully) next to it.
Blue’s grinning now. “I can’t believe you’re actually gonna pull this off.”
“I’m going to do more than pull it off, Baby Blue.
By Sunday, Coach Linwood is going to think I hung the moon, my father is going to weep openly into a turkey, and that whole table is going to believe Aspen Linwood and I are the greatest love story of our generation.
” I cap the marker and step back and admire the board, which now has a stick figure, two nets, an eyeball, and the word PIE on it, and which I consider a masterpiece.
“Because here’s the thing none of you appreciate about me, I’m a closer. ”
That’s when my phone buzzes on the table.
I flip it over. The whole room watches me.
Linwood: My mother wants to know if you have any food allergies for Thursday.
And something stupid happens in my chest. Some warm, dumb, traitor thing, completely out of proportion to a logistics question about a fake dinner.
I’m aware I’m grinning at the phone. I’m aware the grin is the wrong size. I clear it off my face fast, but not fast enough, because when I look up, Benson is looking at me, and Percy is looking at me, and neither of them says one single word.
Me: No allergies. I’m extremely low-maintenance and a joy to host.
The dots come up right away.
Linwood: I’m telling her the first part.
I grin at the phone again before I can stop it.
Across the table, very quietly, Percy says, “Mm.”
And nobody denies it.
Rowan’s the one who checks his phone. “It’s quarter to seven.”
The table reacts the way only five college students can react to the discovery that time kept moving during a crisis. Chairs scrape. Blue can’t find a shoe. Somebody’s keys are on the counter and not in their pocket. Rowan rinses his cereal bowl.
“Practice is at seven.”
“I’m walking,” I call out.
We all look at each other.
Percy says, “I’m driving.”
“I have class at nine,” Blue says.
“Everyone’s class is at nine,” Percy says.
Two minutes later, the five of us are out the front door and onto Hawthorne Street in the cold, bags over our shoulders, falling into the loose pack we’ve walked this exact stretch a thousand times.
Blue drops in beside me. “So does this mean we can go on a triple date?”
“I’d have to ask her.”
“It’d be good practice.”
“Sure, baby Blue.”
Benson’s on my other side with his hands in his pockets, saying nothing. Rowan’s already three strides out front.
We pass three doors down. I glance at the house, knowing somewhere in it that my hockey stick is still being held hostage. She has no idea that she’s completely lost this war.
I don’t slow down.
But I look.
Twice.
And every single one of these idiots notices, and every single one of them keeps his mouth shut. We walk to the rink together in the cold like we’ve got nothing to worry about in the world.