Chapter 17
Aaron
I check my phone. No new messages.
Nobody texted. That’s fine. I wasn’t waiting for anyone to text.
The library smells like old wood and that particular brand of carpet cleaner they use on the third floor.
I’ve been here since four. It’s almost eight.
My neck is stiff and my back aches and I’ve gotten through forty-two pages of a chapter that should have taken me two hours.
At this rate I’ll finish the review material sometime around Thanksgiving.
Valedictorian candidates don’t fall behind on review material.
I flip the page. Underline something. My handwriting looks like it belongs to someone who’s paying attention.
The chair across from me scrapes back.
My pulse does the thing it always does before my brain catches up, and then Sasha drops into the seat and tosses his backpack onto the table hard enough to rattle my coffee cup.
“I’m going to kill Diego Vasquez.”
I glance left. The freshmen didn’t look up. The sleeping girl is still asleep.
“Keep your voice down.”
“I don’t care about my voice, Aaron Kelly. I care about the fact that I have been waiting for three months and nothing is happening.”
He’s in a black hoodie with the hood pushed back, his hair shoved behind his ears, and his cheeks are flushed from the cold outside. His eyes are too bright. Not the fun kind of bright — the kind where he’s been working himself up about something on the walk over and arrived already at a ten.
I should tell him to sit somewhere else.
Two guys at a table in Whitmore is nothing — people study together, that’s what libraries are for — but my chest is doing the tightening thing anyway.
The scan-the-room thing. The who’s-watching thing that I can’t turn off no matter how many times Sasha tells me nobody cares.
“What happened with Diego?”
“What happened is nothing happened. That’s the problem.
” He leans forward on his elbows. His knee bounces under the table — I can feel the vibration through the wood.
“He said he had contacts. He said he would help move things along. He said —” Sasha makes air quotes — “‘I know a guy in immigration, don’t worry about it, I’ll handle it. ’ That was July.”
“It’s only November.”
“It is already November. If I don’t have my citizenship before graduation, I’m going to lose my mind.” He stops. His jaw works.
I close my textbook. Not because I was getting anything out of it, but because the look on his face makes cytochrome P450 feel very far away.
“Okay. Walk me through it.”
“I have walked through it. Many times. With Diego, with the immigration lawyer Diego recommended, with the second immigration lawyer I found on my own because the first one was useless.” His hand cuts through the air.
“I’ve been working on this since I first got my scholarship to come to America.
I graduate in May. I need this done before then, and no one will give me a date. ”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not moving.”
“It means I can’t plan. It means I can’t —” He stops again. Drops his voice, which for Sasha means going from audible-across-the-room to audible-across-the-table. “I can’t come out while I am still a Russian citizen. We have talked about this.”
My stomach tightens. “I know.”
“So every day that nothing happens with my citizenship is another day I am —” He stops.
His jaw works. His hand opens and closes on the table.
“I know this word. It’s —” He presses his fist against the wood.
“Stuck. I am stuck.” He gestures at the space between us.
At the careful gap. At the two guys who are definitely just co-captains studying. “This.”
I know.
I don’t say it again. I pick up my coffee and take a sip. It’s cold.
“Have you called Diego this week?”
“I have called Diego three times this week. He tells me to be patient. He tells me these things take time.” Sasha’s lip curls. “He is very good at telling me things he has already told me.”
“Diego’s a marketing guy. He’s not an immigration lawyer.”
“No, but he is supposed to know people. That is his entire job. Knowing people.” His knee bounces harder. “If I wanted someone to tell me to be patient, I would call Olga. At least she would pretend to care about how I’m doing and ask if I’m eating.”
That’s almost a joke. Not quite. His mouth doesn’t commit to it.
He’s scared. I can see it under the frustration — the thing Sasha almost never lets show. The boy who came to this country at eighteen with a duffel bag and a scholarship and built everything he has from scratch, and now some office in Washington gets to decide if he keeps it.
I want to reach across the table and put my hand over his. Squeeze his fingers. Do what a normal person does when somebody they care about is upset.
I pick up my highlighter instead. Roll it between my fingers.
“Diego cares about the brand stuff. The sponsorships. That’s where his head is.” I keep my voice even. Helpful. The good co-captain. “Maybe he dropped the ball on the immigration thing because it’s not really his lane.”
“Then he shouldn’t have told me it was.” Sasha’s fingers drum the table. “He sat in that office in Boston and said, ‘Sasha, I’ve got this.’ Those were his exact words.”
“That does sound like Diego.”
“It sounds like Diego because Diego says whatever he thinks you want to hear. And I wanted to hear it. So.” He spreads his hands. Drops them.
The heating vent above us clicks off. The silence feels louder than it should.
“So what are you going to do?”
He slumps back in his chair. The leather creaks. He stares at the ceiling for a long beat, and when he looks at me again, something in his expression has shifted. Flatter. Calculating.
“Lily texted me.”
My hand stills on the highlighter. “Lily Rafferty?”
“Do you know another Lily?”
“What did she want?”
“She wants me to come to Thanksgiving. With her family.” He says this like he’s reporting the weather. Overcast, chance of rain, Coach Rafferty’s daughter wants me at the family table. “She says her dad would be happy to have me. Since I have nowhere to go.”
First layer: Lily. Ballet major in New York. Coach’s daughter. The girl Sasha slept with sophomore year, before I was here, before any of this. I know about it. It’s not a secret. Sasha told me about it early on — casual, like it was a fact about himself, like his shoe size.
Second layer: Thanksgiving with the Raffertys. Sasha sitting at Coach’s table. Carving turkey. Lily across from him, smiling, touching his arm — probably hoping she can get another fling out of him like she did sophomore year.
Third layer: why is he telling me this.
“That’s nice of her,” I say.
“It is nice.” He’s watching me. Not the way he usually watches me — the way where his eyes drop to my mouth and stay there. This is something else. He’s reading me. “She has always been a fan of mine. She doesn’t hide it.”
“You should go. If you want to.”
“Maybe.” He pulls his phone out and turns it over in his hands. A small smile.
“Maybe I should marry her.”
The highlighter cap snaps in my fingers. I look down. I’ve bent it sideways.
“What?”
“For the citizenship.” He says it like it’s obvious.
Like this is a reasonable thing to say to the guy you’re secretly sleeping with while pretending to hate each other in front of everyone in the world of college sports.
“If I marry an American citizen, the timeline accelerates. It becomes much simpler.”
“You want to marry Lily Rafferty.”
“I didn’t say I want to. I said I should.
” He runs a hand through his hair. It falls right back into his face.
“She’s kind. She already knows my situation — the hockey, the visa, all of it.
She grew up with a hockey family. She understands.
And she likes me.” He pauses. Tilts his head.
“She might be understanding. About the arrangement.”
My throat is dry. “The arrangement.”
“A temporary marriage. For the paperwork. I would explain everything to her. I wouldn’t lie.” His eyes hold mine. “I’m not a liar.”
I know what he means by that. I know it’s aimed at me. I know the word liar is sitting between us like a grenade and he didn’t pull the pin by accident.
I straighten the highlighter cap. Smooth it back into shape between my thumb and forefinger. Very carefully.
“That’s fraud, Sasha.”
“It’s marriage.”
“It’s immigration fraud. You’d be filing federal paperwork based on a fake marriage. If anyone found out —”
“Who would find out? Lily’s not going to report me. Her father loves me. I’m his best player.” He shrugs. One shoulder. The casual kind that means he’s thought about this more than he’s letting on.
“You’re not his best player. We’re co-captains.”
His mouth twitches. “We’re co-captains and I’m the best player.”
Normally I’d take the bait. Normally we’d go three rounds on this and end up somewhere that makes my face hot. But my hands are gripping the edges of my textbook and my jaw is clenched and I can’t find the version of myself that knows how to banter right now.
“It’s a bad idea.” My voice comes out flat. Controlled. The voice I use when my mom asks why I haven’t brought a girl home for Sunday dinner. “You could lose everything. Your visa, your draft status, your contract —”
“Easy for you to say.” There’s no heat in it. He’s just tired. “You were born here. You have never had to wonder if the country you’ve built your life in is going to let you stay.”
That lands. My chest aches with it.
“I know,” I say. Quiet. “I know that’s not — I’m not saying your situation isn’t —”
“I know you’re not.” He softens. Just a fraction. His knee stops bouncing. “I’m not angry at you. I’m angry at the system and I’m angry at Diego and I’m angry that I have been playing hockey in this country for four years and I still have to prove I deserve to be here.”
I can feel something building in my throat. Something with teeth. Something like don’t marry her, don’t marry anyone, don’t let someone else have a version of you that I can’t even —
I swallow it down.
The girl two tables away shifts in her sleep. Someone’s phone buzzes in the distance. The heating system clicks on.
Sasha watches me. His head tilts a little — the way it does when he’s noticing something I don’t want him to notice.
“You’re upset,” he says.
“I’m not upset.”
“Your jaw is doing the thing.”
I unclench my jaw. “What thing?”
“The thing where you pretend you’re not upset while being very upset.” He leans forward. “Aaron. It would be temporary. A few months. It wouldn’t mean anything.”
It would mean something to me.
I don’t say that. I would rather chew through this textbook page by page than say that out loud in the Whitmore Library on a Tuesday night where anyone could hear.
“I just think there are better options,” I manage. “Diego’s useless, fine. Get a different lawyer. Talk to Coach directly — he’d help you.”
“I’ve thought about Coach.”
“So talk to him. Don’t — marry his daughter.”
Something crosses his face. Quick, then gone. “You’re right. It’s probably a bad idea.”
“It’s definitely a bad idea.”
He nods slowly. Studies me for another beat. The blue of his eyes in the warm library light is doing something to my chest that I’m going to ignore completely.
“I should go,” he says. He pulls his backpack off the table. Stands. His hand lands on my shoulder — brief, friendly, the kind of touch a teammate gives a teammate — and my whole body lights up from that one point of contact.
“Thanks for listening, Aaron Kelly.”
“Yeah.” My voice sounds normal. I’m pretty sure my voice sounds normal. “Keep me posted on the citizenship stuff.”
“I will.” He squeezes once and lets go and walks toward the stairs with his backpack slung over one shoulder and his hood still down and his hair catching the light from the old brass fixtures.
I watch him take the stairs two at a time.
The library settles around me. The freshmen leave. The sleeping girl’s alarm goes off and she startles awake and stuffs her books into her bag and hurries out without looking at me.
I’m alone.
I stare at the paragraph about cytochrome P450 enzymes. The words swim. My highlighter is still bent.
Lily Rafferty. Thanksgiving with the Raffertys. Sasha carving turkey, Lily pouring wine, Coach at the head of the table watching his daughter smile at his star player. A girl who’s kind and once slept with my boyfriend and might be understanding about a temporary marriage.
I get a visual of them sophomore year — before I was here, before any of this. Sasha in her room, or his room, her hands on his chest, his mouth on her neck. I push it out of my head.
Then I get a visual of them at a courthouse. A ring on his finger. Her last name on his paperwork.
I push that one out even harder.
My boyfriend. I’ve never said that word out loud. Not once, not to anyone. Not even to Sasha.
More than a year. It’s been more than a year and I still can’t say it in a library when nobody’s listening.
My phone sits face-down on the table. I don’t pick it up. There’s nothing I would type that I feel safe sending to Sasha right now.
I’m not jealous. I have no reason to be jealous. This isn’t even — we aren’t even — it’s not like he’s my —
I open the textbook. Flatten the bent highlighter cap. Read the paragraph a sixth time.
I don’t absorb a single word.