2. Beau
Beau
O’Grady runs us for an hour and forty minutes on the first day of preseason and then looks at us like he’s considering going longer.
He doesn’t. But he looks at us.
I’m the last one off the ice, which is not required of me and which I do anyway, because I’ve been doing it since sophomore year and at this point it’s either a superstition or a compulsion and I’ve stopped trying to figure out which.
The rink is quiet by the time I hand in my stick — the overhead lights on their timer, the ice starting to settle, that stillness that a hockey rink has after everyone leaves it, which is a different kind of quiet than any other room I know.
Louder in a way. Like it’s still holding the practice.
My shoulder aches in the way it’s been aching since March, which O’Grady doesn’t know about, and which I am going to continue to make sure O’Grady doesn’t know about, because it’s fine.
It’s probably fine.
I roll it once, twice, grab my bag off the bench.
Fine.
The Raven House sits on the east edge of campus, three blocks from Corbin and technically within walking distance of everything else, which is how we sold it to the housing office when they tried to put us in the athletic dorms freshman year.
Four juniors, same house, third year running.
The housing office pretends this is not preferential.
We pretend we don’t know it is. Everyone is comfortable with the arrangement.
Cash is already in the kitchen when I get back, which means he showered in four minutes, which is physically impossible, and which I’ve pointed out to him on previous occasions. He dismisses it by saying he cleans fast.
“Please tell me you’re cooking,” I say.
“I’m not cooking.”
“Wyatt?”
“Wyatt’s on the phone with his mom.”
I drop my bag by the stairs and check the refrigerator. It has a block of cheese, a six-pack, and something in a Tupperware that I’m not going to open. “We need to go to the store.”
“We need to go to the store,” Cash agrees, making no move to go to the store.
He’s sitting on the counter with his phone, scrolling.
Cash Rourke has the energy of a person who is always slightly moving even when he’s sitting still — dark hair, usually too long, currently still damp from the shower, permanent bruise under his left eye from something that happened in July that he gave me three different versions of and which I eventually stopped asking about.
He was home in South Boston for most of the summer, which for Cash means he was in about twelve places at once, all of them slightly questionable.
I grab a water bottle and lean against the counter opposite him. My shoulder makes a small complaint that I ignore. “How was your mom?”
“Good. Great.” He sets his phone down. “She got promoted.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He’s not quite smiling, but it’s in there somewhere. “Regional manager. New England.”
“That’s huge.”
“She’s been there fifteen years.” He shrugs, which is Cash’s version of emotion — not that he doesn’t have it, just that it travels sideways rather than up. “She was never going to leave, you know? Whether they promoted her or not. But still.”
“Still,” I agree.
He picks his phone back up. “Theo’s being weird.”
“Theo’s always weird.”
“Weirder. He’s in his room and he hasn’t said more than twelve words since we got back.”
I think about the summer. Theo was in Providence through July for training, and then he went quiet in a way that meant something had happened and he wasn’t telling anyone what.
He texted back in single sentences for about three weeks.
Then he went back to normal, which for Theo means a scowl and the occasional grunt of acknowledgment.
I let it sit. You let things sit with Theo until he decides to tell you, because pushing gets you exactly nothing, which I’ve known since freshman year.
“He’ll come out when he’s hungry,” I say.
“This is what I’m counting on.”
Heavy footsteps on the stairs. Then Wyatt appears in the kitchen doorway, six-four, sandy hair, his favorite Whitmore practice shirt, still carrying his phone.
From Alabama, somehow the nicest person I know, which I say with full awareness that it sounds patronizing but which is true — Wyatt Calloway has a quality of attention that would be unnerving if it weren’t so clearly warm, like he has decided in advance to think well of whatever you’re about to say.
He spent the summer running a hockey camp for foster kids in Montgomery. He does this every year. He never makes a big deal of it.
“Are we eating?” he asks.
“Trying to figure that out,” I reply.
“I could make something.”
“We have no food.”
“I could make something from the no food.”
Cash and I both look at him. He surveys the open refrigerator with the calm of someone who has, in fact, previously made something from a less promising situation.
“The cheese,” he says. “And there’s pasta in the cabinet.”
“That’s not dinner, that’s a cry for help,” Cash says.
“It’s cacio e pepe.”
“Cash-ay what?”
“Cacio e pepe. Pasta. Cheese. Pepper.” Wyatt is already opening the cabinet. “It’s Italian.”
“I know it’s Italian, I’m saying it sounds like a disease.”
Wyatt pulls out the pasta with the unhurried manner of someone who has already committed to this. “Theo eats pasta.”
“Theo eats anything.”
“Then problem solved.”
I’m about to agree with this, which would make it simple, except my phone buzzes on the counter. I glance at it.
Bella
Heard you’re back. missed you
The buzzing has been going on for three days. Since the day we got back to campus, actually, which is either a coincidence or it isn’t. She knew we were coming back for preseason — everyone on campus knows when preseason starts, the hockey calendar isn’t a secret.
I put the phone face-down.
I told her in May, clearly, that whatever we’d been doing wasn’t going to keep going.
Not because anything was wrong — Bella’s great, she’s funny, she’s easy to be around — but because I don’t have bandwidth for it and I told her that upfront when we started and she said she was good with it and then the end of the semester came and she was not, in fact, good with it.
Which I understand. But understanding it doesn’t change the answer.
The answer is no.
It’s been no since May. I was clear.
She’s texted four times in three days and I have not responded to any of them and I feel bad about that, which I’m aware is not an emotion I’m allowed to complain about to anyone in this house, so I’m not going to.
Cash is looking at me.
“What?”
“You made a face.”
“I didn’t make a face.”
“You made a face like someone texted you something you’re about to not deal with.”
“I’m dealing with it.”
“You flipped your phone over.”
“I’m dealing with it slowly.”
He makes a sound that means he's filing this.
Cash Rourke is somehow both the person least equipped to give relationship advice and the most likely to give it anyway, which is a quality I find both irritating and useful, depending on the week.
He spent the summer, as far as I can piece together, in a series of situations he'll describe when and only when he's ready to, which is fine. We operate on that system.
Wyatt sets a pot of water on the stove and says, to no one in particular, "I was thinking we throw the first one this year."
“The first party?" I say.
“Somebody always hosts the first week back.” He doesn't look up from the stove. “Might as well be us. Theo brought it up.”
“Theo brought up throwing a party?”
“He brought it up like he was against it, which means he wants it.”
This is, in fact, accurate Theo Mercer translation. Theo's default position on anything social is a kind of aggressive neutrality — he'll tell you why it's probably more trouble than it's worth while already deciding where he's going to post up once it starts.
He appeared in the doorway about two minutes ago — dark hair, the sleeve tattoos, the scowl that is his resting face and not a note on the room — and is now leaning against the frame with the posture of a guy who has decided to be present without technically arriving.
“I didn't say I wanted to host it,” he says.
“You said, and I'm quoting,” Wyatt says, “that it would probably be fine.”
“That's not the same as wanting to do it.”
“Theo. Buddy.” Cash swings off the counter. “You spent the whole summer in Providence punching guys during practice. You've gotta put some of that somewhere.”
“I put it somewhere. O'Grady ran us an hour forty.”
“And?”
“Got more in me,” Theo says.
Probably true. Theo runs on a fuel source I've never fully placed — six-four, the tattoos, the jaw, the look of a guy weighing something you'd rather he didn't. He was in Providence for camps, and then somewhere between there and back something happened he hasn't told us, and it's been sitting under the last week like a bruise nobody's pressing.
I respect the bruise. Got one of my own, technically.
I look at my phone, face-down on the counter. Then I look at Wyatt, who's feeding pasta into the pot with the calm of a man who mostly wants everybody fed.
“We host,” I say.
Cash points at me like I've said the thing he's been waiting on. “Yes. There it is. Beau's in.”
“I’m not doing it if it's the four of us standing around our own living room pretending it's a party,” Theo says.
“Nobody's standing around. It's our house. You'll have a wall to hold up and everything.”
“Cash'll end up in a corner.”
“I stand near a corner,” Cash says. “With purpose. Different thing.”
Wyatt says, “Pasta's up in twelve minutes.”
So that's settled.
Mormor calls at six.
She does this — times the calls to catch me between practice and dinner, because she has my schedule memorized better than I do, which I’ve stopped pointing out because it only makes her smile in a way that means she knows exactly what she’s doing.
“How’s the shoulder?” she says.
My hand finds the back of my neck. “What shoulder?”
“Beau.”
“It’s fine.”
“Your mother called me.”
“My mother worries.”
“Your mother is very smart, and you should listen to her.”
“I listen to her.”
“You listen to her and then you come back to campus and skate on a shoulder that shouldn’t be skating and call it fine.”
The thing about Margaret Sorensen is that she has eighty-two years of practice at being right, and she has never once had the grace to pretend otherwise.
She is four-foot-eleven, she has silver hair that she wears in the same bun she’s worn since before my mother was born, she has run the same bookshop for forty years, and she has approximately zero patience for bullshit from people she loves, which includes me.
I love her in a way that I can’t really explain to people who haven’t met her.
“The shoulder’s fine,” I say. “Tell me about the shop.”
A beat. She lets me redirect. She’s going to come back to the shoulder. We both know this.
“Busy,” she says. “End of summer is always busy. Students coming back.” A pause, and I can picture her — behind the counter, her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, the shop light warm, that old brass bell over the door.
“Sloane’s been wonderful this summer. She kept the whole place running while I was in Vermont. ”
I grab a water bottle. “Yeah?”
“She redid the entire new arrivals wall. I told her she could, and she did it overnight on a Tuesday like it was nothing. Came in Wednesday morning and I nearly cried.”
I don’t say anything because there’s nothing to say — Mormor talks about Sloane the same way she talks about the first editions she got last spring, with a quality of satisfaction that means this is mine and I know what it’s worth. She’s been doing this since I got back.
“She’s applying for the Yale MFA,” Mormor says.
“You mentioned.”
“In February. The audition.”
“You mentioned that too.”
“She’s very talented, Beau.”
“You’ve mentioned.”
A silence. Then Mormor says, with the precision of someone delivering the line she’s been warming up, “She’ll be at the shop on Thursday.”
I wait.
“If you were planning to come see me.”
“I come see you every week.”
“Thursday would be lovely.”
“Mormor.”
“I’m simply telling you my schedule.”
She is absolutely not simply telling me her schedule.
Margaret Sorensen has been simply telling me her schedule four times in the last week, and every single one of those schedules has included the information that Sloane Beckett would be there.
I don’t know what she expects to happen.
I haven’t met the woman. Whitmore is a big school, and despite Sloane working for Mormor, we’ve never crossed paths.
But Mormor still talks about her like she invented something.
“I’ll come Thursday,” I say.
“Wonderful.”
She sounds pleased in a way that should probably concern me more than it does.
After I hang up, I stand in the hallway for a second with the phone in my hand.
Through the kitchen door I can hear Cash arguing with Theo about the party, Wyatt stirring something, the domestic noise of a house that functions.
Outside, through the front window, the campus lights are coming on along the main path — the old iron ones that Whitmore put in three years ago and which everyone complained about at the time and which everyone now takes photos of in November when it snows.
My phone buzzes again.
Bella.
I pick it up. I type:
Hey. Not going to work. I meant it in May. I hope you’re good.
I hit send before I can revise it, which is the only way I can send things that matter. The revision is where I lose sentences. I’ve known this about myself for a long time.
I put the phone in my pocket and go back to the kitchen.
“Pasta’s done,” Wyatt says.
“Beautiful,” Cash replies.
Theo is already sitting at the table, which counts as enthusiasm from him.
Wyatt plates four bowls with the focus of someone who does not half-ass dinner, even when dinner is pasta and cheese, which it turns out is actually good — better than it has any right to be, given the source materials.
“You’re good at this,” I tell him.
“It’s just pasta.”
“It’s really good pasta.”
He shrugs. He doesn’t know how to take compliments, which is something I’ve noticed about Wyatt in the three years I’ve known him, and which I’ve never pointed out, because pointing it out would require explaining that I’ve been paying attention, and then he’d want to know why, and then we’d be having a conversation that neither of us is equipped for.
Cash points his fork at the center of the table. “Okay. The party. We’re doing this.”
“We’re doing this,” I say.
Theo picks up his fork. “Fine.”
“Was that enthusiasm?”
“No.”
Cash grins. I press a thumb into the heel of my palm under the table, where no one can see it. My phone is quiet in my pocket. The shoulder aches, and I breathe out slowly, and then I eat the pasta, which is genuinely excellent, and let the noise of the house do what it does.
Preseason has been going for a week. The season doesn’t start for six.
I’ve got time.
Everything’s fine.