3. Beau #2
“Since always. You just never notice because I’m entertaining.”
This is true, and it’s also more than he usually gives away at a party at eleven on a Thursday, and I let it sit without pulling on it.
There’s something under the surface of Cash’s summer that I haven’t gotten to yet, and I’m not going to get to it in the hallway.
He knows that. He said it here because he knew I’d leave it here.
“She said something about three other girls,” I say.
“She was fishing.” He says it without hesitation. “She wanted you to ask who they were. Don’t ask who they were.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.”
Wyatt looks between us. “Should we check on Theo?”
“Theo’s on the porch,” I say.
“Is he in porch mode or leaving mode?”
“Porch mode. He’s got a drink.”
“Good.”
He heads for the back of the house. Cash watches him go and then looks at the living room like he’s deciding whether to go back into it, which means he’s going back into it. He glances at me once first.
“You’re good?” he says.
“I’m good.”
He holds the look for a half second in the way Cash does when he’s done being funny and is checking the actual answer. Then he nods and goes, and the hallway empties out, and I stand there for a moment with Wyatt’s beer and the smell of too-sweet perfume finally fading into the rest of the party.
I hope she’s worth it.
I don’t know why I’m still thinking about that. There’s no it. There’s nothing.
I roll my shoulder. The ache is there. I breathe around it and go find my team.
Theo has found something worth staying for.
He’s at the far end of the back porch, a drink in each hand — one of which presumably belongs to someone else — and he’s talking.
Actually talking, not performing the conversational minimum that Theo usually contributes to social events.
He’s talking to a girl with red hair who I don’t recognize, who is laughing at something he said, which is remarkable enough that I stop in the doorway to confirm I’m seeing it correctly.
Theo Mercer.
Making a person laugh.
At his own party.
On purpose.
Wyatt appears at my shoulder. “When did that happen?”
“Couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes ago.”
“That’s fast for Theo.”
“I know.”
We stand there for a second, which is probably rude, and then Theo notices us and does the thing where his face doesn’t change but something behind his eyes says if either of you says a single word, I will make your life genuinely difficult. Message received. We go back inside.
The party has found its late-night rhythm — the music louder, the rooms warmer, the crowd a little more honest about what it came for.
I move through it easier than I did two hours ago.
The hallway thing has settled into the back of my shoulders, where things go when I’ve processed them as much as I’m going to tonight.
I end up in the kitchen with Wyatt and a guy from the lacrosse team whose name I always want to be Ryan and isn’t.
We talk about the preseason schedule and the Atlantic Conference and whether Whitmore has a real shot at the Frozen Four this year, which is the kind of conversation I can run on about thirty percent of my brain while the rest of it does what it needs to do.
“Captain,” the lacrosse guy says. “What do you think about the new assistant coach?”
“Walsh?” I say. “Good. He’s got a good eye.”
“O’Grady brought him in?”
“O’Grady recruited him. Played for Minnesota in the nineties. He knows what he’s doing.”
“You trust him?”
“Early days,” I say. “But yeah. I think so.”
Wyatt glances at me. He caught the calculation. He doesn’t say anything.
We’re still in the kitchen when Cash reappears from wherever he’s been with a story that involves, inexplicably, a fire extinguisher and a freshman who was trying to impress someone, and the telling of it takes about ten minutes because Cash tells stories the way he plays hockey — full speed, questionable decisions, somehow nobody gets seriously hurt.
Wyatt laughs the real laugh that goes all the way to his eyes.
I crack up somewhere in the middle at a detail Cash drops completely deadpan, which is always the best delivery.
Theo comes inside from the back porch at some point, red-haired girl gone, expression back to baseline. He surveys the living room with the look of someone doing a structural assessment.
“Good party,” he says.
Coming from Theo, this is a standing ovation.
“Yeah,” I say.
The four of us end up on the front porch without really deciding to — just drifting out there one by one the way we do, the porch being the Raven House’s version of debriefing.
Inside, the party is still going. I can hear it through the screen door — the music, the low current of voices, someone laughing at something in the kitchen. It’s got another hour in it, maybe two.
The campus is quiet from out here. The old maples along the path have just started to turn at the edges, the first suggestion of color that’ll be full by October.
The lampposts run down toward the main quad, throwing yellow light on the pavement, and beyond them the hill drops toward town — Haven at night is just a scatter of warm windows through the trees, the white steeple of the First Congregational catching the last of the light, the clock tower on the town hall reading five past eleven.
“Good summer?” Wyatt says, to no one in particular.
“Mine was fine,” Cash says.
“Yours was a disaster,” Theo says.
“A fine disaster.”
“Those are different things.”
“Are they?”
Theo considers. “No.”
“You’re a real ray of fucking sunshine, Mercer, you know that?”
“I know,” Theo says, and drinks, mildly pleased.
I let them go. My shoulder aches with the low-grade persistence it’s had for six months, and I press my thumb into my palm and look at the lampposts and think about nothing in particular, which is what the porch is for.
I hope she’s worth it.
I don’t know why she said that. There’s no she. I’m not — there’s nothing.
“You’re doing the Captainy thing,” Cash says, beside me.
“I’m sitting on my own porch.”
“You’re sitting quiet.”
“It’s eleven.”
“You’re thinking at the lampposts.”
“I like the lampposts.”
He makes a sound that means he’s filing this and choosing not to press it, which is Cash doing me a favor, and I take it without comment.
He stays another minute beside me — I know him well enough to know he’s leaving the door open — and then he goes, and the screen door closes behind him, and I can hear him pick up exactly where he left off with someone in the kitchen, volume back up, like he was never gone.
I sit on the porch for a while longer.
The semester is six days old. Preseason has been running for a week. Two-a-days through October, and my shoulder is going to be fine before the first game, and I’m going to make sure of that without anyone’s help.
Everything’s fine.
Eventually I go back inside.