4
Excellent Timing, As Usual
Nash
Jules is on her knees on my floor when Coach Berwyn texts me.
My phone is face up on the desk, and it buzzes hard enough against the wood that we both hear it. Jules doesn’t stop. She looks up at me through her lashes, one hand on my thigh and the other wrapped around me, smiling, because she knows I’m not going to pick it up.
I’m not. I’ve got one hand braced on the edge of the desk behind me and the other in her hair, and the dorm is quiet for once.
Rafe is at the dining hall. Koda is wherever Koda goes at six on a Monday.
The blinds are down, the light coming through them is orange and low, and the only sounds in the room are her mouth, my breathing, and the phone buzzing a second time.
She pulls back just far enough to say, “Popular.”
“Don’t stop.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
She takes me deeper, slow, and drags her nails down the front of my thigh, and my head tips back against the wall.
It doesn’t take long. When I come, my hand tightens in her hair, and she stays right there, then sits back on her heels, wipes the corner of her mouth with her thumb, and grins up at me.
“You were stressed.”
“I’m not stressed.”
“You were very stressed, Nash.” She gets up off the floor and stretches, and her sweatshirt rides up over her stomach.
It’s mine, the gray Woodbury Hockey one I gave her Friday night when she was shivering on the walk home.
She hasn’t given it back, and at this point, I don’t think she’s planning to.
“You were stressed Friday too. Is it always like this during preseason, or is it just you?”
“It’s hockey.”
She laughs and flops backward onto my bed, onto my pillow, and stares at the ceiling. I pull my sweatpants back up and pick up my phone.
Coach Berwyn: My office. 8am tomorrow. You and Greeley.
I read it twice.
“Bad?” Jules asks from the bed.
“No.”
“You made a face.”
I shake my head.
“You did. It was like this.” She pulls her eyebrows down so hard her whole forehead creases. “Very serious. Very hockey.”
I put the phone down. On Friday, Dannebrog told the whole locker room nothing happened, because nothing was allowed to happen.
Somebody talked anyway. There were twenty-two guys on that ice, and Greeley has at least four who’d sell me out for a sandwich.
Who doesn’t matter. What matters is that Berwyn can’t run a practice for another month, but he can sit two players in his office and look at them.
“You want me to go?” Jules asks.
She’s on my bed with one leg crossed over the other, my sweatshirt pushed up to her elbows. She’s easy to be around. She doesn’t ask things she doesn’t want the answers to, and she doesn’t make anything bigger than it is.
“I have to lift at eight,” I say.
“So that’s a yes.”
“That’s a timeframe.”
She sits up, grinning, and shoves her feet into her shoes. “You’re so romantic, Kennebeck.”
“You came over for twenty minutes.”
“And I got what I came for.” She hooks a finger through my belt loop, pulls, and kisses me quick. “Walk me out.”
I walk her down. We take the elevator, and she talks the whole way, about her roommate who’s dating a guy in the marching band. I don’t say much. In the lobby, she pushes the front door open with her hip and turns around in the doorway.
“This weekend?” she says.
“Maybe.”
“I’m keeping the sweatshirt.”
“I figured.”
She laughs and lets the door swing shut behind her, and I watch her go down the walk under the lamps before I turn around and head back up.
I take the stairs two at a time. By the second landing, my quads are burning from this morning’s skate, and I come around the corner to the third fast enough that I almost go straight into someone sitting on the step.
It’s the angry girl. Blondie. She’s hunched forward with one hand over her face and her phone in the other, the screen lit, and while I stand there, her shoulders move once, then again. She’s crying.
Fuck.
I don’t move, because I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. The stairwell is narrow, and she’s sitting in the middle of it. A moment later, she notices my shoes. Her hand comes down. Her eyes are red, her cheeks are wet, and she looks up at me for a second without saying anything.
Then she starts laughing. It’s the kind where she’s still crying at the same time and can’t pick one. She drags the sleeve of her sweatshirt across her face.
“What?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“What’s funny?”
Another laugh gets out of her. “You.”
“Me.”
“Of course it’s you.”
I don’t know what that means. She scoots sideways on the step and waves at the gap she’s made, maybe eight inches between her shoulder and the wall.
“Go.”
“I’m trying to.”
She looks at the gap, then up at me. “Jesus Christ. How fucking big are you?” She gets to her feet and flattens herself against the railing with her phone pressed to her chest. “There, your Majesty.”
I go past her close enough that her sleeve brushes my arm, and she leans away from it. I’m on the landing with my hand on the door when she says, “Asshole.”
I push through the door and let it swing shut.
Rafe is back when I get to the room, flat on his back with one arm behind his head and his phone held over his face.
There’s a dirt bike video playing with the sound off, some guy trying to clear an above-ground pool.
Rafe’s hockey stick is leaning against the wall by his bed with a fresh crack running up the shaft that wasn’t there before this morning’s skate.
He doesn’t look over when I come in. He sniffs. “It smells like vanilla in here.”
“It’s a candle.”
“We don’t have a candle.”
“Somebody down the hall has a candle.”
“Somebody down the hall is not wearing your sweatshirt, walking out of our building.” He tips his head on the pillow and looks at me, slow. “I saw her. She had your sweatshirt on her back, Kennebeck. You branding them now?”
“It was cold on Friday.”
“It’s eighty degrees today.”
“She liked it.”
“I bet she did.” He goes back to his phone. “Twenty minutes. I timed it from when I left. That’s generous, for you.”
“Fuck off.”
“I’m complimenting you. Last time it was ten.”
I drop into my desk chair. My laptop wakes up to the assignment I left open this morning, two pages on organizational leadership due Friday, four hundred and twelve words that don’t say anything. I read the last paragraph, delete two sentences, read it again, and it’s worse, so I put them back.
“Berwyn texted you,” Rafe says.
I look up. “How do you know?”
“Because he texted Greeley. Greeley’s roommate told Pennock, Pennock told Koda, and Koda told me at dinner with his mouth full.” Rafe smiles at the ceiling. “Eight a.m. You and the choirboy in the principal’s office.”
“Yeah, because he can’t run practice.”
“He doesn’t need to run practice to ruin your life. He needs a chair and a door.” On the screen, the bike clips the edge of the pool, and the guy goes over the handlebars into the water. Rafe watches it twice without reacting. “Somebody talked.”
“I know.”
“You want to know who?”
“No.”
“It was Raygoza. The D who follows Greeley around. I watched him in the dining hall. He looked at you like a dog that pissed on the rug.”
“I don’t care who.”
“You should.” Rafe’s jaw works. “Dannebrog said nothing happened. That’s supposed to be it. Somebody on this team decided Dannebrog’s word doesn’t count, so now you and Greeley get hauled in, and Dannebrog looks like a captain who can’t run his own skate.”
“And?”
“And somebody should do something about Raygoza.”
“Somebody meaning you.”
“Somebody meaning somebody.”
I look at the crack in his stick.
“Greeley got your reps today,” he says before I can say anything, lazy, to the ceiling, and he knows exactly what he’s doing.
“Second unit, on the breakout, while you stood at the boards like a traffic cone.” He looks at me with a slow, mean little smile.
“Dannebrog ran it five times. You know how many times he put you in?”
“Don’t care.”
“Zero.”
“Still don’t care.”
“Sure.” Back to the phone. “The choirboy told me to move my feet on the forecheck. In front of Dannebrog. Move your feet, like I’m eight and it’s my first practice.”
“Were your feet moving?”
The look he darts at me isn’t friendly. His hand closes around his phone, and I think about the crack in his stick. I know where it came from. I was on the ice at 7:40 this morning when he slammed it into the boards after Greeley skated away.
“Say that again,” Rafe says.
“Were your feet moving, Rafe?”
He holds it for a second longer, then laughs once through his nose and drops his head back on the pillow. “Fuck you.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Greeley is hard to get a read on. With everybody else, he’s loud and easy, the guy who knows your hometown and your girlfriend’s name.
With me, he’s quiet in a way that makes the space between us feel graded.
He tapes his stick like a surgeon. But on the breakout this morning, with Dannebrog watching and the second unit on the ice, he made the first pass every single time, flat and hard and right on the tape, and he never once looked like he had to think about it.
I stood at the boards and watched him do it, and I didn’t like how good it was.
“Greeley’s good,” I say.
“Never said he wasn’t.” Rafe scrolls. “He’s still a choirboy.”
“He’s good, and he’s a choirboy.”
“And you’re pissed.”
“I’m not pissed.”
He smirks at his screen without looking up.
“Tomorrow at eight, Berwyn’s going to sit you both down, and Greeley’s going to fold his hands in his lap and say he doesn’t know what you’re talking about.
And you’re going to sit there with your Friday face.
The serial killer one.” He turns his phone sideways and lets the next video start, loud, a crash and somebody screaming.
“Berwyn’s going to take one look at it and give Greeley your spot before official practice even starts. ”
I don’t care about this conversation anymore. “Headphones,” I tell him because I need to concentrate on homework.
“No.”
“Rafe.”
He looks at me over his phone with that same smile, deciding whether this is a fight he wants tonight. Then the door bangs open without a knock, and Koda walks in with a bag of chips in his hand.
“You tell him about Raygoza?” Koda says to Rafe.
Rafe looks at me. “I told him.”
“He care?”
“He says he doesn’t.”
Koda looks at me. He’s still got a faint red mark on his jaw from a corner battle this morning, and he’s been pissed about it all day. “Raygoza’s got a car in the lot by the rink. It’s already got a dent in the back, so honestly it’s halfway there.”
“No,” I say. “Nobody touches Raygoza’s car.”
“Nobody’s touching his car,” Rafe says from the bed. “We’re just going to go look at it.”
“In the parking lot,” Koda says.
“Parking lot,” Rafe agrees, and holds up his fist without looking. Koda bumps it, and then they both look annoyed that they agreed on something again.
“You two hate each other,” I say.
“We do,” says Koda.
“Deeply,” says Rafe.
“So stop agreeing.”
“We’re not agreeing.” Koda drops onto the end of my bed, uninvited, and opens his chips. “We just both hate Raygoza more. And he’s got that little girlfriend who waits for him after skates. I bet she’d love to hear what a rat looks like up close.”
“Berwyn is going to kill all of us.”
“Berwyn can’t practice us for a month,” Rafe says. “What’s he going to do, stare?”
“Yes,” I say. “For an hour.”
Koda eats a chip. “He can stare at me. I’ve been stared at.”
Rafe is on his bed with his cracked stick and his mean smile. Koda is on mine, getting chip dust on my comforter, still red along the jaw. Neither of them likes me, and they’ve both made that clear. They also both spent dinner finding out which one of our teammates ratted and what he drives.
“Get off my bed,” I tell Koda.
“No.”
“Crumbs.”
“The brunette left crumbs.”
“Friday,” Rafe says. “Ten minutes.”
“Twenty,” Koda says. “Rafe timed it today.”
“You two talk about this?”
“You’re a quick fuck,” Rafe says.
I close my laptop. Four hundred and twelve words on organizational leadership, and I’m not writing any more of them tonight. My laundry has been in the dryer since three. I stand up and grab my empty laundry bag.
“Where are you going?” Koda asks.
“Laundry.”
I shut the door behind me, and through it I hear Rafe say, “Twenty bucks it’s the blonde,” and Koda say, “Forty,” and then they’re arguing about something else.
The hallway is quiet. I push the stairwell door open. The step is empty, and I take the stairs down.