11
An Intervention Seems Reasonable
Kylie
The worst part of Wednesday is how many times I pick up my phone expecting it to be Evan, and how every time I have to remind myself that I told him not to contact me.
By Wednesday night, it has buzzed multiple times, and not once from him.
Four are the group chat. Four are my mom, because I finally told her about Evan and now she wants to keep asking if I’m okay. Three are Declan Greeley.
Declan: How’d the paper turn out?
Declan: You can come study tomorrow night if you’d like.
Declan: Also, what kind of name is Vandercook?
I sit on my bed with my knees up and text him back, because he’s funny, and because he asked, and because at eleven at night my room is very quiet. Tessa is reading, and there’s nobody else who wants to know how my day went.
Kenzie: Thursday night 412.
Kenzie: Mandatory.
Paige: What are we doing?
Kenzie: I have face masks, and you’re not allowed to leave.
Paige: I LIVE here.
I read it four times Thursday morning and feel like I can breathe. I don’t have Evan anymore, but I have new friends, and according to my mom, that’s what college is about.
“There’s a girls’ night tonight,” I tell Tessa while I’m brushing my hair. “Fourth floor, Kenzie and Paige’s room.”
Tessa is at her desk with a highlighter. “No, thank you, Kylie.”
“It’s face masks and talking,” I say anyway. “Nobody’s going anywhere. You wouldn’t even have to leave the building.”
She shakes her head.
I put the brush down and turn around. She’s got her hair up in a claw clip and a stack of printed readings in front of her. It’s ten in the morning, and she’s been in that chair since before I woke up. “Do you sit in here all day?”
She nods.
“That’s sad, Tessa. You should come hang out.”
“Mm. It’s not that sad. I’m fine.”
I go back to brushing my hair, because she’s right. She seems totally fine in her own world. I wish I could be like that. “If you hang out with anyone else, I’ll know.”
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I have no friends here.”
I put the brush down and wonder, for the first time, where exactly she’s from. Then my phone buzzes, and I don’t ask.
412 is a disaster in the best possible way: two beds, four girls, an open bag of chips, and a stack of face masks Kenzie bought in bulk over the summer because she thought college would be like this.
It turns out college is like this occasionally, because she said so.
Bianca is eating the chips like they’re dinner.
Paige does my face mask for me, sitting cross-legged on the bed in front of me, because I keep getting it in my eyebrows.
It’s cold and wet and smells like cucumber, and she talks the entire time about Koda, who she’s hung out with twice now.
“Twice,” Kenzie echoes.
“Sunday and Tuesday.”
“You didn’t say anything before?”
“I’m saying it now.” Paige smooths the mask over my cheekbone with her thumb. “Also. Kylie. I’m sorry about Saturday.”
I offer a small smile. “I know.”
She looks me in the eye. “No, actually. I used your name to get a guy’s number, and then it blew up in a kitchen in front of everybody. And then I told them about Evan, which wasn’t mine to tell, and Koda threw it at you in a diner. That was awful of me.”
“It was awful of you,” I murmur, while she smears the mask across my forehead.
“You have so much going on already. I didn’t mean for it to come out like that.”
Two weeks ago, I would have held onto that situation for a month. But she’s smearing cucumber on my face, and I’m so tired of carrying things I don’t have to carry.
“It’s fine,” I say. “I was mad. I’m over it now. Mostly. Koda’s still an asshole.”
“Oh, completely,” she says, and goes back to my chin. “Also, I got the dirt on the fight.”
Kenzie sits down next to me. “I’m next. Tell us everything you know.”
Paige tilts my face toward the lamp. “Koda said Greeley’s pissed because Nash is a freshman and took his spot. There’s only one spot, and Greeley is doing anything and everything to get Nash to fuck up before the season starts.”
“That’s it?” I scoff. “A spot?”
“Apparently it’s a whole thing.” Paige shrugs. “He said Greeley’s been running his mouth for weeks and the whole team knows it.”
“So Nash punched him,” I say.
“Koda said—” She thinks. “He said yeah, in front of everybody, which was stupid, but he didn’t start it.”
I sit very still with a cold mask drying on my face while Paige starts on Kenzie.
“Nash is still an asshole,” I say.
“Yeah,” Paige says. “They’re all dicks.”
My phone buzzes in my hand, and Paige’s eyes go down to it and back up to me. “Who’s that?”
I ignore her.
“Kylie?”
Kenzie leans over. “Is it your ex?”
Bianca stops chewing and puts her phone down. Paige watches my face. Kenzie tries to see my screen.
“It’s not Evan,” I say.
“Have you heard from him?”
“No. Not since the diner. I asked him not to reach out again.” I pick a piece of dried mask off my jaw. “So he isn’t.”
“And how’s that going?” Bianca asks.
I open my mouth to say fine, but that would be a lie. I shrug. “It sucks. I’m so used to having a boyfriend. We got together the summer before sophomore year, and everybody thought we’d break up by Christmas, and we didn’t, and then it was just—” I fan my face. “My whole life.”
“Wow,” Paige says. “That’s a long time.”
My phone vibrates again. “It’s Declan,” I say.
“Declan, Kylie?” Paige scoffs.
“He texts me. And I answer, because he’s funny, and because I’m—” I stop.
“Because you’re what?” Kenzie says.
I shrug, because it’s the same thought I had Tuesday in the library, in Evan’s voice. I keep fanning my face. “One time, Evan told me I’d never be single. He said it like a compliment. You wouldn’t be single a week, Ky. Somebody would snap you up.”
Kenzie makes a face.
“And then he told me that I don’t like to be alone.
At the time, I thought it meant he was scared of losing me.
Now it’s been a week, and there’s a guy texting me, and I keep thinking, what if he was right about me?
What if I’m the kind of person who can’t be by herself for five minutes without finding somebody to hold onto? ”
Paige pulls back from Kenzie and lets her finish her own mask. “Okay, first of all,” she says, “Fuck him.”
“Paige,” Kenzie says.
“No, I’m serious, that is such a guy thing to say. That’s a guy telling you he thinks you’re a girl-shaped object that gets picked up. That’s not a compliment.”
Bianca snorts.
“Second,” Paige says, “you didn’t find Declan. Declan found you. He walked into a kitchen where you were getting humiliated and came over. You didn’t do anything. It’s neutral.”
“Nothing is neutral,” Kenzie says, peeling the edge of her own mask. “Everything’s something. But you can go on a date with a guy and still be sad about a different guy.”
I stare at her.
“Are you going to go out with him?” Bianca asks.
I look at my phone. “He asked for Friday.”
“And?”
“I said yes.”
Paige points at me with the mask packet. “Kylie.”
“I said yes because I want to go, and because I want to see what he’s like when he’s not being nice at a party.” I pull my knees up. “And if I don’t like what I see, that’s it. I’m not doing anything I don’t want to do. I’m not jumping into anything.”
“Okay,” Paige says. “But you tell us where you’re going, and you text one of us at the end.”
“Obviously.”
“And if he’s weird—”
“I’ll be weird back,” I say. “I’ve gotten really good at it.”
On Friday, I’m putting on my second boot when Tessa looks up from her desk.
“Where’s he taking you?”
“I don’t know yet. He said it’s a surprise.”
She considers that, then pulls a Post-it off the pad on her desk, writes something on it, and holds it out. It’s her phone number, which I already have, and under it, in her neat square handwriting: text “laundry” if you want an out.
I look at her. “Laundry?”
“Nobody questions laundry.”
I fold the Post-it into my back pocket, and I’m smiling about it the whole way down the stairs.
Declan picks me up in the Corvin Hall lobby at six. He comes inside and waits by the mailboxes in a jacket with his hands in his pockets. When I come down the stairs, he looks up and smiles like the whole evening just got better.
“Kylie.”
“Hi.”
“You look nice.”
“Thank you.”
The split at the corner of his lip has almost healed. There’s a thin, darker line where it was that you’d only see if you were looking, and I’m looking.
“So I have to warn you,” he says, holding the door. “This is going to be the worst date you’ve ever been on. I can’t drink this week. Coach thing. And everything in this town closes at nine, which you’ll learn.”
I laugh. “That’s a strong opening. So what are we doing?”
“I’m taking you to the rink.”
“What?”
He grins. “You’ve never seen it.”
I shake my head.
He’s pleased with himself. “I’m going to show you the rink, and you’re going to pretend it’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen, and then I’m going to buy you something fried. Sound good?”
I nod.
The rink is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, and I don’t have to pretend.
We come in through a side door, down a concrete hallway that smells like cold and rubber and faintly like a locker room, and then he pushes through another door and the whole building opens up in front of me.
The ice is enormous, white and lit from above, with the boards going all the way around it.
Behind the glass, the seats climb up into the dark in rows and rows, thousands of them, and every sound comes back at you off the ceiling.
It’s freezing. My breath is right there in front of my face.
“Oh,” I say.
“Yeah. It seats four thousand. It’s loud when it’s full.” He tips his chin at the far end, where six or seven guys are skating in a group. “Skills session. That’s all they can do with the staff right now, a couple hours a week until October. Come on. The good seats are up here.”
He takes me ten rows up at the middle. It’s the best view in the building, and for a long time, it’s genuinely nice.
He’s good at explaining things, which surprises me.
He tells me what the drill is and why they keep restarting it and what the guy in charge is yelling about, and it doesn’t turn into a show of how much he knows.
When I ask what the red circles are for, he answers like it’s a normal question.
When a guy goes down hard on a turn, Declan laughs from his chest.
“That’s Mathers,” he says.
“Mathers.”
“His last name.” He grins at the ice. “Everybody goes by last names.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Kennebeck’s not out there either,” he says after a while. “Same as me. We’re both in the box.”
“The box?”
“Coach’s doghouse.” He rolls his shoulder. “I feel bad about it, honestly. He’s a really good player. Better than I was as a freshman, and I’m not saying that to be nice.”
I look at him. “That’s generous. He punched you.”
“He’s eighteen.” His mouth does something rueful. “I was eighteen once. I said worse to guys who deserved it a lot less.”
It’s such a good answer that my shoulders come down an inch.
“Did he say anything about it?” he asks. “After.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you leave with him and your friends?”
I blink at him. “Who said I’m friends with Nash?”
“You’re not?”
“No,” I say, looking down at the ice, and under my breath, I mutter, “What the fuck?”
He smiles at the ice. “He’s a wall, that kid.”
The conversation dies after that. He tries to revive it, but I mostly listen. He’s awfully charming. He’s almost too kind; nobody is this nice all the time. I watch him and start to think some of it has to be for show.
A door bangs somewhere below us, and three guys come out of a tunnel at the near end in workout clothes, one with a towel around his neck, cutting across the bottom of the seats toward the far side.
Nash is the one in the middle. His shirt has the sleeves cut off, his hair is wet, and he’s carrying a water bottle with nothing in his face at all.
The other two are talking. He isn’t. He looks like a guy who just finished doing something extremely unpleasant.
Then he looks up. Nobody said anything, but he looks up into the stands, straight at us, and sees me, and then sees Declan beside me with his arm along the back of my seat. He looks for maybe a second and a half. Then he turns his head and keeps walking.
“Kennebeck!” Declan calls. His voice goes up into the roof and comes back down. One of the other two guys glances up at us, then at Nash, then at the floor. “Good workout?”
Nash doesn’t turn around. He goes through the far door, and it swings shut behind him with a bang that echoes for about four seconds.
Declan settles back into his seat. “He’s not much for small talk.”
I look at the closed door at the bottom of the stands.
Nash didn’t have to do that. It sits in my stomach while Declan talks about something else, and I watch the ice with my gut swimming.
Nash didn’t react like a normal person would, and it almost feels like Declan brought me here to prove a point.
Tuesday was the library, which felt like an ambush. Then tonight.
I sit through another twenty minutes of drills.
He walks me home, and the worst part is that it’s a good walk.
He’s funny. He asks about my classes and remembers what I told him earlier in the night.
He tells me a story about his freshman year involving a bus, a tuba, and a broken thumb, and I laugh so hard I have to stop in the middle of the sidewalk.
He never buys me anything fried. I notice that too.
At the doors of Corvin Hall, he doesn’t try to come in, and he doesn’t lean down. “This was good. I’d like to do it again.”
“Yeah.”
Then, halfway down the walk with his hands in his pockets, walking backward, he says, “Tell Kennebeck I said hi.”
What?
I wave at him instead of saying anything.
I don’t go to the third floor. I go straight up to 412, texting Paige, Kenzie, and Bianca on the way, and I run into Paige in the hallway.
“How was it?” she asks.
I point at her door. “I need an intervention.”
They sit and listen, and I don’t leave anything out: word for word what Declan said about Nash, how weird the study hall was, how he took me to the rink and never bought me the food he promised.
“What the fuck,” Paige says, thinking.
Kenzie makes a sound. “Oh, yeah. That’s weird, Kylie.”
“Right?”
“Talk to Nash,” Paige says. “You should just knock on his door right now.”
“I don’t know which one is his door.” I laugh at the audacity of this girl. “I’m not doing that.”
“It’s three down from yours.”
Kenzie’s eyes go wide. “You’re such a stalker, Paige.”
I start to panic because I did not mean for it to go in this direction.
“I literally don’t care if that’s stalkerish,” Paige says. “I’d want answers. I want answers, and you’re only going to get them from Nash.”
My phone buzzes.
Declan: Glad you came.
I show them the screen, and they all make a sound.
Paige stands. “Go to your floor and knock on his door right now.”
“No,” I plead.
She grabs my hand. “Come on. I am not going to let you get dragged through the mud by this Declan dude. We’re getting answers.”