16
Two Hours of Excellent Self-Control
Nash
Study hall is the easiest two hours of my week now, which is its own kind of joke.
Seven to nine, third floor, six athletes and a grad student with headphones.
I sign in on time. Greeley sits across from me and doesn’t say a word, and neither do I, and for two hours the only sound at our table is two guys typing.
At nine, the grad student says, “That’s time,” and I sign out under my names from last Tuesday and Thursday, a little column of me being exactly where I said I’d be. Greeley gets up when I do. We take the same stairwell down, six feet apart, which for us is practically holding hands.
“Kenny,” he says.
I glare at him.
“You’re having a good week,” he says.
“It’s Tuesday,” I reply. “That’s barely a week.”
He laughs, and it sounds real. It always sounds real. “Dannebrog noticed. He said something to me about it. He thinks you’ve matured.”
“Great.”
We come out onto the library steps at nine-fifteen. The quad is mostly empty, a couple of people heading toward the dining hall, lamps on, and my breath is right there in front of my face.
“What are you doing later?” he asks.
“It’s already later.”
“Bunch of the guys are at my place. Mathers, Croft, a couple of the D. Nothing crazy. We’re not drinking much; there’s a skate at seven.” He shrugs into his jacket. “You should come by.”
“No.”
“Suit yourself.” He goes down two steps, then turns around and walks backward with his hands in his pockets. “It’s a team thing, though. Just so you know how it’s going to get described.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means Mathers asked if you were coming, and I said I’d ask, and now I asked.” He shrugs. “I’ll tell them you were tired.”
He turns around and keeps walking, and I stand on the library steps for about four seconds before I go after him.
Rafe tells me not to go. We’re in our room, I’m changing out of my study-hall shirt, and he’s sitting on his bed with his phone in his hand and his jaw doing that thing.
“It’s his house,” he says.
“I know whose house it is.”
“That’s where the last one happened. At his house, in front of his people, and it cost you a week on the ice and cost him nothing, because—” He stops. “Say it back to me. Why did it cost him nothing?”
“Because it was his house and his people.”
“So why are you going back to his house and his people?”
“Because Mathers asked if I was coming.”
Rafe puts both hands over his face.
Koda, who is on my bed uninvited eating a granola bar he found in my drawer, says, “I think we should go.”
“Nobody asked you,” says Rafe.
“We’re invited. We’re on the team. I’m allowed at team things.”
“It’s not a team thing. It’s six guys and a fucking setup, Barnes.”
“So then we go,” Koda says, “and it’s six guys, a setup, and three of us.” He grins at the ceiling. “I like those numbers.”
Rafe sits there with that, and I watch him hate it and accept it at the same time. “You don’t touch him first,” he says to me. “If you swing first in that house, it’s over. That’s all he wants. Say it.”
“I don’t touch him first.”
“Good,” Rafe says, and gets his jacket.
The house is quiet when we pull up, with three cars in the driveway when there should be more. Koda notices too. Greeley opens the door before we knock, holding a beer I don’t think he’s drinking. “You came.”
Inside, it’s six guys under every light in the house turned all the way up.
Mathers and Croft on the couch, two D-men I barely know at the kitchen table, a junior named Weber by the counter, somebody’s phone playing something quietly.
Nobody says hi to me except Mathers, who says “Kennebeck” in a way that isn’t friendly or unfriendly.
He has his phone out, low against his thigh, thumb moving, like he’s texting somebody.
There’s no Pennock and no Dannebrog. Rafe counts the room the same way I do, puts his back against the wall by the entry, and stays there.
“Beer?” says Greeley.
“I’m good.”
“Water?”
“I’m good.”
“Suit yourself.”
For ten minutes, nothing happens. Greeley asks about the skate and whether my legs are back after a week off.
He tells a story about his own freshman year, getting scratched four games straight, and it’s a good story, and Mathers laughs, remembering it.
I stand there with my hands in my jacket pockets and watch.
Every couple of minutes, he opens a door for me.
“We’re good, right?” he says, the first time.
“Yeah.”
“Because I don’t want a thing, Kennebeck. We’ve got a season.”
“Same.”
“So say it. Say we’re good, and we’ll all have a beer, and I’ll shut up about it.”
I look at him across his own kitchen with six of his guys in it, and I know exactly what I’m being asked to say and which version of it gets repeated in a locker room tomorrow morning. Kennebeck came over and said we were good.
“We’re fine,” I say.
Greeley smiles at his beer and takes a small sip. He says Dannebrog’s talked about moving the lines again.
“Is there a point coming?” Rafe says.
“I’m just talking.”
“You’re always just talking.”
“Waleska.” Greeley turns to him, delighted. “How’s it feel to be the reason your line’s got a reputation?”
“Better than being the reason mine’s got a coach,” Rafe says, and the two guys at the table go ohhh into their drinks, and for one second, it’s almost fun.
Then Greeley looks back at me. “Your dad coming out for the exhibition?”
I don’t say anything.
“That’s what I heard. That he flies out.” He tips his beer. “That’s a lot of travel for a guy who’s going to watch his kid sit at the end of a bench.”
“He’s not coming.”
“He’s coming,” he says. “Guys like that always come.”
Guys like that, out of his mouth, in that tone, about a man he has never met.
“You don’t know anything about my dad.”
“I know he’s been driving you to rinks since you were four. I know he calls you after skates. Barnes told half the bus in August.” He glances at Koda, who shrugs like it’s nothing. “I’m not even saying it’s bad, Kennebeck. I’m saying it explains things.”
“Okay, fuck off,” Koda says.
“What does it explain?” I ask.
Greeley shrugs. “Why you can’t stop.”
I look at the door. I’m going to leave. I look at Rafe, and I can hear him in the room an hour ago: say it. Say you won’t touch him first. I take a step toward the door.
“Hey,” Greeley says, “how’s the blonde?”
I stop.
“Because I saw her Sunday, walking past the union with her little friends. She’s got that walk like she’s mad about something. And I thought, that’s a shame, because she was nice.” He says it easily, like he’s being generous, looking right at me. “I could’ve had her upstairs screaming my name.”
It turns my stomach. “Shut your fucking mouth.”
The room goes quiet.
Rafe comes off the wall.
I hear him. I’ve also got my hand wrapped around the edge of the counter, and I don’t move it. Greeley looks at my hand on the counter, laughs, takes a drink, and says, quieter, “Mad that I took her to the rink and had her—”
I don’t listen to the rest. “We’re going.”
I turn around. Behind me, Mathers says, “Dec,” low, like a warning.
There’s a rack by the back door with four or five sticks in it, because it’s a hockey house and of course there are sticks by the door.
I don’t hear him take one. I’m reaching for the door when there’s a crack across my shoulder blades, the flat of the blade and the shaft coming down across my back from behind, and the sound of it fills the whole kitchen.
And I’m fourteen.
It’s the driveway after dark, a bucket of pucks, the streetlight buzzing over the garage, the TV loud through the kitchen door.
My stick is lying on the concrete where I dropped it, and it’s in my dad’s hand now, and the sound is exactly the same.
Wood and fiberglass on a body. That flat crack, and how it goes through a space and then through you, up your spine and into your jaw, and the garage door rattling behind my shoulder.
I turn around.
Greeley still has the stick when I get to him.
I take it with one hand on the shaft and one on his wrist, and he’s stronger than I want him to be, but I’ve got both feet under me and he doesn’t.
It comes out of his hands and skids across the floor into the leg of the kitchen table. Then I put him into the fridge.
Everything after that is loud. He gets me twice, once in the mouth and once low under the ribs, and both land and neither does anything, because I’m not in my body anymore.
I get him in the jaw, then the side of the head, and we go down into the table.
A chair goes over. Somebody’s glass hits the floor and sprays across the tile.
Mathers grabs me from behind.
“Off,” Greeley yells at him, at all of them, from the floor with his hand up. “Off! Let him.”
Mathers lets go, and that’s how I know exactly what this was. Six guys standing in a kitchen with their hands at their sides while their friend tells them to let it happen, because his story only works if nobody stops it.
We both get up. My mouth is full of blood, and my back is on fire in a line from shoulder to shoulder. Somebody’s phone is out, a rectangle of light held up at chest height at the edge of my vision, and I don’t care, and that’s how far gone I am.
He comes at me again. I put him onto the counter with my forearm across his chest and hit him twice more, and the second one opens something over his eye.
Behind me, Rafe is going at it with someone, and there’s a scuffle at the table, Koda into Croft and Croft into a chair, and the whole kitchen is noise.
Greeley gets both fists in my shirt and pulls, and it tears down the side and comes half off my shoulder, and then his hand slips, and the whole left side of me is bare.
I hear Mathers say, “Jesus.”
I look down.