16 #2
It starts above my hip, where my breezers usually cover it, and climbs up my side into my ribs.
It’s wider at the bottom, where it went deepest, and it narrows as it goes up.
The skin there is pale and shiny and tight, pulled in against itself, and in places it sinks below everything around it, enough that the shape of my side changes.
Under the kitchen lights, you can see the faint diamond pattern the graft left, like chicken wire pressed into wet cement.
It doesn’t look like a skate cut. It looks like something melted and somebody put it back together.
It’s ugly, and I know it. That’s why I wait to shower alone. Half the room thought it was because I had something small to hide. Unfortunately, the thing I’m hiding is bigger than anybody’s dick in here.
The room looks at it. Greeley, underneath me, with blood running into his eye, looks at it. Then he looks at me, and for one full second, Declan Greeley looks like a guy who just found the bottom of something.
I get off him. He shoves me as I go. I grab the ruined half of my shirt and pull it across, and it doesn’t cover anything. It’s hanging off my shoulder in two pieces with nothing to close, and I stand in the middle of his kitchen holding fabric against my side with one hand like an idiot.
Never have I ever been in a fight with my shirt shredded into pieces.
Greeley ripping my shirt is another fucking red flag. This guy really wanted me to hit him.
He wipes the blood out of his eye with the back of his wrist and slides off the counter, breathing hard, not taking his eyes off my side.
“What is that?” he says. “That’s not a skate. I’ve seen skates. Guys, that’s not hockey. That’s a burn.” He tilts his head. “Somebody burn you, Kenny?”
That fucking nickname.
Nobody says anything.
“Huh,” Greeley says. “That explains a lot, actually. That’s what that is. Somebody set you on fire when you were a kid, and now you can’t—”
I don’t hear the rest of it. I have him back in my hands. I know the table goes. I know I get him, because afterward I can feel it up through both wrists. I know somebody’s arm comes around my throat from behind and I get out of it. I know Mathers yells something and then stops yelling.
Everything goes black, and then it’s Rafe.
Rafe with both arms around my chest from behind and his feet planted, walking me backward, saying my name over and over in my ear, and Koda in front of me with a hand flat on my chest and his whole weight in it, shouting, the two of them getting me across a kitchen and through a doorway and out a door I don’t remember opening.
Cold air. Steps. I’m on the front walk, and I’m still going.
“Nash!”
“You’re outside. You’re outside, we’re going home—”
“Nash!” Rafe shouts.
I get an arm free and most of the way turned toward the house before he gets me again, and he’s stronger than I thought he’d be. He drives me three steps back toward the street. “Look at me. You’re done. It’s done, it’s over, you won—”
I can’t get a breath. His arms are around my chest, and my back is on fire in a line, and every time I try to breathe all the way in, there’s a stick coming down in a driveway under a streetlight.
Koda is off to my left, pacing with his phone at his ear.
Rafe finally lets me go, and I pace to get out of his reach, and it doesn’t work. Twice I nearly get past him. The second time, he shoves me into the side of a parked car and holds me there with his forearm. “Hit me if you have to. But you’re not going back in that house.”
I don’t say anything.
“Hit me, Kennebeck,” Rafe shouts.
I don’t hit him.
The front door opens and closes a few times, guys coming out onto the porch to watch. Somebody’s laughing. Somebody says something about the cops, and somebody else says shut up, and the door closes again.
My hands won’t stop shaking.
“Breathe,” Rafe says.
At some point, Greeley comes out and sits down on the top step with a dish towel pressed to his eyebrow and a jacket on. He looks completely calm, elbows on his knees, like a guy watching his kid’s game from the bleachers. “Kennebeck.”
“Shut the fuck up, Greeley,” Rafe says.
“I’m not calling anybody,” Greeley says. “Just so we’re clear. Not the cops, not Berwyn. I don’t want any of that.”
I look at him.
“Six guys saw you come at me. Somebody’s got it on their phone.” He dabs at his eyebrow and looks at the towel. “So we both know how that goes.”
“Say what you want.”
“October’s coming,” Greeley says. “When Dannebrog reads the lines, you tell him you want third. You ask for it yourself. Nobody has to know why. You don’t feel ready.
Dannebrog’ll respect it. Berwyn’ll respect it.
” He tips his head. “And this never happened. Not the kitchen, not the video, not whatever the fuck is wrong with you.”
Rafe goes very still against my back.
“You planned this,” I say.
“I invited you to my house.”
“You put a stick across my back.”
“That’s not what happened,” Greeley says, without any heat at all, the way you’d correct somebody about the time.
Behind him, in the doorway, Mathers stands with his arms crossed, looking at the floor of the porch.
Footsteps come up the driveway. Rafe turns first, and his arms loosen an inch. It’s Paige in a coat over leggings with her hood up, and the blonde.
She’s in plaid pajama pants and an enormous T-shirt with a jacket pulled on over it, not zipped, and her hair in a knot on top of her head. She came straight out of bed; you can tell from twenty feet away. She stops at the end of the driveway.
I look at Koda. He’s by the mailbox with his phone still in his hand and a look on his face like a guy who knows exactly what he did and is going to defend it.
Then I look at Greeley. He’s looking at her, and something comes back into his face that I’d like to take out of him with my hands.
“Hi, Kylie,” he says.
She doesn’t answer him. She’s coming up the driveway, looking at me. I’m standing in the cold with Rafe’s arm still across my chest, my knuckles split, my mouth bleeding down my chin, and the front of my shirt hanging off me in two pieces.
I watch her eyes drop. They go to my side and stop there for maybe five seconds, which is longer than anybody has looked at it in three years except a burn surgeon, my mom, and, twenty minutes ago, a kitchen full of guys.
In the cold, it’s gone purple at the edges.
I get my hand up and pull the fabric across it.
It doesn’t cover anything. I do it anyway.
“Nash,” she says.
And everything in me that’s been trying to get back through that front door for ten minutes stops trying. My hands are still shaking, and my back is still on fire, but something in me pulls up all at once, the way you pull up at the blue line when you know you’re offside.
“We’re going,” she says.
Rafe’s arm comes off my chest.
I look at her.
“Come on,” she says.
I look back at Greeley. He’s looking at me, and then he looks at her.