20
Everybody Apparently Means Everybody
Nash
Greeley throws a party on Saturday and puts it in the team chat at four in the afternoon.
Greeley: And I mean everybody.
Five guys react within a minute. Rafe reads it on his phone and says, “No.”
I agree by not saying anything.
He drops onto his bed and holds up four fingers. “Four days ago he put a stick across your back, and now he’s got a handshake emoji and an invitation for the whole team.” He shakes his head. “I thought I had problems. You thinking about going?”
“I’m not.”
But I already know that if I don’t show up, it becomes a story. Kennebeck doesn’t come around anymore. Two weeks from now, when Berwyn’s deciding who runs a line, half that room will have spent two weeks absorbing the idea that I’m the guy who doesn’t participate.
Koda walks in without knocking. “You read the text?”
I nod.
“I’d love to just shove my skate so far up his—”
There’s a knock on the door.
“Who the fuck is that?” Rafe says.
Koda grins and opens it. “Paige, baby.” He leaves it open while he asks where she’s going.
“Why is she knocking on our door?” Rafe says, annoyed.
Paige steps in. “Hi, Rafe.” He doesn’t look at what she’s wearing, but I do, because it looks like she’s going somewhere, and if she is, Kylie is too. “I’m down here waiting for Kylie,” Paige says, “and I saw Koda walk in, so I’m saying hi.”
“Paige?” Kylie calls from somewhere outside the door.
Koda’s posture changes. “Blondie. Come in here.”
“That’s okay,” she says from around the corner. “Paige, are you ready?”
“Blondie,” I call from my bed, where I can’t see her. “Get in here.”
Koda and Paige step back to let her through.
She cuts the corner with her hands on her hips, and it isn’t the attitude that gets me.
Her hair is down. There’s something dangling from her ears.
There’s a piece of black fabric across her thighs that’s barely a thing, and her top isn’t much of anything either. It’s skin. All I see is skin.
Something in me turns over. It isn’t a thought; there are no words in it. It’s the same thing that happens when somebody puts a puck on your tape in front of an open net, except lower and hotter, and it goes straight through me before I can do anything about it.
What the fuck.
Koda whistles, low. “Damn, Blondie. Who died and left you that skirt?”
I look at him, and he shuts up. Rafe takes one look at me, knows exactly what’s happening in my face, and keeps it to himself.
“Who are you calling Blondie?” Kylie says to me.
Paige watches for my reaction, but I’m too stunned to answer. I sit up. “What party is this?”
Paige sighs. “It’s not the hockey house. We heard about that one. It’s a get-together at Warren Hall.”
“A get-together?”
Koda plays with Paige’s hair. “We’re going to that party at Greeley’s.”
Kylie makes a sound. It isn’t a word. It’s a noise of pure disgust from the back of her throat, and Paige snorts.
“You’re going to a party at his house?” Kylie says, looking right at me.
I make myself stop looking at the skirt. “It’s a team thing.”
“It’s a team thing,” she mocks. “Why would you ever go back there?”
“I just said.”
Kylie rolls her eyes. “That’s fucking insane.”
“It’s hockey,” Rafe says.
“Come with us,” Koda says to Paige. “Ditch Warren. Free everything, actual space. You can leave whenever you want, and I’ll walk you back.”
“It’s better than a room at Warren with a speaker in it,” I say.
Paige looks at Kylie. Kylie looks at Paige. Then she looks at me for a second, head slightly tipped, like she’s trying to work out what I just did.
“Fine,” she says. “But only because you need babysitting.”
Good.
She walks out putting her jacket on, and I look at her legs in that skirt and clench my jaw.
“Great,” Rafe says, very quietly, to nobody. “Great, great, great.”
Greeley opens his own door again. “Barnes.” He claps Koda on the shoulder. “Waleska. Kennebeck.”
“Greeley.”
He’s holding a beer, and his eyebrow is healing, and he smiles at the three of us. “Glad you came, man. Seriously.” He puts his hand on my shoulder in front of six people in his entryway. “It’s good. We’re good.”
“We’re good.”
I stand there and let a guy who hit me from behind with a stick put his hand on the bruise in his own doorway, because half the roster is in this house and every one of them is going to remember whether Kennebeck came in cold.
Then he looks past me. “Kylie Vandercook.”
I fucking despise hearing her name in his mouth.
“Hi,” she says, and walks straight past him into the house without slowing down. Paige goes with her, and so do Kenzie and Bianca, who met us at the corner, and all four of them are gone into the crowd inside fifteen seconds.
Greeley watches them go, then turns back to me and lifts his beer, grinning. “She looks good tonight. That’s a lot of girl in that skirt.”
It’s the same play he’s run every time since the first week. He’s found a button, and he’s going to keep pressing it until something happens, and if I say one word about it in his entryway, he’ll just press harder.
“Where’s the beer?” I ask.
He laughs and points. “You know where it is, Kennebeck.”
I get one and go out to the back steps with Pennock and two D-men, who are talking about a guy they know in the Ontario league. Through the kitchen window, Kylie is at the drinks with her friends, laughing, chugging whatever’s in their cups. I look at her waist and drink my beer.
The back door opens, and Paige comes out onto the steps with a joint pinched between two fingers and her lighter already going. She sits down on the step above me like it’s her porch. “You guys want?”
“Skate Monday,” Pennock says.
“No,” I reply.
She shrugs and takes a long pull and lets it out slow, looking up at the sky with her whole body going loose, like somebody turned down the volume inside her.
“You’re all so boring,” she says, almost fondly, and when she goes back in, the smell stays on the steps.
I go back in too. Koda is talking with Mathers in the living room. Mathers shakes my hand and asks me something, and I answer it, and I don’t give a shit what it was, because Kylie is in the living room with Paige and Kenzie, dancing.
When the song ends, they drop onto the couch and laugh at something on Kenzie’s phone, and Greeley walks over with two drinks and hands her one.
She looks at Paige, takes it, puts it down on the nearest flat surface without looking at it, and says something with fire in her eyes.
I know that look. It’s about four words.
He says something back. She says four more.
Greeley sips his own drink and walks away, and she picks her own cup back up and turns to Paige like nothing happened.
I go back to the steps.
Ten minutes later, a guy walks up to her who isn’t on the team.
He’s shorter than me, in a flannel, and he says something that makes her laugh, and she puts her hand on his arm for a second when she does.
Everything in me stops. I look at him again.
He’s fine. He’s normal. He’s just a guy at a party.
I watch them for a while. It’s just me and my beer now.
She catches me when she turns to say something to Paige, her eyes going past me and coming back.
She holds it. Then she turns to flannel guy and says something and puts her hand on his arm again, and this time she looks at me while she does it.
Okay. So that’s what we’re doing.
Five minutes later, she does it again. She leans in to hear something over the music, laughs, looks at me.
I take another sip.
Rafe appears at my shoulder. “You’ve been standing here for forty minutes.”
“I’m aware.”
“Are you going to do something, or is this the whole night?”
“It’s the whole night.”
Across the room, Greeley lifts his beer at us. Neither of us reacts.
“He thinks he’s winning,” Rafe says.
“Yeah.”
Greeley smiles, shakes his head, and turns back to whoever he’s talking to.
It’s getting late, and she’s dancing on this guy too much, and when he puts a hand on her waist, she takes it off. I’ve had enough of the show. When she sees me coming, she stops dancing.
“You ready?” I say.
Flannel guy stops too and keeps his hands to himself.
Kylie blinks. “For what?”
“To go.”
She looks at me for a second, and then she starts dancing on him again. “I didn’t ask you to take me home.”
Flannel guy looks up at me like he’d like to not be part of this, but she dances on him anyway.
“Let’s go,” I say.
She shakes her head. “Not yet.”
I look down at her skirt, which inches up her thighs with every move, and I bite back what’s in my mouth and walk away.
I go to the kitchen and fill a cup with water. Rafe follows me in and says he wants to leave. So do I, but I’m not leaving her here, and I don’t have to say that out loud for him to know it.
When the song ends, Kylie walks into the kitchen with flannel guy trailing her. I don’t blame him. I’d follow her too if I were that desperate for attention. He sees me, grabs a drink, and she says, “I’ll see you out there,” and he looks at me once and goes.
“Are you having fun?” I ask.
She looks at me. “You should try it.”
“I will.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
She shakes her head and looks out at the party.
“We’re leaving in five minutes,” I say.
To my surprise, she doesn’t argue. “Okay,” she says, and walks back out to flannel guy. He doesn’t follow her onto the dance floor this time. I watch from the kitchen and start counting.
Rafe brings the car around without being asked. Koda herds the girls out onto the porch into the cold, and Kylie zips her jacket all the way to her chin this time and crosses her arms.
Greeley comes over when he sees we’re leaving. “Kennebeck. Good to have you, man.”
“Greeley.”
He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking past me at the walk, where Kylie is standing under the porch light in a black skirt and a jacket, and he’s smiling, and he doesn’t say anything else, because he doesn’t have to.
I open the car door for the girls. Kylie gets in the back with Kenzie and Bianca, and I’m in the front with Rafe. Koda and Paige walk. The whole way back, Kenzie talks about a guy she met.
On the third floor, everybody splits.
“Night,” Kylie says at her door.
“Night.”
She goes in, and I go three doors down.