“Hey!”Ryan threw an onion ring at him.
Javier caught it midair, not even looking.He chewed it slowly, watching me.“So, Austen.You play?”
“Musical instruments?No.”
“Sports,” Javier clarified.“Anything with a ball or a puck?”
“I ran cross-country in high school,” I said.“It requires zero hand-eye coordination, only the willingness to suffer.”
Ryan laughed.“Respect.Running sucks.”
“Why math?”Decker asked, leaning over the table.“Like, you do it for fun?Or because you hate yourself?”
“Math is predictable,” I said, taking a sip of the club soda Luke had slid toward me.“Unlike humanities, the answer doesn’t depend on how the professor is feeling that day.X is always X.”
“Unless X is O’Connell,” Javier muttered.“Then X is usually in the penalty box.”
“I have a ninety-percent pass completion rate!”Ryan protested.
“Eighty-two,” I corrected automatically.
The table went silent.
Ryan blinked.“What?”
“Your pass completion rate,” I said.“It’s eighty-two percent.I updated your stats after the Caribou game.Your faceoff win percentage is fifty-eight, which is elite, but your pass completion drops to sixty-four in the third period.Likely fatigue-related.”
Ryan stared at me, mouth open.Javier looked from me to Luke, eyebrows raised, and busted out laughing.
“Damn!”Javier said.“He just put you in your place, O’Connell.”
“He did the math,” Luke said, grinning into his water glass.
“You memorized my stats?”Ryan asked, sounding awed.
“I analyzed the dataset,” I said, shrugging.“Patterns are easy to spot.Morales shoots blocker side seventy percent of the time on breakaway attempts.Decker drifts left on the backcheck.”
Decker dropped his burger.“Dude.Is he a spy?”
“He’s my secret weapon,” Luke said, nudging my shoulder with his.
Javier leaned forward, resting his chin on his fist.The boredom was gone from his eyes.“Okay, Math.What’s Carter’s tell?”
I hesitated.Luke went still beside me.
“He doesn’t have one,” I lied.“His save percentage is purely reactive.He waits for the shooter to commit.”
It wasn’t true.Luke dropped his left shoulder a fraction of an inch before he went into the butterfly.But I wasn’t about to tell Javier Morales that.
Luke looked at me, surprise and gratitude flashing in his eyes.
“Damn,” Ryan said.“We really are winning this pitcher.”
The trivia thing was chaos, but somehow slightly organized.
Ryan dominated the Sitcoms category, writing answers before the emcee finished reading the questions.Javier surprised everyone by sweeping Geography, naming the capital of Burkina Faso—Ouagadougou—without blinking.
Then came Quantum Mechanics.
