I grin. “Really?”
She nods.
I fist bump her. “Fuck yeah.”
Benson rolls his eyes and then blocks her from my view.
Okay, moving on.
Gianna and Mara are still giving me eyes, so I walk over to them because I know I’m their favorite person at every Hawthorne House party.
Benson’s little sister has been hockey-adjacent her whole life and is one of the boys for most of it, which means she’s the only woman I trust to be properly mean to me.
“G. I need advice. Woman advice.”
I grab her by the elbow and steer her into the corner by the pantry.
She doesn’t even blink. “Christ. Who’d you piss off?”
“This chick.” I lean in. “She’s pure evil, G.” I stare straight into her eyes. “She wants war. She stole my stick.”
Mara throws her head back and laughs. Mila’s here too. I don’t know when that happened.
Gianna nods slowly, deadpan, zero context, sipping her drink. “It’s your dick, buddy. Do what you want with it.”
“My — no. My stick. Hockey stick. Linwood walked into the —”
But the girls are already gone, drifting back into the party with their drinks, leaving me standing in the corner alone, holding a warm beer, betrayed by the institution of friendship.
Rowan makes the mistake of walking past me with a glass of water.
I take his whole face in both my hands. “Buddy. Buddy. I need you to help me look for something. Will you help me?”
He closes his eyes like a man accepting a prison sentence. “Yeah.”
“Atta boy.”
I pull him toward the door. He doesn’t fight it, because Rowan stopped fighting me sometime around sophomore year and has been living a more peaceful life ever since. And off we go, out the front door, into the cold.
“What the fuck are you making me do, Stan?” Rowan barks as he follows me down the sidewalk in front of our house.
I lift my hood over my head and smirk at the poor fella who has no idea what I’m dragging him into. Benson –– done for. Blue –– a goner. Percy doesn’t talk enough. So, Rowan is my new favorite man.
I shove my hands into the pockets of my hoodie and stare up ahead.
“Are we just going for a walk? What are we doing?”
I turn and give him a wide grin. Then I put an arm around his shoulder and pull him in. He’s two inches shorter than me, sohe’s perfect to manhandle. This poor guy can’t tell the difference between an inconvenience and an opportunity.
Rowan says, “You can’t handle the fact that they’re breaking the house rules, and you wanted to come out here to cry?”
I point ahead at the stop sign. “Do you know what this street is called?”
He pauses, looking ahead.
“Come on, say it,” I encourage him.
“Hawthorne Street,” he mumbles.
