“Why are you going to sleep?” he says, way too close to my face. “The night’s just getting started.”
He smells like vodka. And a lot of it. He puts a hand on my shoulder —theshoulder, the one the trainer iced after the second period, the one I just paid for going up the stairs two at atime — and I shove his hand off so hard the movement grabs all the way up into my neck.
“Fuck.”
“Whoa,” Stanley says, in the voice of a man who is delighted to have caused something. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Touchy.”
I open my eyes. The ceiling is too bright. I force them to adjust and look down at him.
“What do you want, Stan?”
“I just told you. I wanna know why the hell you’re in bed right now when there’s a party downstairs. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
I close my eyes again. “I’m tired.”
“Bro.” Pause. “Bro. Younevergo to bed this early.”
“I’m fucking tired, Stan.”
“Bluey, come on.”
“Get out of my room and turn off the light.”
“No can do.”
He grabs the corner of my comforter. I grab it back. He tugs. I tug. We have a short, stupid, entirely silent battle for the blanket, in the middle of which I am made aware of two things — one, that my shoulder is in real trouble, and two, that Stanley is sober enough to be having fun and drunk enough to not stop.
“Let it go,” he warns.
“Youlet it go. Don’t you have someone better to pick on?” I huff and pull the blanket up to my chin.
“I’m not picking on you,” he says, which is a lie. He’s decided in the past week that I’m his new best friend. “I just need you to get the fuck out of this bed and come downstairs.”
“No, man.” I close my eyes again. “I’m going to sleep.”
He doesn’t say anything for a second. Which is unusual.
I peek.
He’s staring at the floor, fully zoning out.
“Shit,” he says quietly. “Is it because you’re feeling like shit from the game? Did you get hurt?”
“Drop it, Stan.”
“You got hurt.”
“Drop it.”
There’s half a second where I think he might. Stanley is, underneath the relentless mouth, a guy who notices things — that is the part about him that gets forgotten, because the mouth gets all the attention, but Stanley notices. He notices when a guy has a bad period. He notices when a freshman is homesick. He notices the things that the rest of us are too tired or too proud to notice, and then he does the most annoying possible thing with the information.
He does it now.
“Nah.” His face changes. He grins. “Nah, nah, nah. This is because of the girl.”
Fucking help me.“It’s not.”
“You think you’re so fucking slick, man.” He points at me with a smirk. “But I’m onto you.”
