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At 7:41, her fingers twitch under mine, and she makes a small, cranky sound into my back, and then she goes stiff. I can feel the exact second she figures out where she is, where her hand is, whose shirt her face is pressed into. She doesn’t pull away. She just goes very still, like if she stops breathing I won’t notice she’s there.

“Morning,” I say to the desk.

Her forehead presses against my spine. “I don’t know how I got over here.”

My arm is pins and needles, and her hand is still under mine, and neither of us lets go.

“What time is it?” she murmurs.

“Seven-forty.”

“I have class at nine.”

“Okay.”

She stays exactly where she is for another four minutes. I watch every one of them change on the clock. Then she slides her hand out from under mine and climbs over me to get out, all elbows and knees and fuzzy socks, catching me in the thigh on the way and saying, “Sorry, sorry,” in a voice that isn’t sorry at all. On her feet in the middle of my room, in those pants, with her braid half undone and one side of her face creased from my shirt, she looks around like she isn’t sure what she’s supposed to take with her. She finds the hair tie on my desk and puts it on her wrist.

“Bye,” she says. She gets as far as the door and stops with her hand on the knob. “They’re strawberries.”

Then she’s gone.

I roll onto my back and shake my arm out until the feeling crawls back into my fingers. It hurts like hell. I lie there with my hand open on my stomach, right where hers was, and let it.

Monday is the day off, so there’s no ice, no lift, no Berwyn, and I never know what to do with it. I have class, but it doesn’t fill the day, and I watch the clock the whole time. Twice I catch myself flexing my left hand under the desk, working out the last of the stiffness from this morning.

Rafe comes back after class with his pillow under his arm and throws it on his bed without looking at me. “Koda’s roommate snores,” he says, and that’s all he says. He puts his earbuds in and lies down on the pillow with his shoes on.

At noon, my phone buzzes with a picture of strawberries.

Kylie: For the record.

Me: I know what a strawberry is.

Kylie: Sure you do.

I look at that for a while and don’t answer. I put the phone in my pocket and go to lunch. The fruit is in a big metal bowl by the silverware like always, bananas going brown on one side and oranges nobody takes. I grab an apple on the way past, because that’s what I grab when I want something sweet. I take a bite, and set it on my tray and sit down. Then I take out my phone and take a selfie of the next bite and send it to her.

Me: This is an apple.

I put the phone face down and eat my chicken. It buzzes before I’m through the first piece.

Kylie: Huge day for you.

Kylie: Discovering fruit.

Kylie: So proud.

I eat the apple last, the whole thing down to the core, and then sit turning the stem between my fingers until Koda texts to ask if I’m coming to shoot.

The shooting room is in the basement of the athletic building, at the end of the hallway past the equipment room, behind a door somebody wrote NO SKATES on in Sharpie. It’s maybe thirty feet deep. The floor is synthetic ice, white plastic panels locked together like a puzzle, scuffed gray in the middle where everybody stands. There’s a regulation net at the far end against a sheet of plywood that’s black with puck marks, thousands of them, some gouged deep enough to show the layers of wood. A shooter tutor hangs off the crossbar, the vinyl sheet with four holes cut in the corners, and one of the bottom holes has been hit so many times its edge is chewed. There’s a passing rebounder along the left wall, two green rails that kick the puck back at you, and two black marks on the ceiling tiles above the net.

Mathers is already there at the top of the room with a bucket at his feet, shooting from the same spot over and over. Every one goes bar-down on the glove side, and the ping of the post and then the plywood is the only sound in the room. He looks up when the door bangs.

“Didn’t know anybody else came in here on Mondays,” Koda says.

Mathers pulls another puck off the pile with his blade.

“Missed any open nets lately?”