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Tessa gives me a tiny grateful look.

Paige nods like she understands, and everybody in the room knows she doesn’t.

“There’s a thing on Preston,” Kenzie says. “The house with the porch. It’s somebody’s roommate’s boyfriend, or something. Everybody’s going. We won.”

“We won,” Bianca says to the mirror as she comes in. “Did you play?”

“I screamed for two hours, Bianca. My throat hurts.”

Paige checks herself in the mirror. Kenzie glances down at her own outfit. “Hot, yeah?” Paige says, adjusting.

“You’ll be cold,” Bianca says.

Paige rolls her eyes. “He’s not going to be there. They have a thing at the rink. So it’s not about him. This is a piece of fabric, and I look good in it.”

“You do look good in it,” I say.

I still don’t know what actually happened Thursday. All I’ve gotten is busy, and then on Friday, he’s a child, and at the game, she screamed louder than anybody when Koda scored and then said she was screaming for the team. Kenzie knows something. I can tell by the way she doesn’t look up from her phone whenever it comes up.

Bianca does my eyeliner. I change twice. The first thing makes me look like I’m going to a funeral, according to Paige, and the second makes me look like I’m going to a different, better funeral, according to Kenzie, so I put on the good jeans and the black top with the neckline and my boots, and Bianca does my hair in the hallway.

The whole campus is loud. People in the quad in Woodbury hoodies are yelling at other people in Woodbury hoodies. Somebody is playing music out of a car. It’s freezing. I don’t have a coat, again, and I don’t care.

The house on Preston has a porch with a couch on it that should not be outside, a screen door that doesn’t latch, and about a hundred people. It’s warm the way it gets when the windows are sweating. There are speakers in the front room, and the kitchen has a table with a handle of something and four two-liters and a kid with a Sharpie writing everybody’s name on their cup, which is the most organized thing I’ve ever seen at a college party.

“Kylie,” the Sharpie kid says. “K-Y-L-E-E?”

“No.” He writes it wrong anyway.

The girl from my lab is here, and we scream at each other. A guy I’ve never spoken to tells me he saw me at the game. Bianca finds people from her floor, and we end up in the front room dancing, and it turns out Bianca can actually dance, which she has been hiding from us, while Kenzie can’t and doesn’t care. I dance until my hair sticks to my neck. I drink one drink and then make myself a weaker one. Somebody spills something, and there’s a big cheer. My lab partner’s friend shows me a picture of his dog, and I look at it for four minutes and tell him it’s the best dog I’ve ever seen, and I mean it.

Then Bianca grabs my arm and says, “Oh, no,” in a delighted way, and I follow her eyes. Hockey guys in the kitchen doorway, six or seven of them, taking up the whole frame the way they do, with Koda in the middle laughing at something with his hood down.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Paige says.

And behind Koda, half turned away, holding a cup he isn’t drinking out of, is Nash.

I smile before I do anything else. I feel my own face do it, and I’m already moving to go over, because that’s what happens when I see him now. He sees me and lifts his chin from across the room. Then he turns back to Rafe and says something, and Rafe says something back, and they keep talking. I stand in the middle of the party with my drink in my hand.

What the fuck was that?

Then I stop myself. He’s with his team. They just played a game, they won, and they’ve been at a thing with everybody’s parents all night, and his dad’s in town.

And he’s not my boyfriend.

We’re at a party. I came with my friends, and he came with his, and this is exactly how it’s supposed to work.

“What the fuck are they doing here?” Paige says, and Kenzie looks like she’s afraid to speak. “Fuck this,” Paige says. “Let’s dance.”

So we dance, and somewhere in there, the hockey guys move from the doorway into the kitchen, and later into the back hall by the stairs, and at some point, somebody props the back door open, and I know he’s outside without checking. Then he’s back in. I can hear his voice behind me over the music, and I don’t turn around, but I know exactly where he is.

“He’s coming over,” Kenzie says quickly to Paige.

“No.” Paige turns around and physically puts her entire back to him. “No. Nope.”

“Paige—”

“I said no.”