Page 168 of Under His Jersey

Paige points at her with both hands. “I’ve got my eye on you, girlie. It’s the innocent ones you have to watch out for.”

Tessa makes an O with her hand and holds it up to one eye and squints through it like a telescope. Paige and I look at each other and lose it. Apparently, Tessa Canten has been sitting four feet from me since August with a whole hidden personality. I lift my cup to her. She smiles, and we both take a long sip.

“Who are we playing today anyway?” Bianca asks from the floor.

“Lakeside,” Tessa answers.

We get there at one for a two o’clock, and it’s already packed with four thousand people in the student section, standing on metal bleachers in the cold, screaming at a field. We end up sixteen rows up behind a guy in full body paint who doesn’t sit down once in three hours. I keep my phone in my pocket on purpose. This is a girls’ day, and I shouldn’t be expecting a thing from Nash, who’s in another state getting ready for his own game.

We buy two trays of nachos and share them. Bianca eats all the cheesiest chips, and we all yell at her, because it’s bullshit. Kenzie turns out to be extremely passionate about football, which she was not at the hockey game. I can tell Paige’s upset about something, but she’s the kind of girl you just don’t ask. And Tessa has come out of her shell. She’s one of us, and I’m still adjusting to it.

The team’s up ten at the half. I check my phone twice the whole game, and there’s nothing from Nash.

Then some guys come down the aisle past us, and one of them looks familiar. He’s wearing a Woodbury hockey hoodie.

“Wait, is that—” Bianca says.

“He’s a freshman, so he didn’t travel,” Kenzie says. “He’s friends with Koda—”

“We’re not talking about Koda,” Paige says to the field.

“Nobody was talking about Koda,” Kenzie says.

Tessa, who is on her third drink of the day and has stopped filtering entirely, says, “That was convincing.”

Paige turns around and looks at her. “You haven’t been around enough to have an opinion.”

“I have eyes and ears,” Tessa says.

I think the drink finally hits my system, because I grab Tessa and laugh. Paige yells something at the field. Nobody gets another word out of her about it. Bianca tries once more at the end of the third, very gently, and Paige just says, “Nope,” and points at the field like something’s happening there, and nothing is.

In the fourth quarter, with the game basically over and everybody standing anyway, Kenzie leans into me while I’m sending Nash a picture of the field. “So you’re actually together.”

“Yeah,” I say, and I smile, because I like saying it.

“Like he said it,” Bianca says, leaning around Kenzie. “He used the word.”

I nod. “He used the word.”