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“When do you play again?”

“Tuesday. Home.”

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll be there.”

She runs down to meet her friends, and I go down.

I wait outside the room, and they come out in twos and threes. Koda’s furious. He’s got his bag on his shoulder and his jaw set, and he looks like he wants to go back out and play the whole thing again right now.

“I had the middle open four times,” he says to me. “Four.”

“I watched it.”

“You watched it,” he says, disgusted, like I was up there eating popcorn on purpose. Then he shifts his bag. “It’s not on Orr. He played fine. It’s—”

“Yeah.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.”

“So win a draw next week,” Koda says.

“Maybe learn to get into a zone without me.”

“Fuck you,” he says, and goes.

Rafe comes out after him, wrecked, with his tie in his hand instead of on. He looks at me. “Next game.”

“Yeah.”

Nobody mentions how I fucked up, and I’m glad I can put it behind me.

Kylie waits for me by the doors, and we walk back across campus in the cold. I’m still going about the third period, and she lets me bitch for about four blocks. Then she bumps my arm.

“I told Dorothy about you at bingo yesterday.”

“Who’s Dorothy?”

“The eighty-six-year-old who runs the bingo cards. I told her my boyfriend’s suspended for a game.” She’s grinning. “She said good. She said it builds character, and she’d like to meet you.”

“I’m not going to bingo.”

“You’re absolutely going to bingo.”

There’s a flyer taped to the inside of the door at Corvin. It’s orange, with a pumpkin on it, about something at the student center. There’s another one on the stairwell door, and a third on the bulletin board on our floor with tabs cut into the bottom. Kylie stops in the hallway with her phone out and her face lit up by whatever’s happening in the group chat, and I get about four steps past her.

“It’s almost Halloween, Nash,” she says.

“No.”

She looks up. “Oh, we’re dressing up.”

“No, we’re not.”

She wraps her arm around me and puts her cold hand in the pocket of my dress pants, which is a large pocket, and reaches for my cock.

I shake my head at her.