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“It’s aromatherapy,” Paige says, but she leans over and shoves the window up. She’s the girl in the black top from the party, the one who told me I had beautiful hair and then said tragic when I said I had a boyfriend. She’s cross-legged against the wall with an enormous bowl of kettle corn in her lap, and she hands it to me without a word. A second later she says, “Did you break up with him?”

Everybody in the room stops.

Kenzie says, “Paige.”

“What?” Paige says. “She looks like she broke up with him.”

I look down at the kettle corn. “Yeah,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud. “I think I did.”

Paige nods, very seriously. “Good. He was probably boring.”

“I was with him for three years.” The room goes quiet. “More than three.”

“Are you okay?” Paige asks.

I nod.

“Then good,” she says, takes a handful of kettle corn back out of the bowl, and turns to the TV, where a man in a suit is handing a woman a rose.

And that’s it. Nobody asks what happened. Kenzie puts a blanket over my legs. A girl named Bianca, who I’ve seen in the bathroom and never talked to, tells me I have to pick a contestant to root for, because it’s a rule, and I say I’ll take the one with the bangs.

“The one with the bangs is evil,” Paige says.

“I like evil.”

“Respect.”

For an hour, I sit on a bed in a room that isn’t mine with girls I barely know and yell at a television. The one with the bangs cries in a hot tub. Kenzie shouts at the screen. Bianca does a voice for the host that’s so bad and so accurate I laugh until I have to put my face in the blanket. At some point, I realize I haven’t looked at my phone in forty minutes, and I don’t look at it then either.

When the episode ends, Paige says, “Same time next week?” and everybody says yes, and Kenzie looks at me and says, “You too,” like it isn’t a question.

“Yeah,” I say.

When I get back to our room, Tessa is asleep, or pretending to be, with her face to the wall. She’s turned my desk lamp on low, the only light in the room, so I won’t have to fumble in the dark.

I change into pajamas and get into bed. There’s nothing from Evan. There’s a new message in Corvin 4 + Kylie, a picture Bianca took of all of us on the bed, blurry and mid-scream, with me in the middle and kettle corn in my lap. I look at it for a while. Then I tap the number I’ve been calling Maybe-Morgan in my head for four days and save it: Kenzie.

I reach over and turn off the lamp, and I don’t turn my phone back over, and I lie in the dark listening to Tessa breathe until I fall asleep.

6

Character Building, Apparently

Nash

Greeley is already sitting outside Berwyn’s office when I get there, in the chair by the trophy case with one ankle crossed over his knee and a coffee in his hand. There’s one other chair in the hallway, across from his. I don’t take it. I lean against the wall beside the door with my arms crossed and look at a team picture from 1994 with a lot of mustaches in it. Through the frosted glass, I can see Berwyn’s shape at his desk, on the phone.

Greeley lets thirty seconds go by. “You know what I figured out this weekend?”

I don’t answer.

“Your film.” He takes a sip of coffee. “I watched the stuff the scouts have. It’s all highlight reels. Somebody cut it for you, somebody who knew what to cut out.” He smiles into his cup. “I bet there’s a whole other reel. The one with the penalties, the one where you lose your shit in front of the bench. I bet that’s the one nobody sent out.”

I keep looking at the mustaches.

“I’m just saying. Must be nice to walk in with a clean tape.”

“You don’t know shit about my tape.”