Page 72

“Hm,” I say.

“Nothing to say about that?”

“Sounds like her business.”

He looks at me sideways. “You know what she told me at the rink? That she doesn’t know you at all. Who said I’m friends with Nash? That’s what she said.”

On Friday, she hated my guts, so it isn’t even a lie. But she saw right through him anyway, and he thinks he’s got one on me, which is funny.

The whistle goes. “Good drill,” I tell him, and skate away, and it takes everything I have.

After the skate, the locker room empties out slowly, and I take my time. I untape, I shower, I sit and do my laces, and I watch Greeley out of the corner of my eye the whole time. Koda leaves with Pennock.

Rafe says, “You coming?”

“Two minutes.”

He looks at me for a second too long and goes. Greeley takes his time too. I catch him watching me from the corner of his eye, so he knows. He talks loudly to everybody on the way out. He’s the last guy out of the room in every building he’s ever been in, because being last means everybody who left before you saw you.

I had a plan for when he finally walked out. I’d been building it since five this morning. Then he stops in the doorway on his way out, turns around, and waits, in front of Weber and two freshmen and a trainer with a bucket of pucks, for me to do something.

And I get it, standing there with one skate lace in my hand. He can only do this in front of people. Every time, there’s a room. The party, the diner, the boards with Dannebrog at the whiteboard sixteen feet away. It’s all he’s got.

So I finish tying my lace. “Night, Dec.”

He looks at me for a long second, and then he laughs, a little, and goes.

Rafe is waiting by the doors to the lot. He looks at my face, then back at the rink. “What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“You sat in there for twenty minutes.”

“I tied my skates.”

He looks at me like he doesn’t believe a word of it, and then, slowly, like he does. “Huh,” he says.

We walk back to Corvin without saying anything else. Halfway there, he takes out his phone and starts texting somebody, and I don’t ask who. The whole way, my hands won’t stop wanting to be fists.

When I come out of the stairwell on three, Kylie is stepping off the elevator with a basket of laundry on her hip and a blank expression. When she sees me, the last two nights disappear off her face.

“You,” she says, like she’s annoyed.

I know better now.

Rafe looks at me as he walks past and goes into our room. I keep walking, and she follows me with her laundry.

“You’re mad,” she says, observing me. “You’re really mad. I thought you said you’re back on the ice.”

“I am.”

“That should make you happy, right?” She looks at me. “You’re doing the walk.”

“What walk?”

She sets her basket down on the carpet and does an impression of me: head tipped back, jaw hard, walking like every step weighs something.

“I don’t walk like that.”