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“It’s already later.”

“Bunch of the guys are at my place. Mathers, Croft, a couple of the D. Nothing crazy. We’re not drinking much; there’s a skate at seven.” He shrugs into his jacket. “You should come by.”

“No.”

“Suit yourself.” He goes down two steps, then turns around and walks backward with his hands in his pockets. “It’s a team thing, though. Just so you know how it’s going to get described.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means Mathers asked if you were coming, and I said I’d ask, and now I asked.” He shrugs. “I’ll tell them you were tired.”

He turns around and keeps walking, and I stand on the library steps for about four seconds before I go after him.

Rafe tells me not to go. We’re in our room, I’m changing out of my study-hall shirt, and he’s sitting on his bed with his phone in his hand and his jaw doing that thing.

“It’s his house,” he says.

“I know whose house it is.”

“That’s where the last one happened. At his house, in front of his people, and it cost you a week on the ice and cost him nothing, because—” He stops. “Say it back to me. Why did it cost him nothing?”

“Because it was his house and his people.”

“So why are you going back to his house and his people?”

“Because Mathers asked if I was coming.”

Rafe puts both hands over his face.

Koda, who is on my bed uninvited eating a granola bar he found in my drawer, says, “I think we should go.”

“Nobody asked you,” says Rafe.

“We’re invited. We’re on the team. I’m allowed at team things.”

“It’s not a team thing. It’s six guys and a fucking setup, Barnes.”

“So then we go,” Koda says, “and it’s six guys, a setup, and three of us.” He grins at the ceiling. “I like those numbers.”

Rafe sits there with that, and I watch him hate it and accept it at the same time. “You don’t touch him first,” he says to me. “If you swing first in that house, it’s over. That’s all he wants. Say it.”

“I don’t touch him first.”

“Good,” Rafe says, and gets his jacket.

The house is quiet when we pull up, with three cars in the driveway when there should be more. Koda notices too. Greeley opens the door before we knock, holding a beer I don’t think he’s drinking. “You came.”

Inside, it’s six guys under every light in the house turned all the way up. Mathers and Croft on the couch, two D-men I barely know at the kitchen table, a junior named Weber by the counter, somebody’s phone playing something quietly. Nobody says hi to me except Mathers, who says “Kennebeck” in a way that isn’t friendly or unfriendly. He has his phone out, low against his thigh, thumb moving, like he’s texting somebody. There’s no Pennock and no Dannebrog. Rafe counts the room the same way I do, puts his back against the wall by the entry, and stays there.

“Beer?” says Greeley.

“I’m good.”

“Water?”

“I’m good.”

“Suit yourself.”