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The room goes quiet.

Rafe comes off the wall.

I hear him. I’ve also got my hand wrapped around the edge of the counter, and I don’t move it. Greeley looks at my hand on the counter, laughs, takes a drink, and says, quieter, “Mad that I took her to the rink and had her—”

I don’t listen to the rest. “We’re going.”

I turn around. Behind me, Mathers says, “Dec,” low, like a warning.

There’s a rack by the back door with four or five sticks in it, because it’s a hockey house and of course there are sticks by the door. I don’t hear him take one. I’m reaching for the door when there’s a crack across my shoulder blades, the flat of the blade and the shaft coming down across my back from behind, and the sound of it fills the whole kitchen.

And I’m fourteen.

It’s the driveway after dark, a bucket of pucks, the streetlight buzzing over the garage, the TV loud through the kitchen door. My stick is lying on the concrete where I dropped it, and it’s in my dad’s hand now, and the sound is exactly the same. Wood and fiberglass on a body. That flat crack, and how it goes through a space and then through you, up your spine and into your jaw, and the garage door rattling behind my shoulder.

I turn around.

Greeley still has the stick when I get to him. I take it with one hand on the shaft and one on his wrist, and he’s stronger than I want him to be, but I’ve got both feet under me and he doesn’t. It comes out of his hands and skids across the floor into the leg of the kitchen table. Then I put him into the fridge.

Everything after that is loud. He gets me twice, once in the mouth and once low under the ribs, and both land and neither does anything, because I’m not in my body anymore. I get him in the jaw, then the side of the head, and we go down into the table. A chair goes over. Somebody’s glass hits the floor and sprays across the tile.

Mathers grabs me from behind.

“Off,” Greeley yells at him, at all of them, from the floor with his hand up. “Off! Let him.”

Mathers lets go, and that’s how I know exactly what this was. Six guys standing in a kitchen with their hands at their sides while their friend tells them to let it happen, because his story only works if nobody stops it.

We both get up. My mouth is full of blood, and my back is on fire in a line from shoulder to shoulder. Somebody’s phone is out, a rectangle of light held up at chest height at the edge of my vision, and I don’t care, and that’s how far gone I am.

He comes at me again. I put him onto the counter with my forearm across his chest and hit him twice more, and the second one opens something over his eye. Behind me, Rafe is going at it with someone, and there’s a scuffle at the table, Koda into Croft and Croft into a chair, and the whole kitchen is noise.

Greeley gets both fists in my shirt and pulls, and it tears down the side and comes half off my shoulder, and then his hand slips, and the whole left side of me is bare.

I hear Mathers say, “Jesus.”

I look down.

It starts above my hip, where my breezers usually cover it, and climbs up my side into my ribs. It’s wider at the bottom, where it went deepest, and it narrows as it goes up. The skin there is pale and shiny and tight, pulled in against itself, and in places it sinks below everything around it, enough that the shape of my side changes. Under the kitchen lights, you can see the faint diamond pattern the graft left, like chicken wire pressed into wet cement. It doesn’t look like a skate cut. It looks like something melted and somebody put it back together.

It’s ugly, and I know it. That’s why I wait to shower alone. Half the room thought it was because I had something small to hide. Unfortunately, the thing I’m hiding is bigger than anybody’s dick in here.

The room looks at it. Greeley, underneath me, with blood running into his eye, looks at it. Then he looks at me, and for one full second, Declan Greeley looks like a guy who just found the bottom of something.

I get off him. He shoves me as I go. I grab the ruined half of my shirt and pull it across, and it doesn’t cover anything. It’s hanging off my shoulder in two pieces with nothing to close, and I stand in the middle of his kitchen holding fabric against my side with one hand like an idiot.

Never have I ever been in a fight with my shirt shredded into pieces.

Greeley ripping my shirt is another fucking red flag. This guy really wanted me to hit him.

He wipes the blood out of his eye with the back of his wrist and slides off the counter, breathing hard, not taking his eyes off my side.

“What is that?” he says. “That’s not a skate. I’ve seen skates. Guys, that’s not hockey. That’s a burn.” He tilts his head. “Somebody burn you, Kenny?”

That fucking nickname.

Nobody says anything.

“Huh,” Greeley says. “That explains a lot, actually. That’s what that is. Somebody set you on fire when you were a kid, and now you can’t—”