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Me: maybe not the card table

N: ok

N: I won't say anything

N: for now

N: but I'm keeping track

Me: of what

N: of how much of a dick he is

N: that's my brother. I'm the only one allowed to be mean to him

Me: that's fair

N: go to sleep. you have 6am with my brother and you sound like shit

Me: you can't hear me

N: I can READ you

I put the phone face down on my chest.

My shoulder aches from the bag. There's a bruise coming up on it already where the strap dug in. I press my fingers into it in the dark until it hurts, the clean kind of hurt, the kind that's just the body.

Then I set an alarm for 4:50 and roll over and look up through the little window at the snow, coming down slow over the streetlight, from underneath.

4

DANE

"No."

Coach Halvorsen doesn't look up from his laptop. "I didn't ask you a question."

"Coach, with respect, no."

His office is the size of a penalty box and smells like burnt coffee. There's a whiteboard on the wall with next weekend's lines on it, and somebody has drawn a very small skull next to Lindqvist's name on the fourth line. I didn't do it. I didn't erase it either.

Halvorsen finally closes the laptop. He takes his reading glasses off and folds them and sets them down on the desk, very carefully, like they might go off.

"His housing fell through," he says.

"He's a grown man. He can find housing."

"In October? In this town? Where every landlord in a ten-mile radius has a nephew on the fan forum?" He leans back. "He's been living in a basement on Pine with a radiator you have to hit with a shoe. Doug told me. The grad students who own it are selling at the end of the month."

"There are other rooms."

"There's one room. It's in the team house, and it's been empty since May."

I don't say anything.

I know which room it is. It's at the top of the stairs, second door on the left. It shares a wall with mine. The bed's still there because nobody wanted to be the one to carry it out, and there's still a strip of Nico's old poster tape on the wall over the desk, four little white squares where a picture of us at the lake used to hang.

"That's Nico's room," I say.