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"I said I would."

"No. I mean you asked what I wanted."

He's quiet for a long moment.

"That was the deal," he says. "It's both of ours."

"Nobody's asked me that in a year."

He turns his head. In the lamplight his eyes are very light. He looks at me like he's trying to figure out what kind of shot I am.

"Who were you laughing with?" he says.

My stomach drops.

"What?"

"At night. Through the wall. When you first moved in." His voice is low and even. "You were on the phone, laughing. Truth."

It's the rule. In here, I tell him the truth.

So I do. I say the truest thing I can say.

"A friend," I say. "Someone who got hurt last year. Worse than me. We talk about rehab, mostly. He sends me videos."

He looks at me. I can see him thinking it through. A guy from Harrow, he's thinking. A teammate. Someone I left behind.

"Okay," he says.

It's true, every word of it. And I feel like the biggest liar that ever lived.

He reaches over and turns out the lamp. In the dark, I feel his hand find mine on top of the blanket. He doesn't hold it. He just puts his hand on top of mine and leaves it there.

I don't sleep for a long time.

When I finally do, he's still there.

14

DANE

It turns into a rhythm. I don't decide that. It just happens, the way a season does.

Six a.m., the ice. The wager's back on. Five pucks, blue line in, the whole thing. He comes at me every morning like he's trying to kill me, and I stop him, and he says yes when I give him an order, and nobody who walked in would know anything was different.

At night, my door. Or his. Not every night. When the house is loud, we don't. When Kasper's got his headset on and Gunnar's music is shaking the floor, sometimes we do, quiet, with a hand over a mouth. Sometimes it's just his hand on mine on top of the blanket, and that's all. Sometimes he talks. He talks a lot, when there's nobody to perform for. About stupid things, mostly. Which Shania Twain album is the best one. Whether Doug has a family. Why the Lantern has only one fish.

"It's lonely," he says, one night, about the fish. "He's been in there alone for, like, years. Marcy says his name's Walter."

"It's a fish."

"Walter has feelings, Dane."

I didn't laugh in front of anybody from April to November. Now I lie in the dark with my face in the pillow, laughing about a fish named Walter, so the sound won't go through the wall.

Out there, I don't touch him. I don't look at him in the room. He's still at the card table on Thursdays. I hate it now. Every Thursday I sit at the long table and eat my walleye and watch him make Marcy laugh, alone in the corner, and it's like swallowing glass.

But he made the rule. Out there, you do whatever you want. I signed up for out there. And if I change it, the room will notice, and the room will ask why.