Page 142 of On His Mind

“You guess.”

“I’m not into hockey players.” The second it’s out of my mouth, my stomach turns right over, because — what the hell am I saying? I’m in love with a hockey player. I’m so stupidly in love with one of those.

“Yeah,” Mara says, oblivious, “I can’t picture you and Theo. Not in a million years.”

“He’s a dog.” Gianna turns back to the mirror.

“He is,” I agree.

“I’ll take Drew, then,” Mara decides. “He’s the better-looking one anyway.”

“You can have Theo, too,” I say.

Gianna laughs and shakes her head.

I catch Lucy watching me from across the room. When our eyes meet, she blinks and looks away, quick, like she’s been caught at something.

“I can see you with a business major,” Mara says, studying me. “Someone in a suit.”

Percy would look unreal in a suit.The thought arrives fully formed, and I let it sail straight back out before it can show on my face. I don’t answer her. I just settle back into the couch and watch the three of them finish getting ready, and I keep my one enormous secret exactly where it lives, tucked deep in my heart where no one can see it.

I’m in a black silk top and white jeans with my favorite coat over the top. I fold myself into the back of Gianna’s car for the three-minute drive to Hawthorne Street.

The whole way there I work at hiding my nerves. I smile on cue, I answer when I’m spoken to, but like Lucy, I keep mostly to myself and let Mara and Gianna fill the car with noise. It’s ridiculous, my nerves, because I know that house better thanany of them. I know it like the back of my own hand. I spent an entire summer inside it, but the knowing doesn’t settle me. It does the opposite. It winds me tighter. I get to stand in his house, surrounded by everyone we know, and pretend I don’t know the boy I’m in love with.

I pull my coat tighter over the silk. It’s cold out. Gianna’s still going, happy, about how her brother’s captain of the team this year, how good it is to finally see him with Lucy — and my stomach sinks because Benson gets to walk in tonight with Lucy on his arm ashisin front of everyone, and I have to walk in three feet behind them and pretend.

So why are the rules even a thing? Why did they build them? Why is he listening to them? Who are they protecting, and from what?

Gianna parks. I look up through the window at the house.

The party’s barely begun, and I can already hear the music the second Mara opens her door. My heart flutters because I’m about to walk in there and perform a whole evening of not knowing him.

Hawthorne is golden and roaring when we walk in.

Something happens to my knees, going through that front door. I’ve been inside this house a hundred times and I’ve never once seen italivelike this — every light blazing, music coming up through the soles of my shoes, forty-odd people I half-recognize packed shoulder to shoulder with red cups in their hands. This is what he does every weekend, for years, while I sat across town telling myself I didn’t mind. The house even smells the way it always has — like boys and sweat and something familiar.

I walk in like I’ve never set foot here before. I’ve always been good at composure; tonight I wear it like the coat I’m sliding off my shoulders and hanging beside Gianna’s.

I don’t see him, but the girls want drinks right away, so we head to the kitchen.

He’s standing at the counter with a container in his hands, big and broad, calm in the middle of the chaos, mixing up a huge batch of something in a drink dispenser. For one second, his eyes lift and cross the whole crowded house and land on mine. And then they let go, because the guy beside him is talking. He’s good at this too. We’re both so good at this.

Gianna cuts through the crowd to the counter. “Percy, you’ve got to stop making the mango one. You’ll cross-contaminate and put Lucy in the hospital again.”

“I wash everything down with a separate sponge.” Percy shakes his head, unbothered. “There’s no cross-contamination. She’s fine.”

Lucy reaches Benson, and they fold into a hug. I watch it happen, and it hits me in the chest, seeing them like this. Not one of the guys so much as blinks at them. I think my heart cracks a little at the sight.

“Somebody told me once that Hawthorne parties had terrible drinks,” Percy says, to no one, to the room. “So I started making this.”

I stare at the container he’s filling from the blender, listening to what he’s saying and wondering why he’s saying that. Then it hits me that I’m the person who said that. That was years ago. He was a freshman. I was a sophomore. It was nothing, a throwaway thing I said to put Hawthorne parties down. I said it once and never thought of it again.

“It’s a tradition now, G,” Stanley barks, slinging an arm across the counter. “Let the man make his goalie juice in peace.”

Rowan laughs. “Wait — is that why you make it? Because someone said Hawthorne had bad drinks?”

Percy nods, and says nothing, and still doesn’t look at me.