Page 153 of On His Mind

Her name comes up in this house all the time now, and I have to stand there and let it.

Melly’s her roommate. Gianna’s her friend. Lucy’s over here a lot. Sometimes Melly will talk lightly about her, and I have to pretend that it doesn’t cut me deep.

I get very good at hearing her name. It’s a skill I’d rather not have.

The games keep going the way they’ve been going. I’m playing the best hockey of my life. Fuller’s started saying things to me in the hall that he’s never said before about the pro camps in the spring, about what scouts have been asking. I nod and thank him and go get on the bus. The trade paid out. Every part of it, exactly the way I said it would that night on the porch. I chose this and I got it, all of it, and I’ve never felt less like a person in my life.

I take the drawing out on a Thursday.

It’s been in the dresser since I moved down here, face down between the two pieces of cardboard. I get it out and sit on the edge of the bed with it. The two of us in the Hawthorne kitchen. Her against the counter, me in the doorway in my coat.

I remember exactly what I thought when she handed it to me. That I’d have this when I had nothing else.

I sit there with it for a while. Then I put it back between the cardboard, and back in the drawer, and I shut the drawer, and I go to practice.

It’s December and Stanley’s at full volume about the national title. We’re winning, and he’s on it every night now — the run we’re on, the seeding, the bracket he’s already drawn out on the back of a pizza box, their one last shot at the whole thing. The sermon he’s been preaching since I’ve known him. He’s happier than I’ve ever seen a human being. Half of that’s the hockey, and the other half is Aspen Linwood, the coach’s daughter from three doors down — the thing that started as some fake relationship he was running for reasons none of us ever fully followed, and thenturned real on him over Thanksgiving, and he has not shut up about her for a single hour since.

Stanley Ermington. The man who enforces the rules on the whiteboard. Whose entire personality, for three straight years,wasthose rules.

He’s got a girlfriend now. He’s unbearable about her, and not one person in this house holds him to a single word he ever said.

Nobody but me, apparently. I sit here holding all of it while he glows.

“Okay. Christmas break.” He spins a chair around backward and drops into it, forearms crossed over the top. “Let’s do a ski trip. There’s a hot tub. We can stay—”

“No,” I say.

And I feel the meanness of it come up out of me, because three of the four other men at this table are in real relationships, and I’m the one who had exactly what they’ve got and set it on fire with my own two hands.

The room pauses.

“...Okay. So that’s a no from the goalie.” Stanley recovers. “Counterproposal. We—”

“I said no.”

They look at each other. Not at me — at each other, over me, around me, and they start having one of those conversations this house holds without a single word in it, all eyebrows and small mouth-movements, and I hate that I’ve lived here long enough to read every syllable of it.

“He’s said no to everything for a month,” Rowan says.

“Said no to the steak place,” Blue adds.

“Said no to ice skating, and that was a whole house thing,” Benson nods.

They’re keeping a tally. They’ve been keeping a tally of me.

“Deveroux.” Stanley leans in. “What is with you, man?” He’s still grinning, but the grin’s got something under it now,something real wearing a joke’s clothes. “You’ve been a ghost. You don’t eat. You don’t come out. You do the thing where you sit in the corner and stare at a wall like a widow in black waiting on a ship that already sank—”

“Nothing,” I say.

“No. Seriously.” He won’t let it go; Stanley has never in his life let one thing go. “Is it Fuller? You worried about your minutes, your draft stock, what?” His eyebrows climb. “Christ. Did somebody die? Because we’ve all been talking about it, man, all of us, we’ve been—”

“You’ve been off since August,” Benson says. He leans back, arms folded, and the captain voice comes out, the low even one none of us push past. “That’s four months, Percy. That’s not a rough week. That’s a season.”

Stanley argues, “No, it hasn’t been since August. Not like this. These past few weeks have been bad.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. You haven’t been fine, and we’ve all watched it, and—”