Page 5 of Five Hole

“That is the first two wearing a coat.”

He goes up the tunnel ahead of me and does not wait to see whether it landed. He never waits. He puts a thing down where you will trip over it later and lets the tripping do the teaching.

I reset. Glove up. Blocker square. I say the small silent piece of the order a crease will hold. I stand inside it. The settled feeling comes.

Slow. It comes slow.

I do not look at him again.

I look at him again.

* * *

I live in the Stable, like the rest of them. Pelletier Hall on the housing paperwork, though nobody in this building has called it that since before I got here. A cinderblock room. A bed. A desk. A shelf. At home the order is smaller and no one sees it. That is the point. Books upright. Spines out. The lamp squared to the corner of the desk. I set my day down piece by piece, the way I set my gear. The room holds it, and I hold.

The north wall is thin. This is new. This year it is thin in a particular direction.

Music comes through it. Low. A thread of it. It comes off him everywhere. I lie in the dark with the order complete around me. I wait for the music to become a thing I have to manage. An intrusion. A stick dropped in the middle of the sequence.

It does not become that.

It stays low. It stays on his side. It fills the thin place between us. Water into a crack. I lie very still and I do not name the noticing. Naming it would be moving the glove.

Before I sleep I do what I do every night. I run the order in my head and put the day away behind it. Glove. Blocker. Chest. Pads. Mask. The room holds. Tonight there is a new piece at the end of the sequence that I did not put there. A thread of sound through a thin wall. I don’t know when it got added. I only know the sequence is not finished without it. That frightens me more than a dropped stick ever has.

Everything about him comes slow, and arrives anyway. That’s the part I cannot square.

Chapter 3

Emile

The Stable smells like every athletic dorm that’s ever existed, which is feet and body spray and the low grief of a microwave four guys have wronged. There’s a radiator that knocks all night and heats nothing. And I love it about as much as I love the barn, which is completely, and against the advice of everyone including me.

Same room they gave me when I got here. Second floor. The north wall of it’s thin enough that you learn your neighbor’s whole life through it whether you signed up for that or not. I’m hauling my last box up when I find out whose life it’s going to be this year. A door down the hall is open. And there’s a shelf being built inside it, books going up one at a time. I don’t have to see the hands to know them. Steady. No wasted motion. Every spine getting turned the same way before it goes on the wood.

Of course. Of course they put the saint next to me. And somewhere a scheduling committee’s high-fiving.

I don’t say anything. I’m capable of not saying things, whatever my file says. I pause in his doorway a second with the box on my hip, and there he is with his back to me, standing the books up so the spines all face the same way. He hasn’t heard me, or he’s heard me and decided I’m weather. And I think, come on, nobody’s this much of a monk. Nobody. I go put my box down in my own room and turn on my music. Not loud. Just a thread of it, just enough to slide under the wall and let his side know the noise moved in.

His side goes quiet, and it’s a loud kind of quiet, the kind the whole hallway seems to lean toward. I grin at the drywall like a lunatic and go to team meet.

I unpack while the light goes down outside. It doesn’t take long, because a backup travels light. Pads, a couple of masks, a milk crate of tape, the speaker, a photo of my mother on the little dresser that came with the room. Manon, at the kitchen table back home, two hours from anywhere, holding a coffee and squinting at whoever had the camera. She calls on Sundays and asks did I eat. I always say yes. Sometimes it’s even true. I set the photo square to the corner of the dresser and then I laugh at myself, because square to the corner is his move, not mine. And I’ve caught it off him through a wall in under an hour.

* * *

The Trough is our corner of the dining hall. Has been forever. Will belong to whatever sorry freshmen inherit it when we’re graduated and gone. Tonight it’s loud like it only ever gets the night before a season, everybody pretending they’re not wound tight by being twice as much themselves. A sophomore guards a tower of trays like a trophy. A freshman D-man’s already been nicknamed something cruel and wears it like he’s grateful for it. He probably is. And a cruel nickname means they kept you.

Rocco Rizzo’s at the head of the table, because Rocco’s at the head of everything. Our captain. Built low and wide like a fire hydrant, about that easy to move. He does the thing he does, which is not much. He sits there being the heaviest object in the room while the rest of us orbit and knock into each other. He doesn’t give speeches at dinner. He doesn’t have to. When Rocco wants the table quiet he sets his fork down, and the table goes quiet. Nobody’s ever worked out how.

“Fortin.” He tips his chin at me. From Rocco a chin is a whole paragraph. “Good summer?”

“Grew an inch.” I drop into the seat across from him. “All confidence.”

“You didn’t grow an inch.”

“You measuring me now, Cap? All confidence, then. Grew it in the hands, mostly. A guy in my job has to grow something over a summer or he turns up in the fall exactly as useful as he left.”

“This is my last one,” he says, out of nowhere, which is how Rocco says every single thing worth saying. “Senior. I walk in the spring and somebody else gets the letter.”