Page 2 of On His Schedule
I open my mouth.No fucking way.
“You sit the home opener,” he repeats, watching my face, “and I’ll let your agent know why.”
That doesn’t feel very nice. The tightness in my chest is now knotting loops around my brain. This is definitely a hostage situation, and one I cannot get out of. I pick up the flyer. I don’t want him to tell my agent shit.
“By Friday,” I say, understanding that I can’t convince my way out of this one.
“By Friday.”
I’m halfway out the door when he says my first name. “Benson.”
I turn.
He’s already looking back at his computer. “You think NHL teams want a guy who can’t pass Stats?”
“No, Coach.”
“Make the call.”
The walk back across campus is a drag. I’m in a hoodie, but the weather is bipolar, so I shouldn’t be in a hoodie. I left the house when it was freezing, but now it’s hot. I’m fucking sweating. I clutch onto the flyer about tutoring and try to figure out how I, Benson Reeve, captain of the Camden University Wolves,projected first-round draft pick, son of a man who can recite the entire 1996 Red Wings roster from memory, am about to sit the home opener over a class about the mean.
The mean.
The actual statistical mean.
My phone buzzes. Then it buzzes again. Then it buzzes seven more times because the group chat is never quiet. I pull it out.
Stanley:[photo of a raccoon eating a slice of pizza]
Stanley:This is Rowan when he cooks.
Rowan:Wtf. I’m literally making you eggs rn.
Stanley:[photo of the same raccoon, zoomed in]
Stanley:Look at his little hands.
Blue:Almost home. I want some eggs too.
Percy is, as always, not in the chat. He always reads the chat but never contributes. Percy is a French-Canadian ghost.
I don’t text back. I just walk and look at the flyer and think about the wordprojected.
Hawthorne Street is the kind of street where the houses have been rented to college students for so long that they’ve forgotten they were ever real houses. Ours is the third one on the right, white with green shutters and a porch swing that hangs at a forty-five-degree angle because Stanley sat on it wrong in March and we never fixed it. The doormat says GO WOLVES in block letters. Stanley stole it from a tailgate when he was a freshman. Sometimes I think about how every single object in our house has a story like that.
I go up the steps and open the door, expecting a raccoon to spawn somewhere in here. Instead, I’m blinded. Stanley is shirtless on the couch with the sun reflecting off his skin.
“—and that’s why,” Stanley is saying, gesturing with a banana, “we have to outlaw it.”
“Outlaw what?” Rowan says from the kitchen island. He’s whisking something. There’s a small mountain of grated cheesenext to him. He looks like a man who has been awake for four hours and has plans for the next four. “Outlaw what, Stanley. Use your words.”
“Love.” Stanley puts his hands in the air like it’s sprinkling it with his fingers.
I close the door behind me. Nobody looks at me. The Hawthorne House operates on a kind of social radar where you can enter or exit a room without acknowledgment until you’re load-bearing for the conversation.
“You can’t outlaw love,” Rowan says. “That’s not a thing you can do.”
“I’m not saying outlaw it forever, Laurens, Jesus, I’m not a monster. I’m saying for senior year. As a household.”
