Page 83 of On His Mind

I look at the screen, waiting for something to happen. Relief. Indifference. But instead, my heart’s a racing mess. Percy’s going to be on TV. My palms start to sweat.

The game isn’t even halfway through when I make an excuse to leave because I can’t take it anymore. I can see him sitting on the bench, and I hate that my eyes keep looking for him. The girls tell me to have a good night, and we’ll have another get together soon.

When I walk into my apartment, the feeling doesn’t disappear like I hoped it would. I take one glance at the stack of sketchbooks on the table where they’ve been rotting for weeks, and the pressure in my chest is so full that I can barely exhale. So I pick up my phone.

The team’s back tonight — Gianna said the bus gets in around eleven. It’s ten-forty.

Me:Are you back?

Theo:Just got back. Rough one.

Me:Do you need a ride?

Theo:Yeah? Cool.

I grab my keys back off the counter, and finally, the pressure starts to alleviate.

Chapter 25

Percy

Thebusgetsina little before eleven. Six hours back from a rink three states over, and I’ve been awake the whole drive, because I don’t sleep on a bus full of guys breathing in the dark with the road humming under the floor and somebody’s playlist bleeding out of an earbud four rows up. I sit against the window with my hood up and watch the highway peel past, and by the time we come off the exit, my neck’s a solid bar, and my legs have gone to nothing. I’m the kind of tired that isn’t sleepy, just wrung out, hollowed, done.

We lost. Hutch played fine. I dressed, sat, and didn’t touch the ice, which is most games anyway. It’s just late, and I want my bed, the dark, and the sound of the house.

The bus swings wide into the lot, the brakes sigh, and everybody’s up before we’ve stopped, pulling bags down, Stanleyloud already. Cold air comes in when the door folds open. I get up slow, everything stiff, and shuffle out with the rest of them.

There’s a car idling near the doors with its headlights on. I recognize it, and for one stupid, wide-open half a second, something lifts clean off the ground in me, because she’s here. Her car is in my rink’s lot at eleven at night, and there’s only one reason a person waits in a cold lot for a bus to come in.

Then Theo walks in her direction. He’s got his bag over his shoulder, he crosses the lot easily, like he knew she’d be there, and throws the bag in the back and drops into the passenger seat.

I can see her through the windshield in the lot lights. She’s saying something to him as he gets in, and she’s got the car in gear before his door is shut, and then she looks up. Across the lot. Right at me. Our eyes meet and hold, long enough that there’s no telling myself it didn’t happen. Then the taillights swing red across the wet asphalt and pull out of the lot, and she’s gone, with him in the seat.

Something comes up in me then that I have never felt in my life. Not with Mike. Not with Josh. Not in any house I was ever put in or taken out of.

I’m braced for it to be sad. It isn’t. It comes up hot instead, all at once, up the back of my neck and into my jaw and down into my hands where they close hard on the strap of my bag, and I stand there in a freezing parking lot in my travel suit, and I can’t get on top of it. For nineteen years, I’ve been able to fold anything down small and put it away. This won’t fold. It just sits in me, shaking, too big, and there’s nowhere to put it.

“Mon Petit Per—” Stanley’s at my shoulder, both bags on his, reaching to grab the back of my neck the way he does.

I step out from under his hand. “Don’t.”

It comes out flat. He pulls his hand back, and for once, he doesn’t say anything.

Blue’s there. He doesn’t ask. He just stops beside me for a second, looks at the empty place in the lot where the car was, and then he lifts my gear bag off my shoulder and onto his own without a word and starts walking. I follow him in.

Benson drives. Rowan calls shotgun, so I’m in the back of the cab between Blue and Stanley, and Stanley hasn’t stopped talking since the parking lot.

“—because if Kovac makes that read in the second, if he just sees the back door, it’s a different game, it’s a completely different game—” He’s leaned forward between the front seats, both hands going. “We were right there. We were right there, Reeve.”

“We were down two,” Rowan says.

“We were a bounce from down one.” Stanley drops back against the seat and stares out the windshield at the road coming at us, and for a second, he’s actually quiet, which never happens, and then he says, “Next year, though. Our senior year. That’s the one.” He knocks the back of Benson’s headrest. “You hear me? Our senior year –– we win the whole thing. I’ve decided. It’s happening.”

“You’ve decided,” Benson says.

“I’ve had a vision.” He’s coming back up now. “Confetti everywhere. Reeve makes the pass. I slap it in. And we hang a banner. I’m gonna cry at the banner. Everybody lifts me up and I body surf the team. I’m telling you now so it’s not weird when it happens.”

Rowan says something dry. Benson cracks a joke. I sit in the middle of it with my back against the seat and don’t add in a word.