The Understatement of the Year (Ivy Years #3)

November

PINCHING: when a defenseman leaves his typical rearward position to push forward into the offensive zone.

Rikker

We were on a bus heading to Boston when I got a text from Skippy, my ex-boyfriend. For a couple of minutes, I ignored it. There were rules I’d made for myself with regard to him. The first rule was: Never text Skippy first. Because that was just pathetic. The second rule was: Always wait a half hour before responding.

But I was on a bus, just staring out at the highway. So of course I peeked. He’d sent me a photograph, one that made me say, “aw!” and immediately compose a reply.

“Who are you texting?” Bella asked from the seat beside me.

“My ex,” I said, hitting the send button.

“Ooh!” she said. “Can I see a picture?”

“Of my ex? No. I deleted them all. Off my phone, anyway.” As any self-respecting human being would. “But you can see a picture of his new dog.” I handed her the phone.

“Aw,” she echoed. I tried to take the phone back, but she moved it out of my reach, still staring at the poodle in the photo. “Why is the dog wearing glasses?”

“I dunno. In fact, I just asked that question a second ago. Not that I expect a reasonable answer.” Skippy was kind of a nut.

“You know Rikker…” she trailed off, still squinting at the photo. “I’d kill any guy who ever said this to me. But this dog and I kind of look alike.”

“What?” I grabbed the phone back and looked again at the picture. And then I let out the sort of laugh that hurts a little, because you tried and failed to hold it in. “God, Bella! You’re right.” The dog had curly hair, in a color much like hers. And a goofy smile. “Okay, let’s take your picture and send it to my ex.”

“Wait!” she held up a hand, and I thought she’d shoot the idea down. But she turned around in her seat instead. “Hey, Trevi! Can I borrow your reading glasses? Just for a minute.”

Again I snorted. Bella was just about the best sport in the entire world. And I told her so when she came back wearing glasses that were startlingly similar to the ones the poodle wore in the photo.

My phone buzzed with a text, answering the question of why the dog wore glasses: Rikky, not everyone has perfect vision. Don’t make her feel self-conscious. We don’t have a name yet. Ross wants to call her Kujo, but I refuse. Ideas?

“What a goof,” Bella said, reading over my shoulder.

“Yep.”

“Who’s Ross?”

“My replacement.”

She made a face. “Sorry. Let me see the poodle one more time, so we can get this just right.” I showed Bella the photo again, and she adjusted the barrette in her hair to make it poof up like the dog’s. “Let ‘er rip,” Bella said, smiling.

I switched my phone to the camera setting and framed the shot. “Hang on.” I reached up to gently tilt her chin to the side, like the poodle’s. “Okay. Can you make your smile a little… doggier?” But that made Bella laugh, which made me laugh, so we had to take a minute to calm down.

“What eez so amusing?” asked Frenchie from across the aisle.

“Nothing,” Bella giggled, and I lost it again. Several people were turning to stare, now. We were like the loud, raucous table at a restaurant — annoying, unless it’s you. “Okay,” I took a deep breath. “We can do this. Let’s see your pose again.” She made her doggiest smile yet, and I clicked the shutter button.

For a caption, I wrote: Dear Skippy, your new dog and my new friend…separated at birth?

“Hit send!” Bella giggled.

I did, and it only took about sixty seconds to get the first response. OH MY GOD. Of course, that made us howl. Then he wrote: I can’t even… What is her name?

Bella, I replied, and my phone rang almost immediately. “Hello?” I chuckled into the receiver.

“Rikky! Let me talk to Bella.”

Figures.

I passed her the phone. She took it with laughing eyes. “This is Bella. Nice to meet you, Skippy.” There was a pause. “I’d be honored if you named her Bella. Seriously. You’re welcome.” She handed the phone back. “He wants to talk to you.”

“What’s up, Skipster?” I asked, dropping my voice.

“I’m glad you made a friend, Rikky.”

Just what I needed — a little patronizing from the ex. The ex who seemed to be doing so much better than I was. “Um, thanks?”

“Can’t be easy being the new guy for three years in a row.”

I sighed, because it was true. “I’ll live. Always do.”

“Of course you will. Where are you, anyway?”

“On a bus to Boston for a tournament.”

“That doesn’t sound bad. A bus full of big, muscular athletes.”

“It has its moments.”

“Glad to hear it. Take care, Rikky. Ross sends his love.”

Seriously? “Uh, thanks. Bye, Skip.”

I hung up with him, to catch Bella watching me. “He seems fun. Do you miss him?”

“Sometimes.” That was the truth. And Skippy was fun. Yet I’d somehow decided about a year ago that he and I had outgrown each other. I even told him so, which he did not appreciate. Then, when he made it official by dumping me, I was less sure.

Ugh. Next topic, please.

I stashed my phone and took out the book that I was supposed to be reading for English class. After Bella returned Trevi’s glasses to him, she pulled a folder out of her backpack. “Now that you’ve been with us for two months,” she said, setting her backpack at her feet, “you’ve had time to decide who’s the most attractive man on the team.”

“Nice try, babe,” I said, looking out at highway 95, which was currently flying by the window of our bus.

“Seriously, Rikker. How can you be my gay BFF if we can’t dish about guys?” She clicked a ball-point pen and began to write numbers down the left side of a legal pad. From one to twelve.

“No can do. I’m not getting my ass kicked just to fulfill your Hollywood fantasies.” In my duffel I’d hidden a big bar of dark chocolate with bits of salted caramel in it. Bella could joke as often as she wanted. But my true role as gay BFF was to keep her supplied with fine chocolate.

It worked for both of us.

“I’m only half kidding,” she whispered. “For the past two years I’ve made a close study of who has the nicest ass on the bus. It’s difficult for a girl to keep that kind of thing to herself.”

“You don’t keep it to yourself,” I pointed out. “Not a day goes by when you don’t tell each ass’s owner just what you think of it.”

“Not true,” she countered. “I’m very liberal with my praise. A good manager knows to motivate the troops.”

I snorted. Bella’s School of Management was a peculiar institution. But it was our peculiar institution.

“The best ass is on Hartley,” she said in the barest whisper. “And that’s why it’s such a buzz kill that he’s my biggest failure.”

Now she had my attention. “Never tapped that one?” As much as I wanted to avoid the subject of Hartley’s (very fine) ass, the lure of hearing just a little more about the inner workings of Bella’s mind was just too great. “Why not?”

“Timing. Last year when he dumped his old girlfriend, he got together with Corey the next morning.” She shook her head, looking at once disbelieving and brokenhearted. “And I love Corey to death, so I can’t even wish for them to break up.”

“That’s big of you.” I’d met Corey too, and she was the bomb.

Bella grinned. “It is big of me. I’d never sleep with anyone who was attached. Pepé, for instance, has a girl back in Montreal. There are like fifty pictures of her in his room.”

I wondered how she knew that, but I thought I’d just let that question slide.

“So, any given season a lot of the team is out of rotation for me. That’s why Graham and I hooked up so often last year. He’s always single.”

I kept the flinch off my face, but it wasn’t easy. The glimpses I’d gotten of his antics with women always gave me a surprise stab of…I don’t even know what. At Capri’s, girls hung on Graham with as much frequency as they did the other players. A couple of times I’d seen him make hasty, drunken exits in the company of whichever puck bunny had followed us to Capri’s from the rink.

And I already knew that he and Bella were close. They were awfully touchy feely with one another. Then again, Bella touched everyone until they asked her to stop. So I hadn’t made any mental pictures of Bella and Graham naked together. For some reason, I didn’t like imagining it.

If I were a better person, I’d be happy for him, I guess. But apparently, I was the sort to hold a grudge.

Not your business, I reminded myself.

It was time to think about something else. Like the saucer shot I’d sunk into the corner of the net last week, scoring Harkness’s first goal of the year in our preseason scrimmage against Brown. That would have to be my happy thought. It’s not like I would be getting naked with anyone anytime soon. Hockey took up half my time, and that was only going to get worse. School took up the other half.

Besides myself, I couldn’t even name a gay man at Harkness.

I had no real social life. When the team went to Capri’s for pizza and beer, I usually made an appearance. I’d have a slice or two and a pint, and talk hockey with the guys who made me feel welcome. I usually left early, quitting while I was ahead. It wasn’t exactly healthy, the way I still felt like I was apologizing for myself half the time. But there was no road map for being me. I was operating under the vague assumption that if I played really great hockey this season, things would just get easier. My teammates might accept me as a true friend, rather than That Gay Guy who can make tape-to-tape passes.

Because everybody loves a winner, right?

Beside me, Bella made more notes on her legal pad. From the folder in her lap, she extracted a glossy hockey program. “Have you seen this yet?” she asked. “They just came back from the printer.”

“Nice,” I said, because I knew she’d worked hard on it.

She flipped it open to the roster, where our smiling faces looked out at the camera, our uniforms still crisp and unbloodied. “You do take a nice picture, Rikker,” she sighed.

I laughed. “And here I was just thinking how Photoshopped those are. We all look like we’ve just come from having our teeth whitened.”

She pulled the page closer to her face. “What do you think of Orson’s sideburns? It’s a risky look, but I think he pulls it off.”

“No comment.”

“God, Rik!” she heaved a sigh. “That was a perfectly harmless question. I didn’t ask if you wanted to do him.”

“Bella,” I warned, dropping my voice, “I’m really not joking about this. Even if I felt like admitting to you that facial hair doesn’t really do it for me, it’s not a conversation I can have. That’s exactly what the homophobes are worried about, you know? That I’m staring at them. And taking notes.”

“Maybe they need to lighten up,” she whispered.

“I don’t think I can make them do that,” I whispered back.

She held my eyes for a long moment, and I saw understanding flicker through hers. But then her evil grin reappeared. “Seriously — you don’t like facial hair? I love it. Even when it chafes my inner thighs. Especially then.”

With a groan, I closed my eyes, banging my head into the headrest. Thanks for that image, Bella. Of all the people on the bus to remind me how horny I was, who knew it would be a chick? Fuck my life.

She giggled. “I just had the best idea.”

“I can’t wait to hear it.”

“Just for fun, I’m going to tell everyone on the team that you don’t like facial hair. By Christmas, they’ll all be as hairy as Wolf Man.”

The laugh erupted from me before I could hold it in. “Or you could try the reverse, just for kicks. Tell them I’m hot for facial hair, and by tomorrow they’ll all be as clean-shaven as the Marine Corps.”

We laughed until the tears were leaking down Bella’s face.

“What’s so funny?” A head popped up from the seat in front of us to ask. But it belonged to Groucho, a senior defenseman with the shaggiest beard on the team. Bella howled again, and Groucho began to frown.

“Time for chocolate,” I said, digging into my bag. Because everyone responds to chocolate. I should probably buy it in bulk.

The bus rolled on. We were heading to an invitational in Boston. We’d play one game tonight and another one tomorrow.

With the program still open in her lap, Bella scribbled on the legal pad, occasionally crossing something out and grumbling.

“What are you doing, anyway?” I asked.

“Hotel room assignments. It’s like planning the seating at a wedding.”

That got my attention. “What are you going to do with me? You’ll be my roommate, right?”

“I can’t,” she said, making a note on her page. “The athletic department woman has to be with me. We’re the only chicks.”

Well, fuck. “How about Hartley?”

“He asked me to put him with Frenchie, so he can keep an eye on him. Apparently the kid doesn’t like to leave his bong at home. And Hartley doesn’t want anyone to get arrested.”

“Who then?”

“I’m working on it.” Under her breath, she counted all the names on the page. As I watched, she crossed off a name and switched it with another one. “Okay, I think I’m going to put you in with Graham.”

“Whoa,” I said, my heart dropping into my stomach. “You can’t do that.”

She looked up, and her expression was full of genuine surprise. “Why not?”

I swallowed, trying to keep the panic off my face. “That dude seriously does not like me. I’m not kidding. Big-D would probably be happier to see me than Graham.”

Bella’s eyes narrowed. “You did not just compare Graham to Big-D.”

I blinked back at her, having no idea what to say. It didn’t matter that I knew the difference between Big-D, who was just an all-around bigot and total asshole, and Graham, who hated me for a very special reason. We could not share a room.

“Graham is just a big teddy bear,” Bella went on. “I wish everyone would just get off his case.” Two pink spots appeared on her cheekbones.

If ever there was a moment for treading lightly, I had found it. Because I realized then that there were a couple of details that I’d missed. Though she claimed to be a free agent, Bella obviously carried some kind of a torch for Graham. The flush on her face suggested that he was her favorite teddy bear. (Though she’d probably be shocked to learn that I’d snuggled him first.) And also, she was concerned about him. Probably because he had been sucking wind at practice lately.

What to do?

“I’m not on Graham’s case, Bella,” I said softly. “But if you want him relaxed and ready to play, I’m telling you that you should give him a different roommate.”

Bella stuck her nose back into her work. “I’ll take it under advisement. But rooms are tight. And you’re wrong about him.”

Fuck. “Who knows why he doesn’t like me? Maybe he thought I was a shitty player in high school. I lived in Michigan before I moved to Vermont.”

She looked up. “I noticed that in your bio. The Jesus Saves team, right?”

“Yeah,” I chuckled. Cool T-shirt aside, the private Christian schools we’d attended were not the right place for me.

“I asked Graham about that. He said he didn’t remember you. Was it a big place?”

I could only nod at her, because I needed a moment to inwardly choke on that. He said he didn’t remember you. It gave me a fresh hit of pain to hear that out loud.

She kept talking, oblivious. “It was a Christian School, huh? That must have been a lot of fun for the gay boy. I mean, if you already knew it then.”

I laughed, but the sound was bitter to my own ears. “Oh, I knew it all right. And at that school, they preached it just like you read about.” Even before Graham, when I was still in denial, they basically condemned me to hell on a daily basis. I hated that place. “Vermont was so much better. Because everybody there is a little bit weird.”

“So you were out in high school?” She clicked her pen and studied me with big green eyes.

It was a fair question, but not easily answered. Straight people always assume that you’re either in the closet or all the way out. But that’s not really how it worked. You could be out for some people and hiding it from others. “My family knew, and my closest friends. But not the hockey team.”

Bella chewed on the end of her pen. “Sports really is the final frontier, isn’t it? Now there’s same-sex marriage in seventeen states. But the NHL is a hundred percent straight.”

“Sure it is.”

“Right?” she laughed.

The bus rolled on, and we sat in silence for a minute. “Don’t put me with Graham,” I said quietly.

She made an annoyed sound in her throat. “He’s not a jerk, okay? The world is papered over with jerks, but Graham is not one of them.”

That might even be true. But it didn’t matter. If Bella put us in a hotel room, I could almost picture him leaping from the balcony. And it would be my fault, in a way. Because I still took the occasional opportunity to torture him with a knowing smile or a stare.

“How about this?” I asked, hitting on the solution. “Just run it by him first.” That way I wouldn’t offend Bella by harping on it. He could tell her himself. “If he doesn’t like the idea, tell Hartley I’ll babysit Frenchie for him.” I’d never heard either of our French-speaking teammates slander me. And “faggot” was the same word in English and in French.

“Fine.”

I looked out the window then, watching the world go by. And I tried to think of hockey. Nothing but hockey.

Graham

By some miracle, I finally played a decent game that night in Boston.

It was the bright lights and the sound of the crowd that woke me the hell up. Though I’d been stinking at practice, the chance to mow down a real live opponent shook the cobwebs off of me. I felt lighter on my feet than I had in weeks. Whenever the other guys had the puck, I was energy in motion. Mine, I’d chant to myself, poke-checking the puck out of their grasp. And if the guy didn’t give it up, I forced the issue. My pads got a workout. By the time the game was over, I’d tossed every one of their offensive players onto the boards.

It helped that the other team had looked shaky. There’s nothing like an early goal to light up the squad. Hartley sank one when the clock still read 15:55 in the first period.

And it wasn’t just me who was fired up. Our foot speed was good. Passes went where they were intended to go. Our confidence lasted all three periods, for a 4-0 score on the game.

Finally. It was nice to remember that I could play this game.

Pitbull and Ke$sha were already singing their guts out by the time I made it into the locker room. Stripping off my sweaty pads, the exhaustion began to hit me. But it was the good kind. I stacked my gear as best as I could into a dodgy metal locker. The host school didn’t have the fancy digs that our stadium had. (Either that, or they’d saved it for themselves.)

Behind me, Bella suddenly slammed the heel of her boot onto something skittering across the floor.

“Gross,” Big-D said. “Tell me that wasn’t a roach.”

“Save the white meat,” I joked. There was no use getting too ornery about the surroundings. It would only make us sound like the elitist snobs that everyone expected from the Ivy League.

“This is the way I picture showers in prison,” somebody else said, heading around the corner into the cave-like facility.

“And, just like in prison,” Big-D put in, “you can expect to be eye-fucked by those of us who like boys.”

There it was. The daily queer smear from Big-D. And what did I do about it? Look away. Neutral face. Repeat. My whole life was a cowardly exercise in raising my deflector shields.

“I’m sure you meant me,” Bella quipped, because deflection was not her style. “I like boys. A lot. And let me just throw it out there that I won’t be eye-fucking you while you shower.”

“You don’t have to, darlin’. You’ve had the real deal.”

I thought Bella had lost that round, but she lifted one shoulder and proceeded to flatten him. “It’s good that you remind me of that from time to time. Since it only lasted ten seconds, I tend to forget.”

As she so often does, Bella cracked my deflector shields wide open, and I laughed out loud.

Facing the corner, I took a shower that lasted about three and a half seconds.

People like Big-D have it wrong. They think that the gay guy is going to be the one who’s slowly soaping up his dick, watching you shampoo. But that’s not how it works in a varsity locker room on planet Earth. The gay guy is the one who discreetly goes about his business, showering quickly and then getting the hell out of there. He puts his underwear on when his skin is still damp, even though it will stick up his ass crack for the rest of the night.

He isn’t staring at you, and he’d rather eat broken glass than sport some wood in the locker room. That way, when his life explodes in his face because he forgot to raise the deflector shields one time out of a million, you won’t be able to accuse him of being creepy. You’ll look back on your years of showering together, and be unable to remember a single thing he said or did when you were naked.

Because he is invisible. At least he tries to be. His computer’s browser history is deleted every time he steps away from the machine. His clothes are nondescript. His face is carefully blank.

Honestly, it’s exhausting.

As I jammed my feet into my socks, I would have bet cash money that Rikker was setting a similar land speed record across the room for how quickly a guy could get out of this claustrophobic hellhole. Though I couldn’t even settle up that bet with a glance in his direction. Because that would violate more than one of the codes I kept. Number one: never look around the locker room. And number two: never, ever look at Rikker.

“Hey, Graham? I have a favor to ask you.” Bella stood beside me, her hair going frizzy from the shower steam. Ventilation hadn’t been invented when this place was built.

“Yeah? Lay it on me.”

“I’m going to give out the hotel room assignments now, and I want to put Rikker with you.”

The only blessing was that my face was inside my locker when she said it. Because even with years of practice, no deflector shield was strong enough to withstand that kind of shock. I mean… holy shit. I needed to give her some kind of reply. But that’s pretty hard to do when your heart has just crawled up your throat and into your mouth.

“You’re okay with that, right?” she prodded. “I never took you for the homophobic type.”

“Right,” I mumbled. Because I was going out of my fucking mind just then. She said she didn’t take me for the homophobic type. But that was dead wrong. I was the most homophobic person alive. Because “homophobic” means “afraid of homosexuals.”

And I was pants-shitting terrified of myself.

“Graham, look at me.”

Sorry, honey. No can do. “Just a second,” I said. “Cover me.” This conversation had just reminded me of something important: the flask in my hockey bag. With the locker door blocking one side, and Bella the other, I yanked it out and screwed off the cap. With my head in the locker, I took a deep pull.

Even as I swallowed, Bella yanked the flask out of my hand. “Graham!” she hissed. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” I hissed right back. “Now give me that.”

“Not a chance.” Her fingers actually shook with fury as she tightened down the top. Then she dropped my flask into a pocket of her bag. “You skated really well tonight,” she said, her voice tight. “And I was relieved to see it. Because you are freaking me out lately.”

I managed to meet her eyes then, but it wasn’t easy. Bella was pretty good at reading people. I felt her laser gaze searching my face for clues.

She leaned in close, although nobody was going to hear us over the thump of the music and the slamming of locker doors. “Why are you drinking so much, Graham?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”

I just shrugged. Because that’s all I had to say on the subject.

“Fine,” she said, her face hardening. “Be a jackass to me, if you must.” She pushed a hotel key envelope into my hand. “But don’t be a jackass to him.”

God, how I hated hearing her say that. It killed me every time I saw Bella and Rikker talking together. Not only did I fear for my own privacy, I hated the feeling that I was losing my best friend. To him.

“My flask,” I said, hating the sound of my own voice.

“You can have it back tomorrow, after the game.” She marched off then.

Hell.

There was nothing to do then except to go off to find some dinner. And — if there really was a God in heaven, like they taught us at my homophobic hellhole of a high school — more alcohol.

Rikker

I ate a late dinner of crab cakes and lobster roll at some fish place that Coach herded us to. And then everyone walked back toward the hotel in plenty of time for our ten o’clock curfew. But I dawdled, walking down the side streets, buying myself an ice cream cone in a drowsy little cafe. I liked cities. I liked their busy sidewalks and their anonymity.

Where I grew up in western Michigan, there was only a taste of the city life. Most everyone favored the dull suburbs. When I moved to Vermont for tenth grade, I thought I’d hate the rural atmosphere. But it actually grew on me, because it was more honest than the aggressively tended lawns of my youth. There were ragged meadows, with cows munching them. There were miles of pine forest, and the outline of the Green Mountains everywhere you looked.

Still, I preferred the city. Especially a good, old one. My ex-boyfriend and I used to drive ninety minutes from Burlington into Montreal, where the drinking age (and therefore the clubbing age) was only eighteen. We had a blast finding all the gay bars and trying them out.

A group of college kids passed me on the sidewalk, laughing together. There was no denying that I was lonely, and letting it get to me tonight.

At ten o’clock on the dot, I walked into the hotel carrying my duffel bag and a heavy helping of dread. When Bella had given me my key card, she’d done it with a frown. “If you see anybody drinking before the game tomorrow, will you tell me?”

“Um, sure?” You’d have to be a pretty big idiot to want to drink before getting onto the ice with a bunch of guys who were trying to squish you like a bug.

She didn’t say anything about my rooming situation, so I was pretty sure who I’d find. Unless he’d fled, somehow.

Upstairs, the door to room 312 opened with a mechanical click, and I pushed inside. It was so dark in there that I assumed I was alone. In fact, when my eyes adjusted to the dimness it startled the crap out of me to see Graham sitting at the little table near the window, his chin parked on his folded hands.

I dropped my bag on the floor and fumbled for one of the bedside lamps. Even when I clicked it on, making a circle of yellow light on the rug, he didn’t move.

“Hola, Miguel,” I said, my voice low.

There was no response.

Seriously? Even if I could understand his reluctance to speak to me in a room full of people, ignoring me right now was asinine. He made me feel like I was starring in that movie where Bruce Willis is dead, but doesn’t know it.

I should have just headed into the bathroom to brush my teeth and pretend like it didn’t matter. But it did matter. And during the next ten seconds, my anger swelled. I was suddenly livid, with the sound of blood pounding in my ears. Because no matter how much you might want to pretend a person doesn’t exist, you can’t do that. Especially if that person is your teammate.

Especially if that person used to be your best friend.

Crossing the room, I stood over him. He didn’t move. Not a muscle. So I raised a hand, hovering my palm over his forehead, where all that soft blond hair framed his face. I used to run my fingers through it. But I didn’t do that now. Instead, I used the heel of my hand to give his head a violent backward shove.

He moved then, because I really didn’t give him a choice. His neck snapped back until it collided with the wall, and his wild eyes met mine. But he didn’t say a word. And it made me so fucking crazy that I was close to losing it. I didn’t even plan to, but I made a fist.

“Hit me,” he whispered then. And the expression on his face held so much pain that you might think I’d already socked him.

“FUCK you,” I spat. I wanted to hit him — I really did. But the small flicker of sanity that I still possessed decided to surface, reminding me that I would only get in trouble for it. He probably wanted me to deck him so I’d get kicked off the team.

Not worth it.

Not worth it.

Just breathe.

I didn’t punch him. Instead, I reached up like a punk-ass kid and flicked him on the forehead. That’s proof right there that I was, at that moment, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Hell, just then, I wished he’d hit me. Because then I’d have a good reason to feel this insane.

But that didn’t happen either. Instead, Graham reached up and caught my retreating hand by the wrist. Awkwardly, he pulled the back of my hand tight against his forehead, trapping it there. He closed his eyes, and heaved out a breath that had the weight of the world in it.

Stunned, I was frozen in place for a split second. My brain went temporarily offline at the feeling of Graham’s hand closing around mine. For a long second, I could only manage to take in the warmth of his palm and the trembling fingers.

Freaked out now, I jerked my hand out of his grip. Taking two steps backward, my knees hit the back of one of the beds, bringing me down to a seated position. Time out, my consciousness pleaded, trying to catch up. And all the while my heart slammed into my ribs.

“I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely.

I cleared my throat. “For what?”

He gave his head a single, violent shake. “For everything. The whole frickin’ thing. It’s way too late to say it. But I am. Sorry, I mean.”

Whoa. More silence from me, while I waited for the world to stop tilting. “Okay,” I said, taking in some extra oxygen.

“I’m sorry I ran.” He put his head down in his hands, and I could see his chest rise and fall with each breath that sawed in and out.

Well, fuck. A part of me had been waiting five years to hear this. But now that he’d actually apologized, I found that it hurt too much to talk about it. “Um, thanks for the sentiment. But I ran too, dude. It’s just that you ran faster.”

See, running away wasn’t Graham’s crime. Running from thugs who are yelling “sick little faggots!” is not a bad call. The real damage was that Graham never spoke to me again. And as far as I knew, he never told a soul that he was there the day I was attacked.

Although, if I’d been thinking straight in that E.R., I probably wouldn’t have told anyone either. But they gave me painkillers at the hospital. So my parents were treated to a sloppy version of events. It was enough to freak them out for good.

By the time the police arrived to ask me why the thugs had beat me up, I said what my parents told me to say. “They wanted my wallet.” The cops didn’t even bother to ask why I still had it. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t fooling anyone.

My parents’ solution was to get me the hell out of Dodge. They thought that if they sent me away from Graham, I wouldn’t stay gay. “Vermont will be good for you,” they’d said when they brought up my grandmother. “You’ll go there to heal.”

Permanently, though.

Yeah. Thinking about this was really not my favorite activity.

Graham was still slumped into his hands at the table. He looked like a man who was waiting to be executed for his crimes. And even though I’d been mad at him for five years, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Okay, Graham. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

I waited until he picked his head up to look at me. It was the first time he’d made eye contact on purpose since I’d come to Harkness.

“I’m going to stop torturing you,” I said. “No more…” I didn’t even know what to call the taunting I’d done to him. “I won’t bring it up again.”

“I deserved it,” he said.

Hearing him say that really took me back, because that was a classic Graham response. He had that still-waters-run-deep thing going on. Whenever we fought about XBox, or whether one of us had slighted the other one — whatever fifteen-year-olds argued about — he felt it deeply.

“Fine,” I said. “So this is how you’re going to make it better. You’re going to stop looking like you want to puke every time I walk through a door. I didn’t come to Harkness to wreck your life. I came to play hockey. There’s a lot of guys in that room who’d like to toss me out on my ass, so you can try to stop being one of them.”

His face was as somber as I’d ever seen it. “Okay,” he said finally.

“I mean it. Let’s forget every fucked up thing that happened. We won’t talk about that shit ever again. But in the locker room, we have a truce.”

“All right,” he said slowly.

“I’m not expecting you to stick up for me,” I added quickly. “Just chill the fuck out. Can you do that?”

His nod was slow. But it was serious.

There was a knock on the door. “Rikker? Graham?” Bella’s voice called.

“Yeah?” we both replied at once.

She twisted the lever. “It’s locked, morons.”

Graham got up quickly, his long legs eating up the distance to the door in just a few strides. When he opened the door, Bella came in, her glance traveling the quiet room, as if taking our temperature. “Whatcha doing?” she asked.

“Heroin,” Graham said. “With a side of meth, and a vodka chaser.”

For the first time in over five years, I laughed at one of Graham’s dry jokes.

Bella looked from him to me and back again. “Okay then. I was just checking to make sure that everyone is in for the night.”

“You can check us off,” I said. I got up off the bed and picked up my duffel, rummaging inside for flannel pants and my toothbrush.

As I passed Bella on the way into the bathroom, she said, “Hey, Graham, did Rikker tell you that you were on the same team for part of high school?”

“We, uh, covered that,” he said.

Standing at the sink, I brushed my teeth. Thanks to the mirror, I could see Bella reach up to cup Graham’s face in two hands. She rose up on her tiptoes and brought her mouth over his.

With my toe, I kicked the door shut behind me. But because the doors in cheap hotel rooms are made with all the sturdiness of a rice cracker, I heard Graham’s comment a long minute later, while I was pulling up my sleep pants. “That was nice and everything, Bella. But did I pass your Breathalyzer test?”

“Maybe that’s not why I kissed you,” she snapped.

“The hell it isn’t.”

Her voice got tight. “You’re right. I don’t like you at all.”

“Night, Bella.”

“Night, moron.”

I waited until I heard the hotel room door close before I came out again. Both beds were untouched, so I chose the nearest one without asking whether Graham had a preference. He and I did not need to have any conversations with the word “bed” in them. Pulling back the bedspread, I climbed in, rolling to put my back to him. It was body language that tried to say, Nope! No awkwardness here.

Graham spent a few minutes in the bathroom, too. “You want this shut off, right?” he asked. I turned to find him standing by the lamp, fully dressed, including his hockey jacket and shoes.

“Yeah,” I answered.

He clicked off the light. “I’m going for a walk,” he said, his voice low.

“Okay?” That was against curfew, but I wasn’t going to argue with him.

“I just need, you know, head space.”

Pushing up on one elbow, I asked, “Do you still sleep like shit?” Since I’d known him, he was a terrible sleeper. The only middle school insomniac I’d ever met.

“Yup.” Absently, he reached a hand up to probe the back of his head, where it had hit the wall before.

“Shit. I’m sorry about your head.”

He gave his chin a shake, as if warding off my apology. “All our previous shit is covered under the treaty, no?”

That made me smile, and for a second his expression softened. But then he shut it down, turning away from me. He flicked off the bathroom light. Then, without another word, he opened the door and left.

I lay there in the dark for a long time, wondering what to think. How odd to find myself, after five years, lying sleeplessly in another strange bed, wondering where Graham was.

Part of me would always be hurt. When I was beaten and scared, I’d waited for him to call me. I’d slept with my phone in my hand in that hospital bed. So that nobody would try to keep him from me when he finally called.

But he never did. Not once.

I wasn’t sixteen anymore, though. And the years had provided some much-needed distance from that awful time. What I hadn’t wanted to face at sixteen was the fact that my phone made outgoing calls, too. I was looped up on pain meds for a few days — not a few years. Even after they shipped me off to Vermont, I could have sat myself in one of the wicker chairs on my grandmother’s porch and called him.

I didn’t, though. Because I was scared to hear that he didn’t want me anymore.

Fuck, we were sixteen. We’d confided in nobody. And we were too afraid to ask for help. So I could either carry around this childhood grudge for the rest of my life, or try to set it down. Seems like a no brainer, right?

When I finally fell asleep, I was still alone in the room.

Graham

The following weekend we had practices only — no games. It was our lull before the storm. Regular season games were about to kick in at full force. So Bella and Hartley and I sat a long time over Saturday brunch in the Beaumont dining hall, drinking coffee and shooting the shit. Hartley’s girlfriend Corey told us a funny story about holding tryouts for an empty goalie position on the women’s team. But I was feeling almost too lazy to listen. Outside of the old arched windows, the fall leaves made a yellow carpet in the courtyard. Sometimes this place was like a freaking postcard for Ye Olde College Experience.

Like a total sap, I loved everything about it.

Eventually I got my lazy butt up to go, and Bella stood up too. “I’ll walk you out,” she said. Together, we started down the granite steps and out into the autumn day. The air had that Harkness smell — a mixture of decaying leaves and coffee beans.

Bella had a giant duffel on one shoulder and a box under her arm, so I scooped the duffel off her shoulder as we walked along.

She gave me a smile. “Aren’t you the gentleman?”

“Once in awhile. When it suits me.”

“What are you up to today?”

“I have to hit the library for a couple of hours. You?”

“Team errands. Can I pawn one off on you? It’s on your way.”

“Sure?”

She stopped and beckoned for the duffel I was carrying. Unzipping it, Bella pulled out a new Harkness Hockey jacket in its plastic wrapper. “Can you drop this off? It’s Rikker’s. He lives in McHerrin.”

Aw, Christ. “We don’t know if he’s home, though,” I said. “Why don’t you give me a different errand. I don’t want to carry that around all day if he’s out.”

She pressed the jacket into my chest. “I just texted him from the dining hall, and he’s there. He even propped the outside open for me. It will take you two minutes. He’s in the first entryway on the left, third floor.”

Damn. It. I couldn’t think of a decent reason to turn her down. “Okay.”

“You’re the best. See you at practice tonight.” She hefted her duffel again, which was now not quite so large.

She walked away without a backward glance, having no idea what she’d just asked me to do.

Even though Rikker and I had cleared the air in Boston, we weren’t pals. When I’d walked out of that hotel room after our crazy-ass conversation, I was shaking like a leaf. A few laps on foot around Boston had helped.

But I knew I couldn’t stay in that hotel room with Rikker. Talking to him had stirred up a lot of raw memories for me. I couldn’t lay there in the dark, listening to him breathe, and re-live the sound of pounding feet in that alley where we’d been attacked. “Cocksuckers!” they’d yelled. “Faggots!”

It used to be that when I closed my eyes, the voices were always right there, waiting for me. Along with the sound of their laughter. And the heavy thud of Rikker’s body hitting the ground when he’d tripped.

Once in a while I still heard that sound in my dreams.

“Get the other one!” someone had shouted. I’d switched into survival mode, and I just ran. Even after I’d gotten away, I kept running. I ran a mile in the wrong direction. When I’d stopped, the streets were unfamiliar. On shaking legs, I’d found a city bus stop. But I wasn’t that familiar with the bus system. It took me a couple of hours to get home. I was so freaked out when I finally got home that I might have broken down, telling my parents everything. But the house was empty. There was a note from my Mom on the perfectly clean kitchen counter telling me that she and my father had gone to walk around the sculpture garden.

While I’d left Rikker all alone to be beaten.

Panicked, pacing my kitchen, I’d had to run to our bathroom to throw up. I fell asleep on the bathroom floor after that. But somehow, when my parents came home, I’d gotten up and tried to act as normal as possible. Down in the basement, the game controllers sat next to each other on the sofa, right where Rikker and I had left them.

So I’d knocked them off onto the floor, then curled up in a ball and commenced hating myself. And I’d never really stopped.

Last weekend in Boston, I’d given those memories a couple more hours to churn. After pacing the streets, I walked back to the block where our team’s hotel was. But instead of going inside, I went into the hotel on the next corner. Sitting at the bar, I’d dampened those old memories with beer. (Only beer. Bella would be so proud.) Then I’d gone to the check-in desk and asked for a room. Two hundred dollars later, I walked into another hotel room. I didn’t even turn on the lights. I set my phone alarm, dropped my jeans and jacket, climbed into the bed and slept.

The next morning, I’d snuck back into the team’s hotel, and into Rikker’s room to retrieve my things. He’d been eating breakfast with the rest of my teammates.

Since then, we’d spoken only once. After the final game, we’d found ourselves standing next to each other at a fast food counter. “You okay?” he’d asked without removing his eyes from the lit menu board above our heads.

“Yeah, we’re solid,” I’d said.

That was it. Until now.

On my way up the stairs in McHerrin, I passed the rooms where Hartley and Corey had lived last year. When I got to the third floor, one of the doors was ajar. I tapped on it with my knuckles.

“Yeah!” he rasped. The familiar sound of his voice clocked me over the head like it always did, and I made myself take a deep breath before I pushed on the door. Please be fully dressed, I prayed as I entered.

Rikker reclined on his bed, two different textbooks open in front of him. When he glanced up, I saw him do a double take. In fact, he sat up so fast that one of the books slapped shut.

“Hey,” I said. “Bella asked me to drop this for you.”

“Thanks,” he recovered, shoving the books aside and standing up.

“Heads up.”

I tossed him the bundle, and he caught it with a grin, turning it around in his hands. Then he ripped the plastic and tore it back, exposing the wool and leather. “Nice.”

Extracting the jacket, he turned it around so that I could see the back, where RIKKER was spelled out.

“Well, put it on already,” I said. “You know you want to.”

He smiled again, because I was right. “What is it about these things, anyway? It’s just a jacket. But…”

But it was everything. “I dunno,” I said. “Maybe it’s that you have to bust your ass six days a week for seven months a year to own one?”

He slid one arm into the jacket. “That must be it.” He pulled it on, straightening the shoulders. He spun around once. “I’m in.”

If it were any other guy in the world, I would have said “lookin’ good,” or something like that. And he did, of course. But I didn’t trust myself. “You’re in,” I agreed.

Rikker took two steps across his tiny room to reach the little closet in the corner. From there he yanked another jacket, this one red with blue sleeves. “Funny. I thought I was in when they gave me this,” he said, showing me the Saint B’s logo. “I don’t even know why I kept this thing. Probably out of spite.”

“What happened there, anyway?” Ack. Even as I asked, I knew it was the wrong thing to do. I should have just gotten the hell out of there. But the question had been burning a hole in my brain, and it kind of slipped out.

Rikker’s smile turned wry. “Now there’s a cautionary tale.” He shoved the Saint B’s jacket back into the closet.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

With a shrug, he sat down on the edge of his bed. And when he raised those big brown eyes to mine, I couldn’t have looked away to save my life. “There was a photo of me, and I sure as hell didn’t know it had been taken.”

“A photo,” I repeated, like an idiot.

He wiggled his eyebrows. “You know, a photo. Anyway, during the spring term, my fuck buddy decided he wanted more than I was willing to give him. He got mad at me, and he emailed the picture to the coach. I got chucked off the team the next day.”

It was a real struggle to keep my face impassive, given all that I’d just heard. The first thought that hit me was how ugly that betrayal was. My second thought was: but I hurt him worse.

And lastly: Rikker had a fuck buddy. I tucked that away to think about later.

“God,” I said finally. “How did you not know about the picture?”

He shook his head, that lopsided smile on his face. “Well, when he took it, I had his balls in my mouth. Couldn’t exactly see what he was doing with his hands.”

I laughed, but it came out sounding like a choking fit, as I struggled to fight off that image — of Rikker kneeling down in front of… Jesus Christ, I might get hard just thinking about it. “What a jackass,” I said, wondering how to change the subject.

“You think? I heard Big-D telling somebody in the locker room the other day, ‘hey, never stick it in crazy!’ I wanted to say that it was true for men too. But I didn’t want to get my ass kicked.”

Another bark-like laugh escaped me, and I could feel myself blushing. My face was probably as red as his Saint B’s jacket by now. We both chuckled for a minute, but then it died back to silence.

And now I was having trouble meeting his eyes. So mine roamed the room. “Hey, is that you on a snowboard?” There was a picture tacked up over his desk. It was the only thing on the wall, actually. It showed two figures suspended in the air, mid-jump. And even though they were covered in a whole lot of cold weather gear, the one nearest to the camera had Rikker’s lazy smile.

“Yeah! It only took us about thirty tries to get that picture.” He smiled at the photo, as if remembering the day. “You ever tried snowboarding? It’s pretty great.”

I shook my head. “Michigan is still flat, just in case you forgot. That’s why we skate, remember? Looks like fun. But I’m not sure I’d like that feeling of having my feet tied together.”

“That takes some getting used to.”

I found myself leaning back against the doorframe, continuing the conversation instead of cutting it short. That’s not what I came up here to do. But I’d missed this. How many hours had Rikker and I spent just shooting the shit during the three years of our friendship? A thousand? Probably more. After he’d left, there was nobody I’d ever been so close to.

Christ, that was depressing.

“…A snowboard is just another blade, with edges, right?” Rikker was saying. “So it shocked the hell out of me that I couldn’t even stand up on the thing. And my high school boyfriend was like, just do this.” Rikker made a hand motion of someone zig-zagging down a mountain.

My brain snagged on high school boyfriend.

“…I finally paid cash for a real lesson, because it was either that or we were going to kill each other. And two hours later, I could handle most of the groomers. The next weekend, I could do even more. It comes fast once you get the basic motion. And I didn’t want to be the only Vermonter who couldn’t snowboard.”

“Vermonter, huh?”

Rikker leaned back on his hands, looking more relaxed than he had before. “I fucking love Vermont, honestly. It made me actually like high school.”

“Cool.”

“It was cool. And if I were smarter, I would have played hockey for the University of Vermont, and avoided the shitsplosion at Saint B’s.”

But then you wouldn’t be sitting here talking to me right now, I thought immediately.

Annnd that was my cue to leave. I checked my watch, like the tool that I am. “Shit, I’d better get going. See you at practice?”

Rikker blinked, probably confused by my abrupt departure. “Sure,” he said after a beat. “See you over there.” He dragged one of his books back into his lap. “Thanks for the delivery.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. And then I practically left a vapor trail on my way out of his building.

Talking to Rikker in his room had been the most vivid ten minutes of my week.

Naturally, I vowed never to go back there.