I’d planned the night. I’d planned all the way down to the takeout we were going to order. Penelope said she’d be out, and Chase liked the idea of having me to himself.
“It’s just a party with a bunch of guys from the hockey team,” Mara is saying, and I tune back in too late, halfway throughher sentence. “They throw a party basically every two weeks, and the entire school shows up.” She waves a hand, dismissive in that way only girls who have been invited everywhere can be dismissive. “You’ll see. Bring your boyfriend.”
She pauses.
“Is he hot?”
I set my mug down on the counter very, very carefully.
“My boyfriend?” I say, stalling to answer that question.
She nods like it’s the most natural question in the world, like it’s the kind of thing a girl asks another girl on a Friday morning over coffee.
I think about Chase.
His beard comes in patchy along his jaw now that we’ve gotten a couple of years older, and he doesn’t shave for our dates anymore. His hair sits flat against his forehead because he’s started using too much product. There are four inches between us — he’s five-nine, I’m five-five, we don’t quite fit the way I’d like, but being picky about height seemed shallow of me, so I gave him a chance. I think about whether I find him hot. The honest answer is that I find himfamiliar, which is not the same thing as hot. Or is it?
I take too long.
After a long moment, Mara’s face softens as she says, “He must be really nice.”
I don’t say anything to that either.
Yes, he’s nice. And somewhere in the last two years, I found him attractive. He’s been very good to me. But Mara is a pretty girl who attends Camden U, a college town crawling with all kinds of attractive men. And I think she took one look at me and decided I could be dating the hottest guy in this state, and I’m not, and I know it. I pray with everything I have that she doesn’t ask me if I’m in love, because I will have to bolt out of this room.
“We’re going to get ready at G’s place tonight,” she says, sliding past it kindly.
“Who’s G?” I ask, grateful for the lifeline. I don’t do well with boyfriend questions.
“Gianna Reeve. Her brother is the captain of the Wolves.”
“Oh.”
Oh.
The captain. The tall guy in the doorway, the one who told Blue about the coach’s meeting. The one I saw last weekend, take an elbow to the face for Blue.
Penelope’s connected to the hockey team?
Penelope, my beautiful new roommate, with her hand-thrown mugs, her beautiful paintings on the wall, and her quiet, observant face, is connected, by way of her group of friends, to the entire roster of the Camden U Wolves? I would have thought twice –– no, I would have thought ten times as hard before moving in here. I would have stayed at the sublet if I’d known this vital piece of information.
“I’ll probably just get ready here,” I hear myself say. “Chase will be here this afternoon, and we were planning to get dinner.”
I inhale. The breath comes in shallow.
“Okay. Cool.” Mara is unbothered. She’s the kind of girl who is unbothered by everything, I am realizing, and I both admire it and want to ask her how she does it. “What’s your number?”
I tell her across the room, so she taps away on her phone. My phone buzzes in my pocket a second later.
“That’s me. I’ll send you the address.”
I nod. This is my way out. I take my coffee and walk back toward my bedroom, and as I pass behind the couch, I hear Mara say, half a beat too low for me to be sure I was meant to hear it —
“So, tonight’s going to be interesting. Do you think they’ll be all over each other?”
I shut my door.
I stand in the middle of my new bedroom with the coffee in my hand. I stare out the window at the brick wall of the building across the way, and I try to figure out how I have managed, in seventy-two hours of living in the prettiest apartment in town, to engineer the worst possible Friday night of my entire life.
