He picked it because upperclassmen don’t want to be in a room full of freshmen on a Saturday. That was his pitch. I didn’t argue.
Two beers between us. A basket of wings. He has sauce on his thumb. He hasn’t done anything about it.
“— and I’m telling you, Blue. Telling you. You weren’t there because you had to —”
“Take a shit.”
“Yeah, Rowan’s chicken casserole all gave us the shits that day. So you while you were sitting on the toilet for twenty minutes, Coach is running the breakout drill, and Rowan is on the point. And Coach yells,low pass, low pass, and Rowan rifles it cross-ice at Benson, and cap isn’t looking. Like, at all. Cap is looking at the bench. Why? Because Benson’s been on his phone, baby Blue, because Benson’s been texting Lucy between drills like a madman.” He spreads his hands. “The puck hits him in the cup.”
I lower my beer.
“In the cup.”
“In the cup. Direct hit. Reeve goes down. Folds in half. Glove off. And Coach skates over and stands over him, and looks at him for a long second, and then he says,captain, get your head out of your girlfriend’s ass and into the game.”
“He said that,” I chuckle. “He knows about Lucy?”
“He knows.”
“How?” I ask.
He shrugs. “It was the first time Coach ever said anything about it, but you know how coaches are. Nosy fuckers. He’s probably got a listening device in the locker room.”
I drink to that.
“Or it’s G.” That’s Benson’s younger sister, Lucy’s roommate. “She works in the equipment room, so I bet she hasn’t stopped talking about it.”
“But Lucy moved back in with her, I thought.”
Stanley shrugs. “She did, so now the girl group grows.”
I drink again.
He picks up a wing and starts eating.
On the TV, somebody scores, the camera cuts to a celebration, and the captions race across the bottom of the screen too fast to read. Stanley watches it for a second. He turns back to me.
“Real talk.”
Fuck. “No.”
“I’m asking you a question. As your roommate. As your friend. As a man.”
I glare at him, waiting for whatever the hell it is.
“How serious are these Hawthorne House rules, structurally, if cap has already broken number one?”
I scratch my cheek and look down at my beer. “It’s the rules.”
“Are they though?”
I take a pull of my beer and don’t answer.
He leans in and drops his voice. “Because I’m just saying, Bluey, philosophically speaking — if the captain has a girlfriend, and he has her over basically every night ––” He shakes his head, pausing for a moment.“I watched the man sear a steak. I watched him slice butter into a pan. He used a garnish. If the captain is breaking rule one in front of God and everybody, in our own house, with a garnish, are we — the rest of us — really still bound by the rules? Like––”
“Like?” I question.
He keeps his head down, looking up at me. “Philosophically.”
