I say, “Tell Blue I said thank you.”
This will be my last time in this house.
“Will do.”
I open the door, and my heart aches to leave his clothes here. It almost feels like a way of saying goodbye. Last night we were friendly, and I know it’s the furthest it’ll ever go.
I get in my car and start driving. Then I smile. It starts small. The corner of my mouth. Then it grows. Then it is on my whole face, and I cannot stop.
Blue has a team. Three guys who would corner a girl at his front door and ask her what her intentions are. Blue has Stanley on a couch with a controller in his lap, saying are you playing our boy.
He has the family he always wanted.
His life wasn’t easy back at home. His mom worked two jobs, his dad was never around, and he had three younger siblings to take care of. His success now proves everyone wrong, and the Hawthorne House is part of that success. He has brothers now. He has the love and care from his teammates that he didn’t receive from his own blood, so I feel –– I feelsohappy for him.
Blue doesn’t have many friends that are girls. Stanley meant Blue has been single his entire time at Camden. In high school, itwas the same. Girls had thrown themselves at him from the time we were in sixth grade. He had not taken any of them. Including me. Especially me.
He hasn’t changed.
I know that it’s because of hockey. That hockey took up all the air. That the NHL plan made him single-minded. That a boy like Blue, focused like Blue, did not have room for girls. Ever.
I pull onto Linden, and a piece of last night comes back.
Do you remember the night at your captain’s house?
I asked him that in the dark. I start cringing.
I think about that night sometimes.
And he said,Yeah,me too.
The words land harder now because I’m sober.
He thinks about that night? He thinks about that night sometimes.
I’ve always carried that night around in the back of my throat at three in the morning when Chase used to fall asleep next to me, and I would lie there in the dark with my eyes open and think about a different boy in a different bed on a different night.
We have been carrying the same night, and I wonder if it eats at him the same way it does for me.
I park in front of my building and turn the car off. I sit in the driver’s seat for one second longer with my hands on the wheel. I drove over there to give him back a hoodie. I came back with new pieces of information.
I have used hockey as the explanation for why he was never interested in me. I knew he was occupied with his home life and that we were just kids in high school, but I used hockey as the explanation for why he left at five in the morning two and a half years ago. He couldn’t commit to me. His life goals were too big. It was too much for him.
I think for a fraction of a second that maybe it wasn’t hockey.
Maybe it was —no.
I’m analyzing again, romanticizing something that’s actually simple.
Blue never wanted you.
Ever.
Don’t make it bigger than it was.
Chapter 12
Blue
