Page 288 of On His Team

My mom has one hundred and forty photos and has learned, overnight, at fifty-three, how to make an album on her phone.

My father says the words “hell of a hockey game” twenty separate times.

I have six hundred and eighty pictures, and I am not sorry about a single one of them.

I see Rowan for four minutes in the lobby before the team buses go. He’s in team sweats with a bag over his shoulder and a hat on, and he’s limping. Actually limping. Not being dramatic — his left leg is not doing what the right one is doing, and there’s a step in his walk that wasn’t there on Friday.

“Oh my God. You’re limping.”

“It’s just bruised.”

“Have you shown somebody?”

“They looked at it last night, this morning, and forty minutes ago,” Rowan says. “It’s a contusion. It’s fine. It’s going to be about nine colors by Wednesday, and then it’ll go away.”

“Can I see it?”

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

“How about later, G,” he says.

Stanley goes past us and says something obscene and gets on the bus.

I get hold of the front of his hoodie. “I love you.”

Rowan looks down at me. “Love you too.”

It does exactly the same thing to me as it did in the hallway and after the game last night, which I assumed would wear off but hasn't.

Winning a national championship turns out to be extremely inconvenient if you are also enrolled in college. That’s the whole of the following week. There’s a thing on campus on Monday afternoon where the university does an official something in the arena and about two thousand people come. The guys get up on a stage and Coach Fuller gives a speech. Captain Benson Reeve says his captain’s words about his time playing for Camden U, and I couldn’t be more proud. Rowan catches me smiling at my brother. Social media is wild with clips and announcements. They’re going to be printed in a magazine. Somebody makes a mural. The university announces there’ll be a championship banner hanging in the rafters before the month is over.

People stop Benson everywhere. In the union. Outside buildings. In a grocery store, which I witnessed personally.

Stanley thrives. Stanley has never been happier in his life. He signs a boy’s arm outside the library and then talks about it for two days.

Percy hates it so much that he stops leaving Hawthorne except to go to class and Penelope’s.

Blue pretends to hate it and has changed his profile picture to a sick image of him during that game.

And Rowan gets asked about his leg about ten times a day and plays it off every single time, which is somehow the most annoying thing about him.

And then Tuesday comes, and I have Statistics at nine.

Ives gives me my final assessment on Thursday. She catches me after class with her bag already on her shoulder, and she doesn’t hand me anything because it’s all on Canvas.

“Reeve. Two minutes.”

I stop in the doorway.

“Your event was the best one in the section,” she says. “That’s not an opinion I’d share with the section.”

“Okay.”

“Your concept was strong in January, and your budget was weak in February, and your approval chain was the most accurate one I’ve had in four years.” She flips a page on her own clipboard, which contains nothing relevant to me. “And you were better on event day than you were in the proposal.”

I look at her and grin. “Is that a compliment?”