Page 296 of On His Team

I keep my eyes on him.

“But I agree,” he says. “This is our first date.”

I hit my knee. “Thank you!”

“So,” he says. “Do you put out on the first date?”

I grin. “Do you want to find out?”

I lick my cone all the way around, and we both laugh.

I don’t notice that the month of April is slipping away until it’s mostly gone. One day I’m undressing Rowan and the bruise on his thigh has gone from black to purple to a horrible green and then a yellow, and now, to nothing at all. The championship hat lives on Rowan’s dresser and becomes one with his room. The banner goes up in the rafters, and within a week, nobody in that building looks at it.

Finals arrive. I have Statistics on the fourth of May, and I have been building a study schedule with the girls. I created a group chat with every single couple, and it’s my favorite screen time.

Stanley discovers, with three weeks left, that he is two credits short of something and has a genuine crisis in the kitchen at Hawthorne that requires Aspen to sit down with him and a course catalog.

Benson’s on the phone constantly with people about hockey.

Penelope’s finishing her thesis project and has not slept.

Percy and Blue are quietly becoming the oldest people in that house without anybody saying it out loud. Zero guilt; they have another year.

A week into May, I walk into Hawthorne, and there’s a box in the front room. Flat cardboard, folded, propped against the wall by the coat hooks with two others behind it.

I stop dead. “What the fuck is that?”

Rowan looks up from the couch. “A box.”

“Whose?”

“Benson’s.”

Oh.

“No.”

“G.”

“Get it out of here, Rowan.”

He laughs at me and doesn’t move, and I stand there genuinely upset about the fact that my brother is moving.

Then, there are boxes in two of the bedrooms and a vicious ongoing negotiation about the kitchen. Stanley claims a frying pan that is not his. Percy tells him it isn’t his. Stanley says he bought it in October, and Percy says he bought it in October, and Blue says he doesn’t care and takes the pan, and the matter is closed.

Benson’s walls come down first. He used to have a wall filled with his schedule. Things were pinned everywhere, and when I see the bare wall, I try not to be emotional about it.

There’s a chaos in my chest that’s happening all at once because Hawthorne isn’t ending. Percy and Blue are juniors, so they’re not going anywhere. Rowan’s room isn’t being packed. Two guys from the team are moving into the empty rooms in August — Theo and a sophomore whose name I keep forgetting, so there’s going to be a Hawthorne House in September with familiar hockey players in it. But Benson won’t be here, and that’s a whole other thing, like a live wire in my chest.

Watching him leave for Camden after high school feels like it happened five minutes ago. I remember how badly I wanted to be here with him, how far away two years felt when I was still waiting for my turn.

And now somehow I’ve already had them.

Two years at Camden with my brother, gone faster than I knew they could. He’s graduating, and the next time I watch him play hockey, it’ll be in the NHL.

Stanley too.

It’s terrifying how quickly something can become the past while you’re still living in it.