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“We’re doing this,” I say.

Theo picks up his fork. “Fine.”

“Was that enthusiasm?”

“No.”

Cash grins. I press a thumb into the heel of my palm under the table, where no one can see it. My phone is quiet in my pocket. The shoulder aches, and I breathe out slowly, and then I eat the pasta, which is genuinely excellent, and let the noise of the house do what it does.

Preseason has been going for a week. The season doesn’t start for six.

I’ve got time.

Everything’s fine.

Chapter 3

Beau

The Raven House throws the same party every first week of school.

Same keg on the back porch, same playlist that starts with something everyone knows and devolves into whatever Cash considers a personal statement by eleven — he took over the speaker three years ago and has not relinquished it since, which the team has collectively decided to accept because the alternative is Theo choosing the music, and Theo’s taste runs to things that make people feel like they’re in a car chase. Same crowd, more or less. Athletes and their orbits. Theater kids who came with someone. Freshmen doing the thing where they’re performing casual about being here, which is always the most painful part of the first week and which I remember doing and choose not to think about too hard.

I’ve thrown this party three times now.

I don’t mind it. That’s the thing people get wrong about me — they assume because I’m captain I’m above the party, that I’m hosting for the team and tolerating the rest of it. I’m not. I like the noise of a full house and the cold of a beer and the looseness of the first week of school, before anyone’s behind on anything, when the semester still feels like a door someone’s holding open. The Raven House is good at parties the same way it’s good at most things — the porch, the kitchen, the living room that’s somehow big enough, the fact that we’ve been here two years and it shows in the comfortable way that means people know where the cups are and where the bathroom is and which floorboard to step over on the stairs.

Cash is in his element. This is the only way to describe it. He moves through his own party like he’s visiting it for the first time, perpetually delighted by what he finds, somehow always exactly where something interesting is about to happen. He’s been gone for forty minutes and I’ve already heard his voice from three different rooms, which is a physical accomplishment I’ve stopped trying to explain.

Wyatt is near the kitchen doorway with a drink, talking to someone from the football team. He’s got the body language of a person who is genuinely interested in what he’s hearing, which with Wyatt is always real — he doesn’t perform attention. He just has it. I’ve never figured out if that’s an Alabama thing or a Wyatt thing, but either way it’s one of his better qualities, which is saying something given the competition.

Theo is on the back porch.

I know this because Theo gravitates toward exits and porches in approximately equal measure, and the back porch of the Raven House is both. I’ve known him since freshman orientation, when he sat next to me in the hockey welcome and said, about the coach who was speaking, “He’s going to rise us hard,” in the tone a doctor uses to read an X-ray. He was right. Coach O’Grady is intense, but his track record for conference wins and Frozen Four trophies makes him one of the best college coaches in the country.

I’m working my way toward the back of the house when someone steps into my path.

“Beau.”

I stop.

Bella Hastings is standing in the hallway between the living room and the kitchen wearing a white dress that she absolutely knew she was going to wear when she got dressed tonight. She has dark hair and green eyes and the quality of beauty that has always made her aware of it — not vain, exactly, just calibrated. She knows the angles. She knew them the first night I met her and she’s known them every night since.

She’s smiling at me in a way that is not a smile.

“Hey,” I say.

“You didn’t text back.”

“I did text back.”

“That was a text back?”

I press a thumb into the heel of my palm. “I said what I needed to say.”

“You said four sentences.”

“It didn’t need more than four sentences.”