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“Beau. O’Grady fines you. You can’t just⁠—”

“Sloane.” He says it the way he says things on the ice, the flat certain way that doesn’t leave room. “Your house is on fire. I’m not going to practice.”

And before I can argue — before I can do the thing where I insist I’m fine and don’t need anyone and he should go live his enormous important life — he’s already got his phone out, already stepping half a pace away, and I hear him say it, low and even: “Coach. It’s Beau. There’s been an emergency — my girlfriend’s house, there’s a fire, the department’s here. No. Everyone’s out. I’m going to stay with them.” A pause. “Yeah. I’ll make it up. Run me extra, I don’t care. I’m staying.” Another pause, and something in his shoulders eases a fraction. “Thanks, Coach.”

He puts the phone away.

“He says don’t worry about the fine.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know I didn’t have to.” He comes back to my side, the hand finding my back again. “I wanted to. There’s a difference. You keep getting them mixed up.”

And I don’t have a single thing to say to that, because he’s right, and because I’m standing on a frozen lawn watching my house burn in a hoodie that smells like him, and the speech I spent the whole drive building — this can’t happen again — is sitting somewhere in the wreckage of my composure with no air left in it.

It takes them less time than I expect.

That’s the thing nobody tells you — that the catastrophe is fast and then it’s just standing around in the cold. They knock it down before it reaches the second floor, and the smoke goes from grey to white to nothing, and the radios quiet, and the men start the slower work of making sure it’s actually out, and the four of us — Margo, June, me, Beau — stand on the lawn in a clump while the neighbors watch from their porches and the cold gets into everything.

June’s stopped shaking. She’s gone quiet instead, which is worse, and Margo’s got an arm around her now, and I’m holding a coffee someone handed me that I don’t remember accepting, and Beau is a furnace at my back that I keep not stepping away from.

Eventually one of them comes over to talk to us. Older, calm, soot on his face, the kind of tired that’s just Tuesday for him.

“You the residents?”

“Four of us,” Margo says. “One’s at — she’s not here. There are four of us.”

He nods. Explains it in the flat way they explain things, the way that’s kind precisely because it isn’t dramatic: an electrical fire, started in the kitchen wiring behind the cabinets, the kind of thing that happens in old houses with old wiring that’s been quietly failing for longer than anyone knew. The fire itself is out. But the kitchen’s gone, and there’s smoke and water damage through the first floor, and the wiring’s going to have to be assessed and very likely redone, and the house is not — he’s careful with the word — habitable, not right now, not for a while. Weeks. Maybe longer, depending on what they find in the walls and how fast the landlord moves and how the inspection goes.

“How long is a while?” I ask, because someone has to ask the real question, and my voice comes out level and precise, the voice I use when I’m holding everything.

“Honestly?” He looks at me, not unkind. “With electrical and water both, and an inspection? Don’t count on being back this semester.”

This semester.

I do the math the way I do all math, fast and cold and underneath my own face. It’s November. This semester means December, means through finals, means through the showcase, means — there is a list forming, the practical architecture of a disaster, and at the top of the list, in letters I can’t quite look at directly, is the question of where I sleep tonight.

“Can we get anything?” I ask. “Now. A few things. Clothes, my laptop, the—” the photo of Danny, the one thing I’d run back in for “—a few things.”

“Once we clear it. Give us a bit. One of us’ll walk you in, but you’ll have to make it quick.” He glances at the four of us, the assessment of a man who’s seen a lot of people on a lot of lawns. “You got places to go? Tonight?”

And that — that small ordinary question — is the one that opens the floor the rest of the way.

“My sorority sister has a double,” Margo says immediately, already on it, already solving, because Margo solves. “Delta house. Priya’s been trying to get me to crash there all semester anyway. I’ll be fine.” She looks at June. “You?”

“Hana, in the dorms,” June says, quiet. “She’s got a spare bed, her roommate transferred. I texted her already, she said yes.” June’s looking at me with her enormous gray eyes. “She might have room for two? I can ask, Sloane, I can⁠—”

“It’s a single dorm bed and a spare, June. There’s no room for two.” I say it gently, because it’s true, and because June would give me the bed and sleep on the floor and I won’t do that to her. “You go to Hana’s. I’ll figure it out.”

I’ll figure it out.

I have said that sentence my entire life. I said it at nine when my mother left and somebody had to know where the cereal was. I said it at twelve and fifteen and eighteen. I said it when I changed my name and when I got on the bus and every single day since, and it has always, always been true, because the alternative — the alternative is needing someone, and needing someone is the thing I do not do, the thing my whole life is built around not doing.

But I’m standing on a frozen lawn and Margo has a sorority sister and June has Hana and Wren has the team and I have — I run it, fast, cold, and the answer comes back the way it always comes back, the answer that’s been the answer since I was nine:

Nobody.

I have nobody. There’s no family I can call. There’s no spare bed waiting. There’s Danny, who’s in Germany, who would move heaven and earth and can’t, who I would never tell, because telling Danny means Danny worries from four thousand miles away and there’s nothing he can do with the worry but carry it. There’s my father, who is a sentence I don’t finish. There’s a Christmas card from Arizona signed with a first name.