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“Jude!” I yelled after him. “Jude! It’s—”

“Hey!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Don’t you worry, boo! I’ll be there! And you can rub me for luck!”

Several nearby people turned, and my ears heated immediately. Out of context, that sentence sounded significantly worse. Idiot. Wyatt burst out laughing beside me, completely unaware of my discomfort.

“Shut it, asshole.” I shoved him hard enough to make him sway. “Come on, we have spicy cheese fries to find.”

That immediately redirected him. The fries were one of Wyatt’s game-day traditions. It wasn’t the weirdest superstition on the team by a long shot. Still, his particular collection of lucky rituals meant the days before a game usually involved us driving around hunting down increasingly specific shit.

“Got your necklace?” he asked as I hopped off the table. I reached beneath my shirt and pulled out the simple bead necklace.

“And my lucky socks are sitting out,” I told him.

The necklace made it to every game, and the socks did too. But unlike some of the disgusting animals on our team, I washed them between uses. Apparently, some people believed washing lucky clothing somehow washed away the luck. Those people were wrong. And they smelled terrible too. No amount of supernatural intervention was worth putting the same sweat-soaked socks back on my body week after week.

And I absolutely wasn’t thinking about the guys who had similar rules about their jockstraps.

Some days, I genuinely questioned whether any of us were mature enough to be trusted with adult responsibilities. This was one of them. Wyatt and I had spent the last several minutes putting Jude’s hair into as many tiny rubber bands as humanly possible while giggling like twelve-year-olds. There was no reason for it. None. His hair was getting shaved off in another few minutes anyway.

But I was the one holding the clippers, which meant Jude had temporarily surrendered all control over his appearance. That was basically a legally binding contract as far as I was concerned—tradition and all that.

“It’s a unicorn horn!” Wyatt exclaimed happily. He tugged on the one little ponytail at the front of Jude’s head, and Jude neighed, sending both of us over the edge again. I leaned against the chair as I laughed hard enough to make my stomach hurt.

“Do unicorns neigh?” I asked, and they faltered. The room fell oddly quiet as three of us wrestled with a question none of us had ever considered.

“I mean… they’re a horse,” Jude replied.

“They’re mythical,” I pointed out.

“A type of horse,” he retorted.

“Yeah, but how do we know they neighed?” Wyatt demanded. “For all we know they—”

“For all we know?” I interrupted. “They’re mythical! We don’t know anything because they weren’t real.”

That seemed like a fairly unbeatable argument, but Wyatt disagreed.

“Coach K would probably know,” he continued, like I hadn’t said a word. “He knows a lot about aliens.”

Rhodes had become the team’s designated expert on every creature that didn’t exist. Some of the questions he fielded from the team were way out there.

“Aliens that don’t exist,” Jude scoffed. Still, he hurried across the room and grabbed his phone.

“You’re not actually going to call our coach about unicorns,” I said.

“No, I’m going to call my brother—Rhodes!” Jude exclaimed loudly when his brother answered. “Rhooooodes!”

“What do you want?” Rhodes demanded as Jude put the call on speaker. My heart did one stupid little flip in my chest at the sound of his voice.

“I’ve got Wyatt and Theo with me,” he replied. “We have a question for you.”

“Can it wait until the game tonight?”

“No,” he retorted. “Honestly, you don’t want me asking this in front of the other players. It won’t end well for you, Brother Coach.”

“Great.” Rhodes sighed, making me chuckle. I knew exactly what his face looked like as he accepted the reality that this conversation was going to happen, even if he didn’t want it to. “What do you three need?”

“What sound do unicorns make?” Jude asked. The silence on the other end had Wyatt and me cracking up, but Jude didn’t even crack a smile. His commitment to the question was almost admirable. “Based on the silence, I’m not sure you heard me, so let me ask again… what sound do unicorns make?”