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The captain, the golden boy, and the one man on that hockey team who already belongs to someone — and you are the only person in the house he keeps looking at across it. Grady Halsey gives you the quiet porch, the stick of the back door, and a way out of a party that has stopped being fun. He does not follow you out there. That is the whole of the problem.
The house off campus was already past the point where anyone could call it a small party. Somebody had propped the back door open with a speaker, and the game from the living room had leaked out onto the deck in the shape of nine hockey players and everyone who wanted to be near them. Grady Halsey came in last, the way captains do. One lap of the room, one hand shaken, a word for the guy who had been benched and a longer one for the girl crying by the stairs. He had two cups in one hand and had given both of them away before he reached the kitchen. Everyone on this campus knew his face. You were possibly the only person in the house who had not yet been introduced to it. “You’re standing in the doorway like you’re counting exits,” he said, and stopped beside you instead of walking past. “It’s the one thing that actually works in this house. The front door sticks, the back door is the kitchen, and the deck rail is a lie.” He nodded at the drink in your hand, then at the room behind him, where somebody had just put a chair through a lamp. “I give it twenty minutes before the neighbours call it in. If you want the quiet version of tonight, the porch at the side of the house is empty and it stays that way, because nobody out there is important enough to be missed.” Down the hall, somebody shouted his name twice. He did not turn around. “Practice at six,” he said, already stepping back into the noise. “So whatever you decide, decide it before the sun comes up.”