Page 24

"It wasn't, though," I say. "Was it?"

"Not even a little."

Kasper is sitting across the aisle from me looking like a man who's just been pardoned from death row. "He gets up at four-thirty," he tells me, low, like it's a secret. "To stretch. In the dark. He doesn't turn the lights on. You'll just wake up and he'll be there on the floor."

"That's fine."

"He sleeps with the window open."

"It's North Dakota."

"I know." Kasper's voice cracks. "Last January."

I look up at the front of the bus. Dane's put his earbud back in. He's looking out the window at the snow coming down sideways over the fields.

"Keep him in line," Jace says to him, grinning. "Good call, D."

Dane doesn't say anything.

That's what they all think it is. I can see it on their faces, the whole bus. He took the new guy to keep an eye on him. To make sure he doesn't sneak out. It's another thing, like the bag and the card table.

I think about the empty room on Monday. Hands behind your back. Him looking away first. His face going red up to his ears.

I don't think that's what it is.

Thorne Valley is two games in a little town called Hollis, three hours past the last place anybody's ever heard of. We win Friday 3–2. I get my first point as a Warden, a secondary assist on a Wes Abernathy slap shot from the point, and when I come back to the bench Wes looks at me and says, "Nice pass," and then looks like he's surprised he said it.

I don't make a thing of it. I just say "thanks" and sit down. But my face is hot all the way through the third period.

Dane stops thirty-one shots. In the handshake line, he goes right behind me, closer than he has to. Nobody grabs my hand too long.

The hotel's a Country Lodge off the interstate with a waterslide nobody's allowed to use and a breakfast room that smells like syrup and chlorine. Our room is on the third floor at the end of the hall, next to the ice machine. Two queen beds, an orange bedspread with pictures of moose on it, a painting of a duck over the TV.

Dane goes straight to the bed by the window and puts his bag on it.

"I wanted that one," I say.

"No, you didn't."

"I really did. I love a window."

He opens the window. Like, physically, opens it, all the way, and a blast of North Dakota comes in and blows the curtains up toward the ceiling.

"Oh, come on. Kasper wasn't joking."

He takes his shirt off.

He does it the way he does everything, without any show, just crossing his arms and pulling it over his head and dropping it on the bed. He's got the build all goalies have, long through the body, thick through the thighs, his back wide and flat and pale. There's a big purple bruise on his ribs from tonight, from a shot that got under his arm. He doesn't look at it. He pulls on a T-shirt and sits on the edge of the bed and starts going through his phone like I'm not there.

Okay.

I'm going to be so annoying.

I take a forty-minute shower. I use all the hot water and I sing. Badly. On purpose. I know every word of every song on a Shania Twain greatest-hits album because my mom played it in the car my entire childhood, and I go through most of it, with feeling.

When I come out, he's sitting in exactly the same place, looking at his phone.

"You missed 'Man! I Feel Like a Woman!'" I tell him. "That's the big one."