Dorian plays a bunch of songs by the same band, translating the screaming and growling into spoken words for me. It’s a lot more meaningful than I expected. More hopeful than the screaming makes it out to be. It’s downright relatable. I can see the appeal. The delivery might take some getting used to, but I mean. People who look like they listen to this kind of music are my type, all those piercings and tattoos, so I might as well give it a chance.
“The screamer, Joel? He writes the lyrics,” Dorian explains. “He’s got depression and anxiety, so he puts all that into his music.”
My stomach flips. No wonder it felt so meaningful. I clear my throat and take off Dorian’s headphones.
“So you wanna go see ’em with us?”
“Who’s all going?” I ask, voice a little rough.
“Me, Barbie, Cauler, Zero, Kovy.” He counts them off on his fingers. “Your sister and her girlfriend might be coming, too, but I guess that depends on how much work Jade gets done on some project she’s got.”
“Okay,” I say, and immediately regret it. Hanging out with Dorian and Barbie is one thing; Barbie’s always in our room anyway, so that’s basically like hanging out already. But Cauler? At a concert? As soon as I agree to it, I know I’m gonna back out at the last second. Tell them I don’t feel good or I got a big assignment or something.
“Nice!” Dorian says. “I’ll send you some of their songs so you can get to know them better. More fun when you can sing along.”
I get a message full of video links from him later that night, lying in a hotel bed wide awake while Colie snores across the room. I put earbuds in and turn the music up just enough to drown him out. Each song hits closer and closer to home, like I could’ve written these lyrics myself.
I take a cold shower to wake myself up in the morning, but my eyes still hurt and nothing I do gets rid of that grimy, sleepless feeling around them.
“You look rough, bro,” Dorian tells me when we meet the team downstairs for breakfast.
I shrug, pouring myself a cup of complimentary coffee. Ever since Delilah started bringing me iced coffees every math class, I’ve started relying on it to function. At least I’ve developed a taste for it, because I desperately need it now.
“Colie’s snoring,” I say, even though it had a lot more to do with the music. Dorian grimaces. The upperclassmen warned us about it. Kovy survives rooming with him at the hockey house because he’d probably sleep through the apocalypse and make it all the way to his first class before realizing something was wrong.
I’m used to running on little sleep, but this is extreme.
I take out my phone on the bus to the rival campus. Nova posted a picture of herself barefaced, red around the eyes, acne scars visible, an angry-looking pimple in the crease of her nose, messy hair cut to her chin, next to a picture of her all made-up and flawless with her waist-length extensions in. She captioned it nothing is real, and she’s got thousands of people commenting, thanking her for the transparency and saying she’s equally beautiful in both.
They’re right, obviously. But it’s my job to keep her humble.
Mickey: You look like a swamp hag
Nova: Dammit.
I was going for more of a banshee kind of vibe
As awful as the day has started, as miserable as I feel, it still makes me smile, even just a little.
“You been hiding a girlfriend from us, Terzo?” Zero asks from behind me, leaning over the back of my seat to creep on my phone. I click out of the messages reflexively, like I’ve been caught looking at something dirty.
“Not my girlfriend,” I mutter, but it’s lost in Zero’s shout of, “Nova? Nova Vinter? Terzo!”
“What’s your deal?” Kovy asks beside him.
“This asshole’s literally texting Nova Vinter!”
“I lived with her,” I try to remind them. I figured it was common knowledge I stayed with the Vinters after my family left for Raleigh, but the whole team’s yelling about it now. I roll my eyes and sink low in my seat, unlocking my phone again.
Mickey: Thanks a lot
You sent my team into a frenzy
Nova: Watch them have the best game of their lives
When we get off the bus to head into the arena, the boys make me take a selfie with them in our suits to send back to her, Dorian and Kovy smiling on one side of me, Zero making what he probably thinks is a seductive face on the other side, and Barbie towering over me from behind, looking slightly less bored than usual with one side of his mouth turned up.
Nova: Who’s the tall one???
Mickey: They’re all tall to me
Nova: Mickey.
Mickey: Barbie.
Nova: Hmmmm
We make it to the locker room before she can add anything else. I shove my phone into my duffel bag and start getting ready for the game.
We’re up against a brute of a team. I’ve got this same massive blueliner on me all game, straight up trying to kill me with the way he throws his weight into his checks and toes the line with what should’ve been a thousand slashing and holding penalties. It’s annoying, but I don’t let him instigate me into retaliation. I’ve never been one to sit in the penalty box.
Halfway through the second half, Kovy dumps the puck along the halfboards and I pick it up behind the net, turning away a check before passing it along to Zero. I make my way to the top of the goal crease, screening the goalie and fighting for position with the aggressive defenseman. Cauler slides to the point, taking Kovy’s place. I see the one-timer coming as soon as Zero makes the pass. As Cauler winds up, I shove my hip hard into my defender, turning my body and reaching out with my stick. The puck tips off my blade and rings off the pipe on its way into the net. The goal light flashes red, and my teammates crowd me against the boards to give out fist bumps and helmet pats.
The blueliner doesn’t take it well. Next time we’re on the ice together, he gets the blade of his stick shoved into the holder of my skate blade as I’m crashing in on his goalie. He pulls my legs out from under me, sending me sprawling. I hit the ice forearms first, and the rest of me follows so hard, it knocks the breath out of me. I slide headfirst into the goalie’s pads, tripping him so he falls right onto my back.
For a second, with his weight on me, unable to breathe, I swear my back’s broken and I’m dying. Whistles blow and guys are shouting and the goalie’s pads push harder into me as he struggles back to his feet.
The asshole blueliner gets banished to the box, and I’m stuck on the bench for the power play as the trainer fusses over me.
We win the game 5–1, and all I want to do is get to the next hotel and crash for the night. But the boys have other plans. We have an early team dinner at a restaurant with high tables and barstools with no back support, then head to a plaza with a movie theater and what looks like a closed-down department store holding a haunted house for the season. I’d rather go to the movies and sit in a comfortable chair for a few hours, but most of the team and coaches head for the haunted house instead. Dorian doesn’t give me much of a choice when he says, “I’m hiding behind you, Terzo. The monsters’ll probably be more scared of your glare than you are of them!”
He’s not wrong about the last point at least. I’ve never scared easily. And when I do get scared, I don’t scream or jump, just kind of freeze up. I might look unfazed, but that lack of a fight-or-flight response would get me killed first in any horror movie situation.
They try to put me up front, but Cauler argues against it because apparently I’m so short, they’d just end up trampling me. So he takes the lead while Dorian stretches out my Royals Hockey zip-up, choking me with the collar of it and hunching over to bury his face in my neck before we’ve even run into an actor. The most startling things that happen are when Barbie full-on screams bloody murder from the back, and when Cauler reaches behind himself to grab at me as a little girl in a tattered, bloody dress comes shambling out of the darkness ahead of us.
His hand around mine sends my heart lurching more than any jump scare this place could throw at me.
Is it legal to have an actual child working in one of these things?