His phone dinged inside his pocket, snapping him out of it enough to realize he was still standing in the middle of the parking lot like a clown. Can’t wait to hear all about your game, Chelsea had texted. Call when you’re done if you get a chance.
He was done, all right. Ryan looked out across the parking lot; he could see his teammates piling into various people’s SUVs, headed for TGI Fridays and then somebody’s basement or backyard or over-the-garage family room, for a night of cheerful drunken celebrating. They’d won, after all. Everything was great.
“McCullough!” Remy shouted, hanging out the passenger-side window of a shiny red Jeep. “You coming or what?”
Ryan shook his raging head, waved them off, and turned toward the front of the building. Jammed his hands into his pockets and started to walk.
It was snowing now, fat flakes slipping down the back of his collar and a sharp wind that bit at the tips of his ears. Ryan kind of liked the sting. His head throbbed, but not nearly as bad as it had the other times he’d hit it. He probably didn’t even have a concussion. She’d probably fucked him into next year for nothing. For a knot on the head.
He kept walking. Colson was peak suburbs, not particularly pedestrian-friendly; Ryan walked mostly on the grassy shoulder, left footprints in the snow in people’s front yards. He wasn’t even sure where he was going until he rounded the corner into Chelsea’s neighborhood, a cluster of small, well-maintained Tudors not far from the middle school. All the streets were named after poets back here, he knew, although none of the names were particularly familiar to him. Dumb jock that he was.
Chelsea’s dad answered the door, a tall, skinny dude with a goatee who had spent the last couple of weeks looking at Ryan with an expression of grim resignation. “Chelsea,” he called, eyes on Ryan like, I know what you’re about, kid, “you have a visitor.”
Chelsea appeared in the front hall a moment later in a pair of soft-looking gray sweatpants and a swim team T-shirt with the collar ripped out, mouth rubbed clean of the red lipstick she usually wore. “Hey,” she said, smiling in a way that looked surprised but—Ryan hoped—pleased. “What are you doing here?”
“Um,” he said, feeling weirdly shy all of a sudden. He didn’t usually get shy around girls, especially girls he was already hooking up with, and it was a new sensation. She was wearing her glasses, which she didn’t always. Ryan liked her glasses a lot. “Hi.”
Chelsea considered him with barely veiled amusement. “Hi,” she said.
“Um, how’re you feeling?” he asked, realizing abruptly what a dope he probably looked like. “I didn’t bring you flowers or anything. I probably should have brought you flowers or soup or something like that.”
“My mom made soup,” Chelsea told him, still hiding a smile and not even very well. “Anyway, I feel a lot better.” She gestured down at herself. “I look like crap, clearly, but.”
“You look beautiful,” Ryan blurted, and this time Chelsea smiled for real.
“Well,” she said. “Thanks.” She leaned against the wall in the foyer then, looking at him a little more closely. “Are you okay?” she asked, dark eyebrows knitting a bit. “How was your game?”
“It was fine.” Ryan shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about hockey, or his head, or Gabby. He especially did not want to talk about Gabby. “Do you want to go for a walk with me?”
That surprised her. “I mean, I don’t think I feel that good,” she pointed out. “It’s actively snowing.”
“Oh, sure.” Ryan nodded, feeling like an idiot. “Right.”
Chelsea smiled again. “What if we drove?” she asked. “Did you drive here?”
Ryan shook his head. “Walked.”
“From school?” Now she looked sort of concerned. “Ryan, are you sure you’re okay?”
Ugh, he was playing this wrong; he didn’t want to worry her. He didn’t want to worry anyone. He mustered his most charming grin. “I’m good. I just missed you once the game was over. And as you might recall, I have no car.”
To his relief, Chelsea smiled again. “I do recall that,” she said, looking placated; she reached out and squeezed his hand. “Let me just make sure it’s okay with my parents. They might give me a hard time about the weather.”
The snow had mostly stopped, actually, so her parents agreed that she could drive Ryan home as long as she didn’t take any detours. “Straight there and back,” her dad said, eyes on Ryan again as he shut the storm door behind them. “Home by usual time.”
“Definitely,” Chelsea promised. “Usual time.”
Chelsea’s car was always full of garbage, which Ryan found sort of improbably charming—like she was so hyper-efficient in the rest of her life that the overflow all ended up here, in the form of empty Starbucks cups and CVS receipts and her second-favorite pair of sneakers. He barely knew her yet, Ryan understood that intellectually. But he felt like he did.
“So,” Chelsea said as she pulled out of the driveway. “You wanna tell me why you’re being such a huge freak right now, or not so much?”
Ryan huffed out a noisy sigh. “I’m not being a huge freak,” he protested. “Whatever, I’m being a regular-sized freak at most.”
“Okay,” Chelsea said calmly, no argument, then proceeded to be absolutely silent until he broke. He told her everything—just like he’d come here to do, if he was being honest with himself; just like he’d known he would deep in his brain stem from the moment he’d set off from school on foot. “And I’m fucked,” he said finally, working himself back up into a dark, satisfying rage about it. “They’re definitely going to pull me. I’m going to sit on the bench the rest of the fucking season, all because of her.”
When he was done, Chelsea was quiet for another moment, like she was thinking. “Do you think you have a concussion right now?” she asked.
“No,” Ryan said with a bombastic certainty that wasn’t 100 percent genuine. “I don’t.”
Chelsea seemed to take him at his word. “Gabby’s not a sports person,” she pointed out. “I’m not saying that as a knock against her; it’s just true. So there are things she doesn’t get. And from what you’ve said, she has zero tolerance for discomfort of any kind, physical or emotional, so I can see why she would have freaked. Having said that, what she did was super obnoxious and overstepping and doesn’t take into account all the ways that your life is different from hers. And you’re right to be pissed off.”
Ryan wasn’t expecting that. “I am?”
“Yeah,” Chelsea said. “Absolutely. I would be.”