The Year We Fell Down (6 page)

“That’s
so
much cuter,” Dana gushed. “It hugs you in just the right places. Now, wait. Put on these hoops.”

“Fine,” Corey sighed, “because it’s quicker than arguing with you.”

“And I’m not letting you out of the house without lipstick.”

“God,
why?
”

That’s when I laughed, and Corey’s door opened all the way. “Gotta go,” she called to Dana.

“Wait!” her roommate cried, fumbling on Corey’s dresser top. “Don’t you
own
any mascara?”

“Good luck at the rush parties,” Corey called as she crutched toward me in a hurry. “
Run,
” she mouthed, and I opened the door.

Corey managed the six stairs into Bridger’s room with little difficulty, which was great since I wouldn’t have been any help. But that night, the party itself was the real work. It was exactly what I should have anticipated. Warm beer in plastic cups? Check. Music too loud to talk over? Check. Girls tossing their hair at all of my teammates? Check and check.

Bridger’s room was thick with Harkness Hockey jackets and sweatshirts. The puck bunnies fanned out around them, fawning. I followed Corey’s stare to find a rather drunk young woman grinding up against Bridger. When I caught Corey’s eye, she raised an eyebrow. All I could do was shrug. You might think that there wouldn’t be any puck bunnies at an ambitious school like Harkness. But you’d be wrong. At every home game, there was at least one homemade poster reading: “Future Hockey Wives.” They weren’t even subtle about it.

When Corey and I had battled all the way into the party, Bridger gave us each a warm smile and a warm beer. It was then that I discovered the logistical difficulty of drinking a beer while supporting oneself on crutches. Corey, who was obviously smarter than I was, had wedged herself onto the arm of Bridger’s beat up old sofa. Leaning her crutches up against the wall behind her, she had her hands free.

From her perch, Corey surveyed the room that Bridger and I would have shared if not for my broken leg. Beaumont House was a hundred years old, and the university hadn’t renovated it in a few decades. So the dark wood moldings were scratched, the walls yellowing. But it was still one of the coolest places I’d ever been. The arched windows were hung with real leaded glass, divided into tiny shimmering rectangles. An oaken window seat stretched beneath.

Students perched on its edge, cups in hand, the same way they’d been sitting since the 1920s. I’d always thought that was cool, but tonight it just seemed depressingly stagnant.

Bridger even had one of those felt banners hanging above his not-functional-since-the-1960s fireplace, reading
Esse Quam Videri
. The university motto was: To Be, Rather Than to Seem. It was a nice sentiment, but the vibe in Bridger’s room that night was more along the lines of: To See, To Be Seen, and To Drink a Lot.

The first beer went down quick. “You need another?” I asked Callahan.

“Not really,” she said with a smile.

And good thing, because I probably couldn’t carry one back to her without spilling it. With my cup in my teeth, I made my way through the crowd to the keg without crushing anyone’s toes with my crutches. Bridger took the cup out of my mouth and refilled it.

“What happened to that octopus I saw hanging on you earlier?” I asked him.

He tipped my cup to avoid too much foam. “Christ. I had to peel her off me. That’s Hank’s little sister.”

“Seriously? I thought she was younger.”

“That’s the problem. She’s sixteen, and just visiting for the weekend. Now she’s reattached herself. To Fairfax, of all people.”

I scanned the scrum of bodies. Sure enough, on the window-seat I spotted a half-lidded girl wrapped around our teammate. And Fairfax looked pretty deep into his cups himself. “Fuck. Where is Hank, anyway?”

“I really don’t know. Haven’t seen him for a while. Probably someone offered him a smoke.” Bridger handed me my cup, and we both watched a drunken Fairfax shove his tongue in the girl’s mouth. “That’s just some kind of wrong,” Bridger muttered. “Do you have your phone?”

“Sure. Hold this.” I gave Bridger my cup, and shot off a quick text to Hank. “911. Put the bong down and come get your sister.”

Bridge and I drank a beer together while watching the door. But Hank didn’t appear. I looked back toward the happy couple. “
Dayum
. Did she just grab his junk?”

Bridger winced. “We’ll have to stage an intervention. If that was my little sister…” he let the sentence die. “That girl is drunk off her ass.”

It had to be done. “Coming through,” I called, and Bridge and I wove our way towards the window seat. They were still hot and heavy by the time we got over there.

I tapped the girl on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Hank is looking for you.” Their lips made an audible popping sound when they came apart. “Whah?” the girl slurred.

“Your brother,” Bridger said, pulling her off Fairfax. “Right now.”

“Holy shit, Darcy!”

Hank had appeared, towering over us. The dude was almost seven feet tall. He put one giant hand on his sister’s shoulder, and held up his phone with the other. “Thanks, Hartley. I owe you.”

I shrugged it off, but not before Fairfax noticed. After Hank dragged his sister away, he fixed me with a wobbly stare. “So you’re cock-blocking me now?”

Seriously?
“No, man. I’m helping you out. You’ve got to throw the little ones back. It’s the law.”

“You are such a bastard, Hartley. Always such a
bastard
.”

I clenched my fists on instinct.

“Oh,
fuck
no,” Bridger spat, putting a hand on my chest. “You are not punching Fairfax at my party. No matter how big a douchecanoe he is tonight.”

But my blood was boiling already. That fucking word. Why do people have to use that fucking word?

“Dude, no,” Bridger pled, both his hands on me now. “Let this one go. If you hurt him, he tells Coach…nothing good comes from that. And the guy is
plowed
, Hartley. He won’t even remember this in the morning.”

As if to prove the point, Fairfax began to sag onto the window seat.

I shook Bridger off me, but I didn’t lunge at Fairfax.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Bridger added, handing me the crutch I’d dropped.

Right. So this had been fun.

I turned away without another word, heading back towards Corey, and her perch on the sofa arm. The sofa proper was taken up by with two couples engaged in varying stages of foreplay. But the wall beside Corey was empty, and so I maneuvered myself into position to lean upon it. With just a third of a beer left, I could dangle the cup from two fingers and still hang onto my crutches.

“Everything okay?” she asked mildly.

“The leg is killing me tonight,” I mumbled, staring into the last of my beer.

She tugged her bag off her shoulders. Digging into the bottom, her hand emerged with a tiny bottle of Advil. God bless her, she tapped two of these into my palm.

“You are such a babe,” I said, tossing them back into my mouth.

“Uh huh,” she said with an eye roll.

I gave her a wink, and the puck bunny standing in front of us gave Corey a dirty look. She was a fluffy-haired cheerleader type wearing some kind of tight, shiny shirt.

“Stacia really left you high and dry, didn’t she?” the shiny-shirted girl asked me.

“How do you figure?” I shifted my weight to put more of it against the wall. I was fairly miserable, and it was only ten o’clock.

“She’s wandering Paris, and you’re stuck here in sunny Harkness Connecticut. How’s that fair? A whole semester without any action?” She tossed her hair, and the invitation was unmistakable.

I winked, shaking my phone in one hand. “See, that’s what Skype is for.” The girl and her friend dissolved in a fit of giggles, while Corey rolled her eyes again. “The only tricky part is getting the whole thing in the picture.” I held the camera at arm’s length and waist height, as if zooming out on my crotch, and they howled again. I drained my beer, wondering why I came to these things.

A guy we called Kreature pushed through the girls to talk to me, and I was happy for the interruption.

“Hey man. How’s it going?” I asked. “Have you met Callahan’s little sister?”

“Nice to meet you,” Kreature shook Corey’s hand. “Practice was just brutal today, Hartley. Lunging sprints on the track, followed by murder drills on the ice. No scrimmage. It was exhausting and boring at the same time.”

“Giddyup,” I said, crushing my empty cup.

“Trust me, man. It was a day when missing practice meant missing
nothing
.”

“No kidding?” I said. But privately, I thought,
bullshit
. I’d have done anything to be at practice today, instead of laid up with a giant cast on my leg. I cut my glance over to Corey’s for half a second, and found her with a knowing smile.

Yeah. She was the only one in the room who understood.

After Kreature went away, Corey put her bag over her shoulders again, and found her crutches. “I’m going to take off,” she said.

“I’ll walk you out,” I volunteered immediately.

She headed for the doorway, and I managed to follow without clubbing anyone with my cast.

“You don’t have to walk me out,” she said as we reached the landing outside Bridger’s door. “Why do the stairs two extra times?”

The pain in my ankle made me grimace. “I’m not, Callahan. I’m just using you as an excuse to sneak away.” With great care, I crutched down the first stair. “Come on, you can say it. That was a totally pointless evening.”

“Was it? Honestly, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Nobody puked on me, and I didn’t do a face plant on the stairs.” Callahan hopped down one stair, and then another. Compared to me, she was practically a gazelle.

“I guess it’s all about expectations,” I muttered, tackling the second stair.

“Everything is,” she agreed quietly.

Chapter Six:
More Fun than Disney World

—
Corey

On my way out of the room on Monday morning, I found a note that had been slid under our door. It was a folded piece of paper reading CALLAHAN on the outside. Inside, it read:
I can’t come to econ today because I’m having two screws put in my knee this morning. Share your notes with me, pretty please? H.

I waited until after lunch to text him.
Got your note. Surgery? So sorry.

A couple of hours later he replied:
Don’t B sorry. Anesthesia rocks. You don’t have to visit, but if you do, bring food
.

Me:
What kind of food?

Hartley:
OMG
who cares? Hospital food is vomit.

I laughed, because it was true.

When I stuck my head into Hartley’s hospital room later, the first thing I saw was his bandaged knee, draped over a machine, which bent it and straightened it repeatedly. “That looks like fun.” At least his giant cast was gone, and there was a smaller one — a boot cast — on his lower leg.

“More fun than Disney World.” He turned his head and offered me a pale smile. He was wearing a hospital gown, and an IV dripped liquids into his arm.

I fought off a shudder at the familiarity of it all. “Sorry,” I said. “Why the surgery, anyway?”

He pressed his head back against the pillows. “The hockey coach wanted me to see his favorite ortho guy. And that guy said it would heal faster with screws in it.”

“Well…that’s good, right?”

He shrugged. “It’s good for my knee. But my ankle will heal at the same speed, no matter what. So I’m trying to figure out what’s changed, except for the fact that I now have steel body parts.”

“You’re going to set off metal detectors.” I rolled further into the room. “You don’t mind me visiting? I always hated visitors.”

Hartley picked his head up. “You hated visitors? What do you have against people who like you?”

“I didn’t want to be
seen
, that’s all. It was so humiliating to be flat on my back, unshowered, and basically naked except for the little cotton gown.”

“That’s where we’re different,” Hartley said with a tip of his head. “I’m cool with not showering. And nudity.”

I fished a white paper bag out of my pack.

“What did you bring me?”

“An Italian sub and a bag of chips. And Gatorade.”

“Have I ever told you that you’re beautiful?”

“Any time I offer you food.”

“Exactly. Gimme that.” He held out his hands, and I passed him the bag.

I looked up at the IV, and the drugs running into his arm. “Are you supposed to be eating?”

“Who cares? I’m hungry.” He unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite. “Mmh,” he said. “Beautiful.”

“Me or the sandwich?”

“Both.” He took another bite. “Callahan? How long were you in the hospital?”