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ONE

ELIO

Go to hell, Easton , I had shouted. The words echoed in my head as one foot hurried to catch up with the other. My legs carried me far away from him. Easton, Patrick, the whole doomed gang of Saints. Was this the team I was inheriting? Was this the group I had to lead to victory? These assholes didn’t know what winning looked like. They had barely left the state to compete in Indianapolis or Detroit when we weren’t split in half.

And now? We would be lucky if we managed to keep up with the drills. The distrust had never felt so thick between us, and the secrets welling to the surface would only distract us.

In the span of ten minutes, a janitor a few doors down from us was arrested for selling drugs, one of our own was anonymously accused of shooting himself up with testosterone, and Easton, my friend…

I shook my head and pushed the exit doors of the rink open, marching out onto the parking lot. It was empty. Some of the Saints were still in the distance, walking away, and the parking spots were mostly vacant. A lone figure stood in the waning sunlight, arms crossed on his chest, face dotted with random tattoos, thin mustache quivering above his sharp lips. He stared at me with intense brown eyes as I stormed by him, almost engaging him in a fight just to let off some of the anger that was about to drown me.

Easton had led me on. He’d befriended me with who knows what intentions, kept me around for two goddamn years, only to turn out to be…

I pushed him out of my mind with all the force I had nowhere else to spend. My heart wasn’t breaking for Kyle. That piece of shit was welcome to burn in hell right next to Easton and the whole lot of them. Their lives and terrible ways were irrelevant to me as long as they didn’t spill into the team. And they had. They had seeped into the very veins of the Steel Saints like venom and were spreading. It would be too late soon to suck the venom out.

My fury carried me away from the rink and into the heart of the campus. Buildings were scattered in a grid of pedestrian streets, occupying plots of various sizes, lanes, and footpaths leading across artificial slopes. A student center here and a library there, its Art Deco style screaming from its rigid lines and sharp corners, and the Faculty of Fine Arts sat across from it. Sports facilities were further out. Among them were indoor swimming pools, outdoor baseball fields, tennis courts, a football field, and the ice hockey rink where the Saints practiced. Smaller facilities, like the gymnasium and a small fencing practice hall, were deeper in the grid of the campus.

I blazed past the cafes and bars where students were already scattering their notebooks and devices along the long tables, studying together with jazz music in the background.

The dormitories were unfortunately clustered across the campus, flanked by the administration building to one side and the Faculty of Philosophy on the other, placing them into the most boring pocket of the campus. The philosophers weren’t so bad. Some of them were so lost in existentialism that all they ever did was get together and drink while bemoaning the meaninglessness of life. It was the administrators who kept the students on edge.

Not that I cared. I had hated parties all my life, even before I had any reason to be wary of them. Sometimes, if I didn’t take good care, I found myself thinking about it. My hatred of the parties may as well have been a premonition. I had always known how bad things could get if I let myself be dragged from one party to another, lowering my guard and letting people see a glimpse of me when I wasn’t in a familiar place.

Those familiar places I could defend. Those were the positions where I could find the high ground. Bah! Desperation was slowly tugging at the corners of my soul.

I’d met Easton at a party. It was a Delta Kappa Phi frat house party a mere few days after I had left Pittsburgh. Easton had been as bored as me, scanning the crowd with no intention of engaging with any of them. When he struck up a conversation about my split lip—the very one that had been torn by those sharp, perfect teeth at a different party some days earlier—I’d offhandedly told him that hockey was a rough sport.

“You’re not on the Steel Saints, are you?” Easton had asked, starting something I’d always believed was a friendship.

But what did I know? What judge of character was I when I could have a friend throughout high school without ever realizing what his real intentions were?

“Hey!” The sound snapped through the air like a whip, cracking over me and yanking me around. Another friend of mine. How lucky I had to be to have so many. “What the hell?”

Patrick was crossing the green lawn between us, his path straight as an arrow. He was shooting right toward me.

I didn’t want to look at him. I didn’t want to have this conversation at all.

Too many things had gone wrong today.

Easton had fooled me, keeping me close as a friend until the coaches put his captaincy under the spotlight and favored me. And if that hadn’t been bad enough, Easton had been messing with our teammates all along. The odds were against me, and I suspected Patrick was on his way to ask me, point-blank, if I was like Easton.

Why did I always have to defend myself from these stupid accusations and rumors? As a boy, I’d had that target on my back way before I’d even known what the word meant. It was like the older boys saw something in me that made it obvious.

But it wasn’t true.

I’d never been interested in guys. From the very first moment I felt a swelling attraction toward another person, I had been sure of this. I was nothing like them. Those boys had been wrong. They’d mistaken something about me, misunderstood me, and bullied me for nothing. But the shadow they’d cast over me was a long one, and it followed me to this day.

“I’ll stop you right there,” I said grimly, straightening my back and facing Patrick. “I had no idea what he was.”

Patrick’s frown deepened. He had very dark eyebrows resting flatly above his bright green eyes, in contrast with his golden locks of hair. He made me think of Peter Pan, only grown up and purposefully edgy.

He didn’t believe me. That was what his frown said.

“What? I didn’t know. Maybe it’s not so obvious to everyone. Or maybe I’m just naive. That’d explain a lot.” My voice ran away from me, words pouring out without any restraint. “If you think, for a second, that I would have…”

“Stop talking,” Patrick said, taking a brutish step toward me. It looked odd on him, considering he was nearly a head shorter. “I swear to God, Elio, if you say another word, Imma punch the crap out of you.”

“You wouldn’t be the first to try,” I said. He didn’t know how far I was willing to go to protect what little reputation I still had left to me. I had spent my life fighting against the rumor mill. I could fight it in my sleep.

Patrick wagged his finger before me, picking his words. “You know what? You’re a shitty friend, Elio.”

I opened my mouth to protest. Something in his eyes told me that I had misunderstood. He didn’t think I was like Easton. He didn’t think I had been keeping Easton’s secrets and threatening Patrick’s reputation by proxy.

Patrick was on Easton’s side.

I took a step back by instinct. “As shitty as he is?” I asked, lips curling into a sneer.

“What’s so shitty about him?” Patrick asked.

My nose wrinkled. “It’s obvious, Patrick.” Easton had no right to keep me so close when he was radioactive. He’d exposed me to unimaginable harm without giving me any choice.

“There’s only one thing that’s obvious to me,” Patrick said. “You’re shitting your pants like the rest of them, Elio. And it’s embarrassing.”

I took a step toward him, not actually trying to be threatening, but it spilled out of me regardless. “We’re not some San Francisco pole dancing team,” I growled. “This is hockey, Patrick.”

He didn’t look like he accepted my argument. To me, it was very simple. Flukes like those Arctic Titans from Detroit happened once in a while, pulling a stunt for the public so they could end up on cover pages of tristate magazines. They’d put together a nice little campaign, capturing the zeitgeist and riding the wave of support in order to brand themselves a little better. They’d only wanted to stay relevant.

And just because it worked for them, we had to follow? Bullshit.

“There’s more to life than hockey,” Patrick said, but the vigor was gone from his tone. He pulled away from me and marched toward the cafe on the other side of the footpath.

As I walked back to my dorm room, I tried to think about the last thing he had said. It simply wasn’t true. What else was there? Maybe Patrick had things outside the Saints. He liked frat parties, had friends beyond the campus, and went to events that weren’t just about hockey.

Good for him.

But my life was empty when you carved the Saints out of it. I studied, and I practiced. I ran after waking up and worked out at the campus gym before going to bed, and that was it. That was my life. And I wasn’t letting stupid shit like Kyle and Easton’s disputes get in the way of my success.