Chapter Three: The Face I Didn't Order

Jarvis Something was off about the new kid, and it took me eleven hours to figure out it wasn't a bad thing, which is roughly ten hours and fifty-five minutes longer than I usually give a problem before I decide it's not my problem. I've been captain of this team for two seasons. I know what a nervous freshman looks like — shoulders up, eyes down, radiating a silent prayer of *please do not notice me* — because I did it myself once, a hundred years ago, before my last name started doing half my talking for me and the other half started doing my talking without my permission. Rory didn't have that posture. Rory walked onto my ice at 5:40 in the morning like he was personally daring the building to have a problem with him. I liked that immediately, which should have been my first warning label. "You're staring at the roster like it owes you child support," Cole said, dropping onto the bench beside me with two coffees, handing one over without asking, because he never asks, he just knows, which is either loyalty or a mild violation of my autonomy — I've never fully decided. "Reyes put Monroe on the roster," I said. "The transfer kid? Good, he hit Duval into the boards like Duval personally owed him rent money." "Yeah." I kept staring at the sheet like it might spontaneously explain itself. "Something's weird about him." "Weird how? Weird like he's secretly forty? Weird like he's an undercover journalist doing an exposé on locker room culture?" "I don't know," I admitted, which was the annoying part. Not weird-bad. Weird like a word stuck on the tip of your tongue. Weird like the first five minutes of a movie where you already sense a twist coming and the camera keeps lingering on something you can't name yet. "I do know something," Cole said, grinning into his coffee. "You've got the face." "I don't have a face." "You have a face right now." I threw a balled-up wad of tape at his head. He ducked, laughing, and I let the subject die because there was no version of *I met a rookie this morning and I've thought about him nine separate times since* that didn't sound like the opening line of a confession I wasn't ready to make. It did not stay dead for long. I caught myself watching Rory during afternoon conditioning — the way he ran like he was racing something invisible and personal, the way he laughed at something one of the other rookies said and slapped a hand over his own mouth like the laugh had embarrassed him, quick and unguarded, before he reeled it back into the careful, low-voiced version of himself he seemed to be constantly auditioning for. I noticed things I had zero business noticing. The way his gear bag stayed zipped tight even in ninety-degree heat. The way he showed up to the locker room already dressed and left before anyone else was out of the showers, like a man on a strict production schedule. The way he flinched — just barely — when Duval slung an arm around his shoulders like they were already lifelong friends. Cole was right that something was off. He was wrong about what it was. By dinner I'd built and demolished four separate theories, ranging from *he's shy* to, at one particularly unhinged point, *he's an undercover spy sent by a rival program to sabotage us from within,* which even I recognized as a lot for one guy with a good left edge. I landed on the least useful conclusion available: I just wanted an excuse to talk to him again. So I found one. He was leaving the dining hall alone, tray still half full like he'd been in too much of a hurry to actually eat, and I fell into step beside him before I'd fully signed off on the decision. "You survive your first day of being personally terrorized by Coach Reyes?" He glanced sideways, wary for half a second, then something in his face smoothed right back into the sharp, easy thing he apparently did on command. "Barely. Pretty sure he called me the wrong name twice and it was somehow still my fault." "Sounds accurate. He called me 'the other one' for an entire season before he learned my actual name." "The other one?" Something flickered across his face — fast, gone before I could pin it down. "There's more than one of you? God help this campus." And there it was. The thing I hadn't told him yet, the thing that always recalibrates how people look at me the second they find out, and for one stupid reason I couldn't articulate, I wasn't in a hurry to say it out loud to this particular person. "Twin brother," I said. "Older by three minutes. Never lets either of us forget it, mostly by starting sentences with 'as the older twin.'" Rory stopped walking. Just for a second — half a step, barely a flicker, if I hadn't already been paying way too much attention to him all day I'd have missed it completely. His face did something complicated, something that looked almost like fear cosplaying as surprise, there and gone so fast I second-guessed whether I'd imagined it. "Twin," he repeated, voice carefully light. "That's — wow. Does he play too?" "Nah. Dray does his own thing. You'll meet him eventually, everybody does." I studied him, that same weird itch from the rink crawling up my spine again. "You good? You went a little pale, Rookie." "Low blood sugar," he said, too fast, holding up his half-empty tray like evidence in a trial nobody was running. "Should eat something." He walked off before I could say anything else, and I stood in the middle of the quad like a man who'd just been handed half a jigsaw puzzle and told to enjoy himself, watching him go, thinking — for the second time that day — that there was a version of this story I wasn't seeing yet. I had absolutely no idea how right I was. I had no idea that four hundred miles away, there was a girl who looked exactly like him, once photographed at a party with the words *S. Sterling's girl for the night* stamped under her face like a brand — and that my own name, not my brother's, was standing between my rookie and the plan she'd built her entire fake identity around.