Chapter Five: Spreadsheet Boy

Dray I've never once, in twenty years of sharing a face with my brother, been jealous of his hockey team. Until Tuesday, when a rookie with a suspiciously well-rehearsed voice ruined my entire week without ever learning my name. I wasn't even supposed to be at the rink. I'd come to drop off Jarvis's spare skate laces — the ones he forgets every single season like the previous nineteen seasons taught him nothing — planning to hand them off and leave before anyone made me watch a drill I had zero interest in. Instead I ended up leaning against the wall near the exit for twenty minutes, watching a stranger move across the ice like he had a personal vendetta against the concept of losing. Most people skate like they're trying to look good. This one skated like he was trying to win an argument nobody else could hear, which is, unfortunately, a very specific energy I recognize, because I run on it too. I clocked the wrong things first, the way I always do — not the face, not right away, but the details underneath it. The way he favored his left edge coming out of turns, same as someone I used to watch highlight reels of a lifetime ago, back when I still cared about competitive hockey instead of just competitive everything else. The way his jaw set *before* contact instead of after, like he was bracing for a hit that wasn't coming from the ice at all. The way his voice, when he answered something Jarvis said, dropped a full register lower than the sentence required. That was the first flag. Voices don't do that by accident. Voices do that when someone's been practicing in a mirror at two in the morning, which, again — deeply relatable, deeply suspicious. I filed it away quietly, the way I file everything, the same instinct that makes me good at spotting a wrong number on a balance sheet before anyone's explained what's wrong with it. Something didn't add up about Rory Monroe, and I am constitutionally incapable of leaving a discrepancy alone once I've noticed it. It's not a personality trait. It's closer to a medical condition. Then he looked up mid-stretch and caught me watching, and I got the second flag — the one that actually mattered. He didn't look at me the way rookies look at Sterlings. Rookies look at us like we're a door that might open — polite, hopeful, calculating an angle. Rory looked at me like I was a door he desperately needed to stay shut, for about half a second, before he smoothed it into something neutral. Fear, dressed up as composure. I know that exact expression. I wear a version of it myself in every boardroom my father drags me into. I didn't say anything. I've never been the twin who says things — that's Jarvis's department, he narrates, I calculate — and I walked out of that rink still holding a bag of laces I'd completely forgotten to deliver, running through everything I'd just seen like a spreadsheet with one column that refused to balance no matter how many times I recalculated it. *Item one:* a transfer with a rehearsed voice and a genuinely excellent left edge. *Item two:* a flinch, quickly buried, at the sight of a face genetically identical to his captain's. *Item three:* the exact moment, according to Jarvis's increasingly unhinged texts, that Rory had gone stiff learning Jarvis had a twin at all. None of it proved anything. All of it proved something. My phone buzzed on the walk to my car. Jarvis, obviously, because Jarvis texts like he's being timed by a judge somewhere. **Jarvis:** did you drop the laces off or did you just stand there being weird again **Jarvis:** Cole says you have a face **Jarvis:** DRAY I didn't answer right away. I sat in the parking lot longer than I'd like to admit, turning it all over, and landed on the one theory that explained all three items at once — the way the correct answer always explains everything at once instead of leaving loose threads hanging off the edges like a bad hem. **Me:** who's the new forward. Full name. **Jarvis:** Rory Monroe? why **Me:** transfer from where **Jarvis:** some club league back home, why do you care, you HATE hockey **Me:** I don't hate hockey. I hate watching you play it badly. **Jarvis:** rude and factually incorrect. seriously though why the sudden interest I looked at that question for a long moment before answering, because the honest version — *because I think your new rookie is lying about something big enough to matter, and I think it's tangled up in whatever you still won't talk about from last year* — wasn't something I was ready to hand over yet. Not until I had more than a hunch and a bag of laces I'd failed at one job. **Me:** no reason. tell coach I said hi. I put the phone down and drove home with the radio off, which I only do when I'm genuinely thinking about something, and by the time I pulled into the garage I'd made a decision I hadn't fully examined yet — the kind I'd spend the rest of the season either grateful for or regretting, depending entirely on the day, sometimes depending on the hour. I was going to find out exactly who Rory Monroe was.