*

The front door is unlocked. Benji walks through the house and notices that apart from a mark on the door to the basement, the house looks like it always does. As if no one had ever lived there. He stands in the terrace doorway and watches Kevin spray pucks all over his neighbors’ flowerbeds as if he were firing blind. Kevin’s eyes are bloodshot and furious when they meet his.

“There you are! I must have called you a thousand times!”

“And now I’m here,” Benji replies.

“You need to answer when I call!” Kevin snarls.

Benji’s words come slowly, his eyebrows lower threateningly.

“I think you must be confusing me with Lyt or Bobo. I’m not your slave. I answer when I feel like it.”

Kevin points at him with the tip of his stick. It’s quivering with rage.

“Have you finished taking drugs now, then? We’re playing in the final next week and everyone’s acting like we’ve done enough just getting there. We need to get the guys together and make them all understand what I demand from them this week! So you need to be available! I won’t tolerate the fact that when the team needs you most, you vanish in a puff of smoke!”

Benji doesn’t know if he means “puff of smoke” as a joke, or if Kevin’s too stupid to appreciate the double meaning. It’s always hard to tell with Kevin. He’s both the smartest and stupidest person Benji knows.

“You know why I left the party.”

Kevin snorts.

“Yeah, because you’re a fucking saint, right?”

Benji’s eyes stare at Kevin’s, intently and without looking away. When Kevin eventually averts his gaze and looks away, his friend asks: “What happened last night, Kev?”

Kevin lets out a curt laugh and throws his arms out.

“Nothing. Everyone was drunk. You know what it’s like.”

“What happened to your hand?”

“Nothing!”

“I saw Maya in the forest. It didn’t look like nothing.”

Kevin spins around as if he were about to hit Benji with his stick. His lips are quivering, his pupils burning.

“So NOW you give a damn? What the hell does it matter to you anyway? You weren’t even here! You’d rather go to Hed and get wasted than stay here with your best friends! Your TEAM!”

Benji’s eyes are staring intently at the way Kevin’s are moving. Kevin looks away again, fires a puck so high above the net that it should be recategorized as a hunting weapon, and mumbles: “I needed you yesterday.”

Benji doesn’t answer, which always makes Kevin lose his temper with him, and he roars: “You weren’t HERE, Benji! You’re NEVER here when I need you! Lyt was sick all over the fucking kitchen and someone banged into the cellar door and left a huge mark on it! Have you got any idea what’s going to happen when my dad gets home and sees it? Do you have any idea, or have you smoked away all . . . ?”

“I don’t give a shit about your dad. I want to know what happened last night,” Benji interrupts.

Kevin takes five quick steps and breaks his stick on the top of the goal, and it snaps into two razor-sharp projectiles, one of which misses Benji’s face by a hand’s width, but he doesn’t blink.

“REALLY? YOU DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT MY DAD’S . . . ? You ungrateful fucking . . . Who’s been paying for your skates and sticks and gear for the past ten years? Didn’t you give a shit about him then either? Do you think your mom could have afforded all that? Christ, my dad’s right about you. He’s ALWAYS been right about you! You’re a virus, Benji, a fucking virus. You can’t live without some sort of host!”

Benji takes two steps forward, just two. His face is expressionless.

“What happened last night, Kev?”

“What do you want? Is this some fucking police interrogation? What’s your problem?”

“Don’t be a coward, Kev.”

“You want to lecture ME about being a coward? You want to talk about COWARDICE? For fuck’s sake, you’re the one who’s a fucking . . . a fucking . . .”

Benji moves so fast that Kevin breathes the last words into his face. Their eyes are just a few inches from each other’s. Benji’s are wide open.

“What? What am I, Kev? Tell me.”

Kevin’s skin is pulsating, his eyes running, his neck is red and blue on one side, as if he’s been punched hard by someone with small hands. He backs away and picks up part of the broken stick and slams it into the goal, making the metal sing.

“Get out of my house, Ovich. You’ve sponged off my family for long enough.”

He doesn’t turn around to watch Benji go. Nor when he hears the front door slam shut.

*

They get home late. The house looks like it did when they left it. Their son is pretending to be asleep; they don’t knock on his door. Kevin’s father finds two sheets of paper on the kitchen counter on which Kevin has given a careful account of all the statistics of each period of the game. Minutes played, shots, assists, goals, numerical superiority and inferiority, possession, penalties, mistakes. His father spends a couple of minutes sitting in the glow of a single lamp and smiles in a way that he doesn’t let anyone see anymore. So proud. A man with less impulse control would have gone upstairs and kissed his sleeping son on his forehead.

His mother notices things that his father misses. She sees the pictures that the cleaner has mixed up and hung in the wrong order. The table that is slightly askew in the living room. A scrap of the plastic covering that has caught beneath one corner of the sofa. But above all, she sees the mark on the cellar door.

While her husband is sitting in the kitchen, she takes a deep breath and slams her suitcase into it as hard as she can. He comes running and she apologizes, saying she tripped and let go of the case. He helps her up and holds her and whispers: “Don’t look so upset, it’s only the cellar door, it’s just a little mark, darling.”

Then he shows her the sheets of paper and says:

“They won!”

She laughs into his shirt.

24

When the burglar alarm goes off at the school early on Monday morning, the security company doesn’t call the police, because it could take them hours to get there. They call one of the teachers instead. Not any teacher, they call the one whose little brother works for the security firm, so that her brother won’t have to go to the trouble of fetching his own keys. Jeanette gets out of her car in the deserted parking lot, pulls up the collar of her coat, and blinks tiredly:

“Sometimes you’re so lazy I’m starting to think your kids must be adopted.”

Her brother laughs.

“Come on, Sis, stop whining, you’re the one who always says I don’t call you often enough!”

She rolls her eyes, takes his flashlight off him, and unlocks a side door to the school.