Consequences. My mind reeled. I felt dizzy. Coach was kicking me off the team. I would lose my scholarship—maybe not be able to pay for school at all. What was I going to tell Mom?

My heart was pounding so loudly that I almost didn't hear the knock at the door. "Come in," called Coach, and the door creaked open. Wesley slipped through.

A new tide of anger surged up inside me. Wesley must have been the one to snitch on me to Coach. For God's sake, it was an accident! I would never knowingly drink alcohol during the soccer season! Didn't the guy have any mercy at all? He dropped into the seat beside me, and I could practically feel the fury rolling off of him, mirroring my own. He folded his arms over his chest, and I avoided looking at him by pinning my eyes to a photograph on Coach's desk of a little girl with a soccer ball. Probably his daughter.

Coach glared at each of us in turn. "You two must think I'm stupid," he announced.

That startled my eyes up to Coach's face. For a moment, I even forgot to seethe about Wesley. "W-what?" I stammered. "No! Why would you—"

"Stupid, Coach?" echoed Wesley.

Coach Garcia's nostrils flared. "I've seen the way you two treat each other. I know that you're competing for similar positions on the team, and I'm not about to stand for two of my players acting like a couple of unruly kindergartners."

His voice was a low, stern hiss, but my heart buoyed instantly into my throat. "Does this mean you're not kicking me off the team?"

Coach gave me a don't-be-an-idiot look, and I could have kissed him. I could have kissed Wesley; I was so happy. "The pair of you are my most talented players," Coach said. "I don't want to kick either of you off—but if you don't straighten out your acts, you're both gone. You've been at each other from day one. I was hoping you would grow up and figure out whatever it is on your own—no, don't tell me, I don't care—but you haven't done it, and if what happened today happened in a real game, the whole team would be paying for your little spat. Así que, here's how it's going to be: from this point onward, you two are inseparable. You eat a meal, you eat it together. You practice soccer, you practice together. On the road, you'll be rooming together. By the end of the season, I expect you to be best buds. You understand?"

"Coach!" Wesley half-lunged out of his seat, a desperate look in his eyes. "Come on. That's not fair. He—"

Coach silenced him with a single raised finger. "I don't care about what's fair to you two. I care about what's fair to the whole team. So this is what you're going to do, and if you don't like it, there's the door." He gestured at it with a sweep of his arm as final as a gavel. "Questions?"

I was shocked. Wesley seemed devastated. Neither of us said anything.

"Good." Coach rapped his knuckles twice on the top of his desk and turned away from us, punching the button on his computer monitor. “As long as there’s nothing else you want to confess…” I gulped. "We're done here. See you tomorrow."

Wesley whirled up out of his chair like a hurricane, and I followed in a daze. Outside, I stopped to shut the door behind me with a quiet click. The corridor was empty except for the two of us. The door to the locker room stood partway open, but through it I could hear nothing. No conversation, no laughter. Everybody else must have already finished washing up and gone on to whatever their next thing was.

Wesley slumped against the wall and pinched the bridge of his nose. He looked like Coach had just shot his dog.

I was so over this shit. I swung around to face him, planting my feet so that I stood squarely in front of him. Even slouching, he had enough height on me that I had to stand as straight as possible in order to look him right in the face. "What's your problem?" I blurted. "I don't get it, Wesley. I really don't. I've been trying to be nice to you this whole time, but you really have had it out for me since day one. Why do you hate me so much?"

He opened his eyes, staring at me past the tangle of his slim fingers. His voice was low—soft. A mockery of gentleness. "I think you know the answer to that, Carter."

It was the first time I'd heard him call me by my first name. He held it in his mouth like something sharp, his tongue moving gingerly around the points of the consonants, and I felt an unexpected flush of heat. "No," I snapped at him. "I really have no idea. Why would I ask if I knew?"

There was that unreadable thing in his eyes again, the same thing I'd see on the field when he almost-sort-of-but-not-really apologized to me. It made him look delicate. Almost vulnerable. "Seriously? You don't get it?"

"Seriously. I don't."

He scrutinized my face for a long moment, his gaze locked on mine. There were flecks of amber in the icy green of his eyes. He was looking at me as though hunting for some sign that I was lying. Then he dropped his hand from his nose and said plainly, "Then you're an even worse person than I thought."

I didn't know what to say to that. I sucked in a breath—baffled, hurt. Wesley didn't explain. He shouldered roughly away from me and stalked away down the hall.

That evening, I recounted the story of everything that had happened to Sean, who listened with a series of gasps and exclamations that I would have thought theatrical if I hadn't known that that was just him. "Look," I said, lying on my back and gesticulating at the ceiling as though I was trying to make it understand. It was an old seventies-style drop ceiling stained with watermarks from some accident of condensation or plumbing, which made it an interesting subject to stare at. The glow of the setting sun spilled in through our window and splashed orange checker marks across it. "I just don't get it. I mean, yeah, as you can imagine, after everything that's happened, I'm not exactly Wesley's biggest fan. But, you know, it's for the team. I can be a sport. I'm willing to put in the effort. Hell. I've been putting in the effort. We can learn to get along. At least, I would think so. If this thing doesn't work out, it sure as shit won't be my fault."

Sean had his sketchbook open in his lap, and he was covering a page with doodles of dogs with exaggerated, human eyebrows. "Yeah man, I hear you. I've been with you on every page of this story. You're not the one dropping the ball here. Uh. So to speak. Ha-ha. You think Wesley will go along with it?"

"I dunno, dude." I dragged my hands down my face and sighed into my palms. Trying to untangle the inside of Wesley's brain was giving me a headache. "He's obviously holding a grudge against me for something, but I have no idea what it is. Not for the life of me. And he wouldn't tell me, so maybe I'll never know. I never even met the guy before last week—I don't know what I could possibly have done to him that's so goddamn awful."

"You sure you never met him?" Sean drew a particularly surprised pair of brows on a bulldog. "Maybe you stepped on his favorite crayon and broke it in elementary school. Or maybe you knew each other in a past life. Maybe your parents knew his parents in a past life, and your parents won in a duel to the death, so now he's your sworn enemy according to the intergalactic code of honor."

I frowned at the ceiling, considering this. "I don't think it would be intergalactic unless he's also from another planet," I pointed out.

Sean made a triumphant stab in my direction with his pen. "Well, maybe that explains his behavior!"

I laughed, opening my mouth to reply when a knock on the door cut me off. My eyes met Sean's, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. "Maybe that's Patrick," he said hopefully.

"Yeah," I agreed. "Maybe."

Neither one of us believed that.

I got up and tugged open the door. Wesley leaned against the wall on the other side—arms folded, jaw clenched. Nothing had changed since that afternoon, except that his shoulders had a distinct slump of defeat to them. I couldn't tell if that made me happy or not.

"Well," I said tiredly. "Speak of the devil."