Page 122 of The Locker Room
could think of, to try to stump the other, but she"d won in the end. She
traced the word she"d guessed, “duplicitous,” and looked up at him with
more understanding than he wanted to see.
“Tell them you got laid,” he said gruffly. “Tell them to piss off, tell
them whatever you feel like—but don"t let them push you into doing
something dumb like this again, okay, Audrey?”
Audrey stood up and threw her arms around his waist in a fierce
hug. “You"re awesome, Xander. I promise.”
And then he was gone, walking back across the freeway in the
dark, because Arco Arena and Chris were only a fifteen-minute jog
away.
The night was cold, and Xander drew his trench coat and his scarf
tight around his neck and ears, wondering dismally if the fog and the
damp were going to give him a cold. Probably, he"d seemed to be a lot
more susceptible to things like that in the middle of the season, and he"d
played sick so often, Leo had stopped alerting the media. It didn"t matter.
He put his gloves on and tucked his hands in his pockets, enjoying the
smell of the fog under the pink sodium lights and the sounds of the
streets, as he walked the same route from Audrey"s apartment that he and
Chris used to walk to school.
He passed the school, looking lonely in its night island of city-
funded light, and then took his life in his hands (twice!) to cross in front
of the on-ramp and the off-ramp in order to get across the overpass,
because in this community, someone had to die before they made traffic
intersections safer for pedestrians.
If Chris hadn"t been waiting at the locker room, Xander might have
hoped that he"d be that statistic, but Chris was there, so he tried not to
dwell on it.
The Locker Room 105
Something had just given, something vital in their little bubble of
