"Ready for this?" he asked, and he went on ahead.

Neil remained behind for a few seconds longer to stare at their backs. He was starting to think Kevin wasn't his only problem at Palmetto State. It was almost a relief. Neil couldn't anticipate Kevin; he couldn't ask how much Kevin remembered about his past and he wouldn't know until too late what finally triggered Kevin into remembering him. But Andrew was just a psychotic midget, and Neil had grown up around violence. Handling him would be easy. Neil would just have to be careful.

"Ready," Neil said, and started after his teammates.

CHAPTER THREE

Neil spotted the Foxhole Court long before they made it to the stadium parking lot. Built to seat sixty-five thousand fans, it'd been placed on the outskirts of campus where it could tower over the shorter utilities buildings nearby. The paint job only made it stand out more: the walls were a blinding white with obnoxiously bright orange trim. A gigantic fox paw was painted on each of the four outer walls. Neil wondered how much it cost the university to build and how desperately they regretted the investment, considering the Foxes' miserable return.

They passed four parking lots before turning into a fifth. There were a couple cars already there, probably for maintenance staff or summer school students, but none were parked at the curb closest to the stadium. The stadium itself was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Gates were placed equidistant down the length of the fence for handling a game night crowd, and all of them were chained shut.

Neil went up to the fence and stared through it at the outer grounds. It was deserted now, the souvenir stands and food stalls boarded up until the season started again, but he could imagine what it'd look like in a couple months. It made every hair on his body stand on end, and his heartbeat echoing in his ears sounded like an Exy ball rebounding off a court wall.

Nicky clapped a hand to Neil's shoulder. "All the orange grows on you," he promised.

Neil twisted his fingers through the metal links and wished he could break the fence down. "Let me in."

"Come on," Nicky said, and led him down the fence.

They'd reached the end of the gates—they'd parked by 24, and the next was 1. Between the two gates was a narrow door sealed with an electronic keypad. The door led to a hallway that cut the outer grounds in two; whoever made it as far as gate 24 would have to go into the stadium and through the stands to reach gate 1. The others were waiting for Nicky and Neil outside that door. Aaron had brought the whiskey with him.

"This is our entrance," Nicky said. "Code changes every couple months, but Coach always lets us know when it does. Right now it's 0508. May and August, get it? Coach and Abby's birth months. Told you they were boning. When's your birthday?"