I don’t see any of it really. I see it like you see traffic out of the corner of your eye when you’re crossing a street toward someone you love.
When I look back, Melly is still staring at me.
So now we’re back to it. The thing we used to do. The thing that started in a hallway in tenth grade and has never really stopped, not even during the years we weren’t speaking — that stupid, unbearable game where I look at her and she looks at me, neither of us moves, neither of us breathes, and somehow in thesmall hot space between our faces a whole entire life happens. I could stare at her forever.
Benson grabs my shoulder. “Come on, lover boy.”
I snap, “Don’t.”
He laughs, but he doesn’t know. None of them know. Rowan made a joke about her once — about myghost, he said,the one Golding doesn’t talk about— and I told him to drop it, and he had, and that was the end of it. The boys of the Hawthorne House have always had suspicions. They didn’t have her name until she gave it to them. They don’t know the death grip that this girl has on my heart.
Benson pushes me away from the glass. Rowan pats my chest. I start skating backward, and I cannot make my eyes leave hers. He and Rowan loop back toward the bench. I follow them. My legs do it. My legs have been doing this on autopilot, and they don’t need my permission.
Something makes me glance over my shoulder. She’s turning to walk back to her seat.
The girls are crowded around Lucy, looking at the puck Benson threw.
Melly is the only one not looking.
She’s walking back to her seat with her hair brushed over one shoulder and the blue sweater isstaringat me. Blue staring at me like a flag, like a sign, like a small careful message like she picked blue on purpose.
I’m supposed to be skating to the bench. I’m supposed to be doing my final warmup loop with Walker. I’m supposed to be in the chute with my helmet down, my mind narrow, and my body ready for forty seconds from now when the puck drops.
Instead, my feet turn.
I skate back to the glass.
I don’t decide this. Some older version of me decides it. The version who used to tell her to stop staring at me, who oncewould purposely stand in her line of sight just to see if she still cared, and the version of me who felt empty in college when I realized what I had lost. He decides for me. He takes the wheel. He says,No, we are not skating away from her, we have skated away from her enough for one lifetime, we are going back.
I have my stick in my left hand.
I raise it.
I tap the plexiglass with the heel of it. Once. Twice. Sharp. The kind of knock that echoes across the arena.
The girls turn.
Melly turns.
She stops mid-step. Her hand is on the back of the seat she was about to drop into, and her whole body goes still. She looks at me like she cannot believe her eyes. Like she cannot believe I would risk it publicly. Like she knows exactly what kind of trouble I am about to be in, and she is already a little bit angry on my behalf.
I gesture with my glove.
Come here.
She blinks. Once. Slow.
And then she walks fast. I see her mouth move, and even through the noise and the plexiglass, I can read it.
Blue, what’re you doing?
She puts her hands flat against the glass. Fingers spread. Small pale fingers I have held and felt pressed against my chest.
Coach barks my name from the bench. “Golding!”
I don’t look at the bench. I’ll think about the bench later.
Right now, there is a girl with her hands against the glass, her hair coming down a little on one side, and she is holding her breath.
