Page 265 of Slashed Bonds

Three wins in a row and a shadow scrimmage that went four-one, and Halloran stood in the room yesterday with his hands in his jacket and said, Two days. Don’t skate. Don’t lift. Don’t look at tape. If I see one of you at the rink before Monday I’ll make you watch Ashford’s second period on a loop until you cry. And Roz, beside him, added, Monday’s the Civic. Nine a.m. Neutral ice, nobody’s skated it, we get it for two hours before they do. Sleep.

So this is sleep. This is what the Blackridge Vipers do with a weekend and a fresh tattoo and no adult supervision. Twenty-two people in a parking lot behind a grocery store because the twins wanted pickles again and Greenie needed shuttlecocks and nobody could agree on whose house, so we never left.

The first time. That’s what this is. The first time the whole team’s been together to do something that isn’t practice. Eight weeks of ice and a funeral and a flooded ring, and this is the first time we’ve stood in a group and been stupid on purpose.

It’s bonding. I’ll say it. Whatever Roz’s clipboard calls it, this is the thing that makes twenty-two bodies into one animal on a sheet, and it’s happening between a cart corral and a sign that says RETURN CARTS HERE.

Okonkwo’s teaching Pruitt to juggle with three limes from the produce section and failing. Dubois has his lip split from Okonkwo’s stick yesterday and is drinking a frap through the good side of his mouth and narrating our badminton like a broadcaster, with a hand cupped over an imaginary mic. Marchetti, who hasn’t said four words to me in eight weeks, is sitting on the curb with Knox’s leash looped around his wrist, because Knox decided an hour ago that Marchetti was the person in this lot most in need of a dog, and Marchetti’s been scratching behind the ears of eighty pounds of pomsky with a face like a man who’s lost an argument and doesn’t mind.

Marchetti. The one who took the slash against Ashford. The one who looked at me wrong in a kitchen and nearly got Nikolai thrown out of school. Sitting with my dog. Knox knows something I don’t.

Twenty-two. I counted. Twenty-one and a space where a cereal bowl used to be, and nobody’s said his name today, and everybody’s thinking it, and the not-saying is its own kind of keeping.

A cart rattles across the asphalt.

Greenie. Pushing it at a jog, green hair out of the beanie now and standing up in the wind, and he brings it to a stop in front of Maddie with a small bow, like a man presenting a carriage.

“Hop on.”

She stares at him.

“You think I’m getting in a cart,” she says, slowly, “and letting you drive it, when you drive like a maniac on a NASCAR track in that Hellcat?”

“Did you die?”

“That’s not the⁠—“

“Did you die, though.”

“No, but⁠—“

He reaches into his jacket and comes out with a bag of Sour Patch Kids. Family size. Holds it up between two fingers.

“To be safe,” he says, with the biggest grin I’ve ever seen on a man who posts everything and films nothing anymore, “I brought a bribe.”

She gawks at him.

A full two seconds of gawk. Then she’s skipping. Across the asphalt, pink boots, hands out.

“CANDY!”

“This bitch would be the first to get fucking kidnapped.”

Viper, from the hood of Killian’s Mercedes, where she’s sitting cross-legged with her Fujifilm up to her eye. The instant kind, the one that spits a square of film out the top, and she finishes the frame she’s taking, of Maddie climbing into a cart with a bag of candy in her teeth, and lowers it and pulls the photo and shakes it the way you’re not supposed to.

I laugh. I look over.

“I know you’re thriving on the inside,” I hum at her, “even with that resting bitch face.”

She rolls her eyes.

But there’s a smirk trying to happen under the black lipstick, and she’s taming it badly, and she turns the camera on me and takes one before I can put my hand up, and the film comes out, and she doesn’t shake that one. She tucks it in her jacket.

She’s got a wall somewhere. I’d put money on it. A wall of squares of us she’d rather die than show anyone.

We keep playing.

Nikolai’s on my team. He insisted, on the grounds that he’s the only one who can be trusted not to hit me with a racket, which is a lie, he’s hit me twice. Cassian and Killian are across the net, and the net sags in the middle where it’s tied to the carts, and the lovebirds are duking it out over it with insults instead of shots.