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“It’s freezing in here,” she mutters.

I look down at the ice, and Nash is looking up at me. The heat goes all the way through me, and I know I’m in deep shit.

When it’s done, we wait by the doors, because Koda told Paige to. The guys come out with wet hair and bags over their shoulders and faces still red from the cold. Nash comes out last, in a hoodie and joggers with his hair pushed back and still wet. He stops in front of me and looks me up and down once. “You’re not cold?”

I shake my head, the same heat filling me as I look up at him. “No.” How could I be?

“What’d you think?” he asks as we start walking.

“Like I was held here against my will and forced to watch men skate in circles for two hours, and the only interesting part was when Declan hit you into the wall.”

Something moves at the corner of his mouth. “You liked that.”

“I liked that he didn’t knock you over,” I say. “I didn’t like that you didn’t do it back.”

Nash looks at me for a second longer than he needs to.

I follow him out with Paige’s arm hooked through mine, and she doesn’t say one word the whole way across the parking lot. She squeezes my elbow every four steps, and I keep not looking at her.

22

The Hallway Is Too Short

Nash

Greeley stops talking to me the Monday after the party, and he doesn’t start again. Not in the locker room, not at study hall, not in the hallway outside Dannebrog’s office. He says good morning to everybody else. He laughs at Weber’s jokes, helps carry the pucks in, and asks Pennock about his knee. He’s four feet from me twice a day for nine days and has stopped acknowledging that I exist. I prefer it. No act, no show, not a single glance in my direction. Rafe thinks it means he’s planning something. I think it means he’s holding it for the day it’s worth the most. Either way, my guard is up.

October first is a Wednesday. Official practice opens at three-thirty, and by two-fifteen, the locker room is already full, which never happens. For five weeks, we’ve had captain’s skates where guys wander in ten minutes before and nobody cares. Today, everybody’s early. Everybody’s taped. There’s a printed sheet on the hallway whiteboard with the drill schedule minute by minute from 3:30 to 5:45, and four of us are standing in front of it reading it.

Coach Berwyn comes through at two-fifty with a clipboard and two assistants, says nothing to any of us, and shuts himself in his office. Koda taps his stick against my shin pad. “Ready?”

“You?”

“Fuck yeah.” He hits my ass with his stick on the way out.

Berwyn’s practice is nothing like Dannebrog’s. It’s the same ice and the same guys, and it doesn’t resemble anything we’ve done in five weeks. Everything is timed and on a whistle. There’s no standing around while somebody sets up pucks, because an assistant is already at the next station with the pucks set up. Twenty seconds between drills. The whole thing runs like a train, and Coach is everywhere, skating, correcting, writing things down.

“Barnes. Feet.”

“Waleska, that’s one touch. One.”

“Kennebeck, you’re talking. Keep talking.”

Forty minutes in, my legs are gone, and my lungs are on fire, and I’ve never been happier in my whole fucking life.

At four-twenty, he stops everything. “Centers. Down here. Everybody else, water.”

There are five of us: me, Greeley, Layous, who’s really a winger, a sophomore named Orr, and a freshman nobody’s seen much of. Berwyn sets up two pylons, a net, and an assistant at the half wall with a bucket.

“Low entry,” he says. “You swing low, the puck goes to the wall, you come back through the middle. I want you at the hash marks, not the top of the circle. Two defenders. You’ve got one read.”

I know this drill. I’ve done a version of it since I was eleven, in a driveway, then in a garage the winter I was fourteen, then in three different rinks. My dad told me on the phone a month ago that I’ve been coming in too high on it.

“Kennebeck. Greeley. You two first. Alternating.”

Same drill, same defenders, same rep, back-to-back, in front of the entire staff and twenty-two guys standing at the boards with water bottles. Nobody says anything.

Greeley goes first, and he’s good. He comes in low, gets the puck flat off the wall, and hits Koda coming across, clean. The assistant says, “Yep.”