Page 5

Rubin scores late in the first off Pennock’s skate. Wyatt gets it back early in the second on a rebound their goalie loses under his own pad. One–one. Against Rubin. On a Tuesday.

None of it touches me.

Eight minutes into the second, I put a shot off a Rubin stick and over the glass behind their net.

The whistle goes. The faceoff stays in the zone, on my side. The linesman goes looking for a fresh puck, and everybody does what you do with forty free seconds. Kennebeck’s at the dot already, bent over with his hands on his knees, breathing through his mouthguard. Barnes takes the chance to get a drink at the bench. I drift back along the boards under the student section with my stick in one hand and turn slow circles so my legs don’t set up.

I don’t look at the stands. There’s never been anybody in a student section worth turning my head for.

I look because Kennebeck’s girlfriend is loud. A laugh comes up out of her whole body, and I’ve heard it through my own pillow enough nights that my head turns before I decide anything. She’s a few rows up with her hands over her mouth. Kenzie’s beside her, saying something with her arm. Bianca’s got her phone up, filming something. Paige has her arms crossed––Barnes can have fun with that.

And two seats down from Kylie, there’s a girl sitting while the rest of them stand.

She has her coat zipped to her chin and her sleeves pulled down over her hands. Her hair is down over one shoulder. Flat, ordinary brown hair.

My skates stop before I tell them to. Not a hockey stop, nothing with any snow in it. I’m standing at the bottom of the glass with my stick hanging off one glove.

It can’t be her.

That’s the first thing my head does, and it’s a stupid thing for it to do, because I was sure from the way she’s sitting, straight up and very still with her knees together. Four years I’ve had to see this girl sit like that at the end of a lunch table. I’d know the shape of it from a mile away.

It’s her.

Tessa Canten is sitting in the student section at Woodbury. Two seats down from my roommate’s girlfriend. In October. Like she belongs here. Like she’s allowed to fucking be here.

She’s fucking here.

The noise in the building drowns out, and the cold comes up off the ice into my shins. My hands have gone strange inside my gloves. My chest is doing something to my lungs I didn’t give it permission to do.

I’m pissed. That’s what this is.

Good. I know what to do with pissed.

Little Tess isn’t looking at me. She’s looking at the ice. Not at the play, because there isn’t one. Not at Kennebeck on the dot or the linesman jogging back with the puck. At a patch of nothing in the neutral zone, flat and steady. Every other face in that row is turned toward something, and hers is turned toward nothing, and it happens to be in the exact opposite direction of me.

She knows I’m here. My name is across my back in letters as tall as her hand. There’s nobody alive who’s ever been better at knowing where I am than Tessa Canten. I’m standing thirty feet below her in the middle of a game, and she doesn’t look at me.

For four years, I’ve decided when she looks at me. Look at me. Don’t look at me. Eyes down. I’ve never had to say any of it twice.

I tap my stick against the glass. Once. Flat. Not hard enough for anybody to call it anything.

The whole row hears it. Kylie’s hands come down off her mouth. Bianca lowers her phone. Paige looks down at me.

Tessa doesn’t move. Her eyes stay exactly where they are, on the exact same nothing, and something hot climbs up the back of my throat from somewhere under my pads and sits there.

She fucking heard it, and she decided I wasn’t worth the turn of her head.

Kylie looks at me. Then she follows where I’m looking, past Kenzie, past Paige, two seats down, and stops. Then she looks back at me, and there’s a little line between her eyebrows that I’ve watched her get on Kennebeck’s bed when he tells her she’s wrong about something.

She’s reading me. Kennebeck’s girlfriend is reading me through a sheet of glass in front of a section full of people, and I’m standing still in the middle of a game, letting her do it.

I watch her lean over. I watch her mouth make the shape of the name.

Tessa turns. And her face—

Her face is fine. Her face is easy. She tilts her head at Kylie with her eyebrows up, a little open, a little patient.

Kylie says something else. Her eyes drop to me while she says it.