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Tessa shakes her head. One shoulder comes up. I can read the word from down here. It’s only got the one syllable.

No.

Kylie looks back down at me. She asks something else, and Tessa says it again, and this time there’s the corner of a smile on it, like the question is sweet. Like I’m a stranger who’s gotten lost.

The linesman blows his whistle at me. It’s the second time.

I’m on the hash before I remember skating there. Kennebeck’s over the dot. The Rubin winger across from me is saying something through his mouthguard about my mouth or my mother or my hair, I can’t tell, and I’m not listening, because there’s a sound in my ears like a blade on a grinding wheel and it’s louder than him.

The puck drops. Kennebeck wins it back, and it goes into the wall, and the wall eats it. Sticks and skates and two Rubin jerseys and me, everybody leaning, nobody moving. Three seconds of nothing. A stick comes up under my arm into my ribs. Somebody’s elbow.

Kennebeck comes out of the pile with the puck, and nobody else does. He takes off up ice, and I’ve got the nearest Rubin jersey by the collar before he clears the blue line.

It’s fast and ugly, and I don’t feel any of it.

I get one good shot in before everybody gets there. My glove catches him high, and his helmet shifts sideways. He shakes his gloves off to come back at me, and then somebody lands on my back. Another body crashes into my shoulder. I go down to one knee under the weight of it and keep trying to get at whatever’s in front of me.

The whistles are going. The building is on its feet. That underwater feeling is back, except now it’s good. Now it’s exactly what I wanted.

Barnes is yelling in my ear. Kennebeck comes back from wherever he took the puck and rips a Rubin kid off my shoulders by the back of his jersey. I get halfway upright and reach for the next guy before a linesman gets both arms around my chest.

“Enough, Waleska.”

Another official gets between us. They shove me toward our bench while everybody keeps jawing over their shoulders.

The ref points at me. “Two. Roughing.”

Then he points at the Rubin kid whose gloves are lying on the ice and sends him down the tunnel.

Berwyn doesn’t say a word. He just points toward the box.

I skate over and step inside. The door shuts behind me.

Two minutes.

I sit down with my elbows on my knees and stare at the rubber floor. I don’t look up. I know exactly where she’s sitting, and my hands clench.

Tessa Canten is at Woodbury.

The thought lands harder now that there’s nothing in front of me to hit.

She told me she’d withdraw.

I made her say it.

Verbal confirmation.

I’ll withdraw.

She lied straight to my face.

And I walked down those stairs and never thought about it again. I didn’t check. One phone call would have done it, and it never once occurred to me to make it, because people do what I tell them to.

The crowd swells around me. Somebody bangs on the glass behind my head. I don’t move.

She’s here.

Not in town. Not visiting. Not somebody’s guest who happened to end up in the student section.