AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Me: I heard about Justine last week.
Starry Skies: Saw her not more than two weeks ago and she was so excited. No battles with anxiety or depression that I often see. She was happy about her new-found fame and bubbly about what was to come. No picking at scabs like a junkie or shaking on pills to lose weight like most either.
Me: If you hear anything else, keep me posted.
Starry Skies: Yeah, now you get the police to give a damn.
I flopped back against the sofa. How could I prove that they weren’t killing themselves when police already labeled their deaths a suicide?
While I wanted to keep following the story today, I couldn’t. I had to get back to the articles that paid the bills. My time to devote head space to non-paying endeavors was limited if I was going to pay my rent.
After two hours of concentration, prolific swearing, and copious amounts of sweat, I sent the idiotic article to my editor at Fresh Faces magazine. Good riddance. Within a few minutes, my email chimed with my next assignment. Lip Gloss Wars. Why couldn’t he ask me for something more substantive?
As I thought more about my call with Ransom, I wondered if he was right. Was I stuck in a fashion-sized rut in Manhattan? Maybe I needed to try something different, get back to my journalistic roots, and find something worth writing about again. Something that didn’t involve lip gloss.
Me: It’s official, Chief. Send the plane for me.
Ransom: Hell, yeah.
That settled it. Tomorrow, I’d be in Taylor Ridge. Closer to nature. Pulling clean fall air into my lungs and tromping through tons of snow. Staying with my best friend who I was totally in love with, but pretending I wasn’t. Regrouping. Deciding what I wanted to do next and finding it inside of myself to be brave enough to make some needed changes in my life.
2
RANSOM
Pushing out onto the ice, I warmed up with some laps. When I was alone like this, it reminded me of the peace I felt standing at the water’s edge in Washington State. When I lived in Seattle, as soon as I had my license I often took the two-hour drive to Ocean Shores to enjoy the surfing there. Cold water. Birds squawking overhead. Biting wind. Waves crashing on the shore. The only other time I felt that rush was in making the first scratches across the ice. Listening to my skates bite the surface. Flying across the space without distractions. The wind in my hair. Alone.
“Hey, Pierce!” Calder shouted.
My head dropped in disappointment and I stopped in front of him. He was a friend, a teammate, but he was always interrupting my solitude. Pushing at one of my leather bands, I tried not to sound as annoyed as I felt. “Hey, man, what’s up?”
He rubbed the back of his neck, staring at his skates. “Could we run that drill Molly’s been pushing? The Finnish? I’m still shit at talking on the ice.”
Molly was Ilya Panchenko’s stepdaughter and teenage hockey whisperer. With her insight, we’ve improved exponentially individually and as a team.
I nodded, knowing I was still struggling with it too. “We all are.”
He grinned. “I have a couple guys coming to practice. Let’s give it another shot.”
As I headed for the locker room, I rounded up a couple defenders. Wasn’t going to get much more time to myself anyway, it seemed.
Back out on the ice, the forwards were already warming up. We joined them with a couple laps around the rink, then set things up to work. The whole purpose of the Finnish was to encourage communication between us on the ice. Problem was, all we could hear was the scraping of our skates and stick.
Calder ground to a stop. “Guys, we’re not talking. Molls said we have to talk.”
Nope, still silent.
“Maybe it won’t feel so forced if we’re going backward,” I suggested.
The other guys grunted what sounded like agreement. When we started going backward, we compensated by moving quickly out of each other’s way.
Kole threw his stick to the ice in frustration. “Who can do this shit?”
I understood the frustration. We were spinning our wheels making absolutely no progress.
Two forwards, Ilya and Chris, came out to help.
We all took our places on the ice, then watched Ilya and Chris practice around us. But instead of full sentences or anything, it was more short bursts, called opportunities when there was too much pressure and the puck needed to be passed.
