I used to watch from the glass, from the box — close enough to study, far enough to stay safe. Tonight I’m wedged into the family section between Gianna and Lucy, with Melly leaning across both of them to steal Gianna’s popcorn. It’s loud and warm, and I belong here, out in the open, with nothing running underneath it.
That’s the part that still catches me. There’s nothing underneath it. Gianna knows everything — got it out of Benson weeks ago, apologized to me twice, never mentioned it again. Lucy knows everything; Lucy basically had it diagrammed before any of us did. And it doesn’t matter, because there’s no lie left to protect, no face to hold straight, no second track running under the friendship. They’re just my friends. Somewhere in the middle of the worst thing I ever did to myself, I accidentally got the one thing I never let myself have — and it turned out to have been real the whole time.
“He’s looking for you,” Gianna says, elbowing me, mouth full.
“He can’t see me. The lights are—”
“Number 11 is looking for you,” Lucy says, certain, not even glancing up from the ice.
My phone buzzes right before puck drop. My dad.
I brace for half a second out of pure muscle memory, and then I remember I don’t have to do that anymore. I open it.
Dad:Good luck tonight. Tell him to keep his feet moving in the third. He gets lazy when he’s up two.
I laugh out loud. Gianna gives me a look. Bart Linwood, ladies and gentlemen — constitutionally incapable of sending a normal good luck, legally required to smuggle a coaching note inside it. But it’s there underneath. The thing that was never there before, the warmth he’s finally figuring out how to say in the only dialect he’s got. We’re not fixed. It doesn’t get fixed in a phone call or a month of better ones. But he texts me now. Just to text me. And he means the thing under the hockey.
I write back.
Me:I’ll tell him. He says hi, by the way.
He hasn’t said hi. I just know it’ll make my dad do the gruff pleased thing he does when he can’t find the words for the soft stuff.
Dad:Good kid. Lazy in the third. Tell him.
I put the phone away, still smiling.
I sit back and watch my boyfriend play hockey.
The first time I saw him, every move was aimed outward — at the crowd, at the scouts, at the girl with the pen who refused to look impressed. A show. The dangle fancier than it needed to be, the grin that knew it was being watched. Armor, all of it, though I didn’t have the word for it yet. The difference is that tonight, he just plays. Clean, hard, and joyful.
He scores in the second. The section comes apart around me. And in the middle of all that noise, he turns and finds me.
He gleams when his eyes land on me. And that’s exactly how I know this is going to last. He winks at me, and I shake my head with a growing smile on my face. He waits for it. I press a hand flat to my chest like I can keep it in.
Gianna says, “Oh my God, the two of you,” around a mouthful of popcorn, and I do not care even slightly.
I get the whole story of the rule from Lucy, at the second intermission, because Lucy has decided I need the full history now that I’m officially one of them.
I knew of it.
That the Hawthorne House had rules. Written on a whiteboard in the kitchen. It was the law of the land. And rule one — rule one, top of the board — was no falling in love before the draft.
Lucy pulls out her phone, shows me a photo, and I have to bite down on my lip. The whiteboard. Rule one, scratched clean out, and underneath it, in what is unmistakably Rowan’s handwriting: RULE ONE (REVISED): don’t get caught fake-dating the coach’s daughter. Too late. RIP Ermington.
“They’re insufferable about it,” Lucy says, glowing. “Benson’s taking full credit. He says the whole thing was his master plan. He keeps calling it ‘the operation.’”
And it was, a little. I think about the four of them clearing out of their own house, twice. Benson herding me up the stairs to wait in Stanley’s room. The family-section seats that Lucy absolutely arranged. The plane trip that every one of them signed off on. A whole brotherhood quietly running a play to get their idiot golden boy the one thing he ever picked for himself, and collecting their victory lap now, smug and proud.
The golden kid who was never going to fall.Fallen.Proud of it. Nothing left to perform.
Late in the third period, Stanley keeps his feet moving, because I texted him at the first intermission that his favorite coach in the world says he gets lazy up two, and he texted back a single skull.
And I notice that the fear isn’t there. The thing that ran my entire adult life, the low constant hum of brace, watch, get outbefore it gets taken from you, the analyst posted at the back of every room I was ever happy in, waiting to be proven right that happiness is just a setup with a longer fuse. I’m sitting in the same section where I came apart a few weeks ago, where I sat among these exact girls and lied with my whole face while my chest caved in, and I check for it the way you check a sore tooth with your tongue.
It’s gone.
There’s just the game, and the cold, and the noise, and him, and me, here, unafraid.
