I open it.
Five seconds. Just to see what he sent. Just to know.
It’s the broadcast cut from Friday — Friday, the night I took the stick, which is its own little needle — trimmed clean and tight, his shifts strung together from the angle behind the bench. And I watch, and I keep waiting for it, the reason a man like him would send a girl a tape. It must be the reaction shot. Me in row three, frozen, white-knuckling my phone while he drew in the air at me. The humiliation, served back to me on a platter, for your reports.
It never comes.
Every shot of the crowd on the blue-line side has been cut. Every angle that would’ve caught row three is gone. He didn’t send me the tape of my worst thirty seconds. He went through and took me out of it, on purpose, and left only the hockey.
I watch forty seconds of clean, anonymous footage and then I close it and lie there staring at the ceiling.
Because that’s the third one now. The closet he didn’t push past. The photo he set down gently. And now a tape withme carefully, deliberately edited out of it — a small, quiet, infuriating consideration dressed up as a taunt, and I do not know what to do with a single one of them, because none of them belong to the man I thought he was.
I have no idea what to do about the damn stick. If I give it back, it looks like I came to collect the reward, and I would rather die in this bed than let him think I wanta moment of his time.I roll my eyes. He knows how to take a situation and make it worse.
At midnight, I’m still awake, so I get up. I cross to the desk in the dark. I pick up the top poster. His smirk. Last seen Friday night, Camden Arena. Reward: a moment of my time.
I take a Sharpie out of the desk drawer, and I uncap it, then across his perfect, laminated face, in block letters I can press hard enough to feel, I write two letters.
NO.
I put it back on top of the stack.
And I go to sleep.
Chapter 9
Stanley
Lucy shows up at the house at three on Monday with her laptop under one arm and a good attitude. And I’m ready for it. I have my own book open on the kitchen table on the Aristotle chapter. I’ve highlighted things I bypassed the first time. Anything less than an A for a random elective for my senior year is a hard no.
“Okay.” Lucy turns my book to face her. “Walk me through what you read.”
I tell her everything, show her the quiz I failed, and I wince every time I look at the grade.
“Close,” she says. “But the virtue isn’t the feeling. Try again.”
I try again.
She sits back. “Stanley. You know you can do this, right?”
I put a finger to my mouth and grin. “Don’t tell anyone.”
We work for forty minutes, give or take. And the strange part is that I’m just doing it. Reading the lines. Asking when I don’t follow. There’s a joke somewhere in me about Aristotle being aguy who clearly never had to backcheck, and I don’t reach for it. It stays where it is.
Lucy’s explaining how Aristotle figured virtue isn’t a thing you feel, it’s a thing you do, over and over, until you’re the kind of person who does it without choosing to anymore — we are what we repeatedly do — and I get it instantly, all the way down, because that’s the rink. That’s the tape job. That’s ten thousand reps until your hands know the save before your head does. You don’t decide to be good in the third period. You already decided, months ago, every morning you laid your gear out in the same order.
“That’s it,” Lucy says, watching me. “That’s exactly it.”
“Huh.” I look at the page. “He’s not wrong.”
She’s looking at me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m grand, Lucy girl.” It’s out before she finishes the question.
“You’re being ––” she shrugs. “Quiet.”
I give her a smile. I feel it not reach the top of my face. “I’m trying to graduate, Luce. I’m G.”
