Coach says something under his breath I cannot hear.
The three of us skate to the glass.
Lucy is standing near the plexiglass in Benson’s Camden U hoodie. She’s grinning at Benson as he approaches like agirl who knew he was going to do something stupid and has prepared for it. Gianna is next to her in a Wolves jersey with her arms folded and her what now face on, and next to Gianna —
I see Mila, and that’s when my mind goes into a frenzy. Because where there is Mila, there is Melly. Where one is, so is the other.
And next to Mila —
The world tilts.
My stick stops moving. The puck on my blade rolls off and clatters against the boards, and I don’t pick it up.
She’s here.
Melly is here.
She’s wearing a blue sweater the exact shade of her eyes — the shade I have spent two years trying to forget — and her hair is half-up, half-down. The way she has worn it since she was fourteen. The way she wore it the first time I noticed she had good lips. She’s laughing at something Mila said, and her head is tilted back just a little, exposing the long pale line of her throat. I’ve kissed that throat. I have pressed my mouth right there, right where her pulse goes, and felt it kick against my lips like something trying to get out.
I knew she might be here. The girls have been bringing her around Hawthorne like they’re all best friends now. And I told myself I was prepared for the time when she’d transfer here. I had spent the entire two years telling myself I was prepared. I had decided I would treat her the way you treat a girl you used to know, a girl who used to know you back, a girl whose name you don’t say out loud anymore because saying it does something to the inside of your mouth.
I was so fucking prepared.
I was not prepared for this.
I was not prepared for her in blue.
She’d said she was keeping her distance. That was the last thing she told the guys — that she highly doubted they’d see her around — and I had leaned on that. I thought the dignity of her absence was the gift she was giving me. I thought I was supposed to be grateful for it. I thought the rule of the next two years was simple: she stays on her side of the campus, I stay on mine, and if we pass on the quad, we pretend the air between us is not made out of everything we were.
But here she is.
Twenty feet away.
Behind a quarter-inch of plexiglass that suddenly feels like the only thing keeping me upright.
She turns her head and looks right at me.
And it is — it is that look that has been living rent-free in the back of my skull for two years, the one I see right before I fall asleep, the one I have tried to replace with other looks from other girls and never could because none of them know how to look at me like that. None of them ever could. None of them have those piercing blue eyes that tear right through me.
Her lips pull shyly. The corner of her mouth is lifting, like she’s trying not to let me see it and failing. The kind of smile she used to give me across the gymnasium in tenth grade when she didn’t know I was looking. Except I was always looking. That was the secret of those years — I was always looking, and she never knew, and somehow she smiled at me anyway, like her body knew before either of us did.
She mouths two words.
Good luck.
Something cracks open in my chest.
I don’t know how else to describe it. There’s a sound in my head like a frozen lake giving way under boots, that deep, complaining groan of ice deciding it’s done being ice. My ribs feel hot. My ribs feel cold. The cavity behind my sternum goeslight and then heavy, and then I forget — actually, genuinely forget — where I am. What I’m supposed to be doing. Why I’m even here.
All of it goes.
What stays is her.
Her in blue. Her with the tilted head. Her mouthinggood luckthrough a wall of plastic like she has any right to wish me anything after what I did to her — and the worst part, the part that scrapes, is that she still does. She still wishes me well. Of course she does. That is who she is. That is who she has always been. I broke her heart in five different ways across the span of knowing each other, and she’s standing in my rink inmyfucking color, wishing me luck like the world is still good.
The world is not. Mine hasn’t been good in a long time.
I look down and see Benson drop to one knee. His face is below the glass, but Lucy doesn’t care. She’s smiling down at him, and he’s smiling up at her, and there’s something so easy about them, something so uncomplicated and bright. And I think,I had that. I could’ve had that but I bullied her and ignored her and told her I didn’t want it.Benson stands, plays around with the puck, and knocks it over the glass. The crowd hollers. Lucy shrieks. Gianna laughs. Mila claps her hands. Benson grins like an idiot and blows a kiss through the plexiglass.
