Me: Good luck. Be a good boy. No fights.
Blue: Only for you.
I laugh.
Mila looks up and asks, “What?”
“Blue’s promising not to fight.”
“The man is whipped.”
I laugh.
“He is whipped, Melly.” She turns back to her little mirror and shakes her head. “If you had told me a year ago, two years ago, five years ago that he would be your boyfriend, I wouldn’t believe it.”
I look at her on the floor of my bedroom. “Yeah.”
I smile.
The game is loud. Apparently, the team that they’re playing has been a thorn in Coach Fuller’s side for three years. The rink is full, and the family section is full. Lucy is in her usual seat in the navy hoodie she has been wearing since October, and Gianna is next to her in a Wolves beanie that has become her signature item. Mila is on my other side in her own Wolves beanie that Gianna lent her.
The puck drops. We scream for the boys hitting the puck across the rink, jumping to our feet at the right times. Gianna is the loudest, screaming at the guys every time they do something she doesn’t like.
The Wolves win four to two.
Blue plays his line. He doesn’t fight or take a single penalty. He skates clean, smart, fast, and at one point in the second period, he back-checks a forward all the way to the blue line and breaks up the rush by stick-lifting him. Coach yelled that’s hockey, Golding, that’s the hockey we want from the bench so loud I could hear him in the family section. And I am embarrassingly proud of my boyfriend.
At one point in the second period, the Jumbotron camera pans across the family section. I’m on the screen for half a second. The crowd cheers, mildly, in the small generic family-section girlfriend on the screen way they cheer.
Gianna howls.
“Mel. Mel. You are on the Jumbotron!”
“Gianna.”
Lucy yells, “Melly!”
Mila shouts, “Melly! Melly!”
I bury my face in my hands.
The girls laugh.
I keep my face in my hands for a count of five, and I let myself laugh into my own palms, and I am — for the first time in my life — the girl who is on the jumbotron because she is the second-line winger’s girlfriend, and I do not, in any of the laughing, hate it.
I am Blue Golding’s girlfriend.
The girls walk out of the rink with me. It’s cold in the lot. The crowd is filtering out around us. The cars are starting to fill the family parking. Lucy peels off first because Benson has textedher from the locker room, and Lucy is gone. She hugs me on the way past.
Gianna peels off next. She has an eight AM class.
Mila and I are alone in the lot.
She’s walking on my left, hands in her coat pockets, beanie pulled down over her ears. The crowd noise is fading. We parked at the far end of the family lot because Mila’s car is here too — she drove separately because she had to drop something off at her own apartment first. We stop at her car.
She stares at the asphalt, then she lifts her head. She looks at me. “I was wrong about him.”
I stop breathing.
