The first period is fast. Faster than I thought hockey would be. Boys hit each other into the boards, and it sounds like furniture breaking. A whistle blows every now and then, for reasons I do not yet understand, and through it all I’m vibrating with second-hand adrenaline.
Then comes the hit.
It comes out of a scrum along the boards, right in front of us — there’s a tangle of jerseys, a Briarhaven forward gets the puck, and a Raven closes on him and buries him into the glass. The student section erupts, my hand rushes to my mouth, and I jump to my feet.
The Raven who threw the hit skates a tight circle and coasts back toward the bench, head down and not looking at the crowd.I let my eyes stay on him longer than I mean to, and it feels like someone is fanning the embers of a fire I thought had died last year.
But I let myself look, because nobody’s watching.
Nobody except Ivy.
I drop my hand from my mouth. “What.”
“Nothing.”
“Ivy.”
She’s grinning as she follows my eyeline out onto the ice, where the Raven in question glides to the bench, taking his time, and then she laughs — one short note, fond, almost pitying — and wraps her arms around me tight.
“That’s Rowan,” she says. “My brother.”
I glance at him for one more second — helmet, visor, number, nothing that would help me pick him out of a lineup — then at her, and the look in my eyes must be a dead giveaway. On the ice, Ivy’s brother sits on the bench, while beside me his sister reads my face.
“Oh,” Ivy says, watching me.
“It’s nothing,” I say.
“Mm.”
She leaves it there, turning back to the game, chin on her wrist. On the jumbotron, the hit plays again in slow motion, and I watch my roommate’s brother drive a boy into the glass for the second time in a few seconds, and my body does exactly what it did the first time.
Ivy hums beside me, but I don’t ask why.
It takes fifteen minutes just to make our way out of The Den. As Ivy and I spill outside with the mass of humanity, a raggedchorus of the school fight song breaks out nearby. Nobody’s taught me the words, but — somehow? — Ivy knows them, and she blasts it out with her arm hooked through mine as we walk.
“Listen to me,” she says, when she’s done. “I need you to prepare.”
“For what?” I say.
“For the crushing disappointment of meeting my brother.”
“Ivy.”
“I’m serious.” She grabs my hand and pulls me to the side of the path, looking me square in the eye while others stream past. “I mean, I love him, but he’s the most insufferable person in our family, which is an extremely competitive field. He answers texts with one word. He alphabetizes things. He eats the same breakfast every single morning of his life.”
“He alphabetizes?” I grin. “I like him already.”
“No!” She’s serious now in that Ivy way that always lasts three seconds before she flips back into teasing. “And the rest of those hockey dorks will be in there with their chests out and their big fucking goofy grins because they won. So I just need you braced, Sloane. I need you to walk in with low expectations and promise not to hate me after the experience.”
“Ground floor expectations it is.” I laugh, not the big one, the manageable one.
“Lower. Basement.”
“Got it.”
We swing by Sterling to change first. I swap the cashmere blend for a more casual sweater, and Ivy changes out of her hoodie into a different hoodie that she insists is completely different, because it has a pocket. The detour takes forty-five minutes, and when we’re ready, we walk to Maple & Main, our go-to coffee shop.
The number of students has thinned out by now, but there’s still excitement in the air. A pack of boys in Ravens jerseysjogs past, whooping, one of them stage-bowing at Ivy like she’s royalty, which, given her brother threw that hit, she kind of is.
