Page 27

Margo

Beau roped us into the Burlington trip, so I guess I’ll see you commit felonies on ice or whatever it is you do.

Light. Deniable. Classic her. And I sat in my room and read it four times and felt something stupid and warm crack open in my chest, because here’s the thing I haven’t said to her and won’t: I want her there.

I want her in that building tonight. I want to know she’s watching. I’ve played in front of scouts and strangers and my own silent phone for years and never once cared who was in the seats, and now there’s exactly one person I want in them, and she’ll be there, pretending she came for Beau, and I’ll be pretending I don’t know she didn’t.

And here’s the part that’s worse, the part I’ve really never said: I want to see her do it too. Her sport. Whatever it is she becomes eleven feet in the air — she told me once she doesn’t trust anyone but the version of herself that flies, and I’ve been chewing on that for weeks. April. Nationals. Daytona. I’m not going to be there; there’s no world where I’m at a cheer competition in Florida in the middle of the draft run. But God, I want to see it. I want to watch Margo Ashby be the best in the country at the one thing that isn’t managed, and I haven’t told her, because telling her would mean admitting I’ve been thinking three months down a calendar that’s supposed to end in six weeks.

The bus turns off the highway. Burlington’s lights come up through the trees.

I put my hood down. Game head. The rest of it goes in the box where it lives.

Their rink is loud before we’ve even got our skates on — you can hear it through the wall of the visitors’ room, the student section already going, nine thousand people’s worth of small-town Saturday funneled into two thousand seats and a pep band that only knows three songs. Good. I like a hostile barn. It’s honest. Everybody in that building wants us to lose, and there’s a clarity in that I don’t get anywhere else in my life.

We’re most of the way dressed when Beau comes through, working the room the way he does — a word here, a knuckle to a helmet there, the captain’s rounds — and he stops longest at the far end, where River Callahan is lacing up like his skates personally wronged him.

River’s a freshman. Eighteen, all elbows and speed, hands like he was born holding a stick and a head that hasn’t caught up to the hands yet. He’s the most talented kid on this team and he doesn’t know it, or knows it and doesn’t trust it, which is worse. And Beau’s decided River is his project this year — the season Beau can’t play, he’s pouring into the kid instead, and it’s the least surprising thing about Beau and the thing I respect most.

“Hey.” Beau crouches by him, bad arm and all. “You’re gripping the stick like it owes you money. Loose hands. You already know what to do, so stop thinking and let your hands do it.” A beat. “Their D-man on the right side drops his shoulder before he pinches. Every time. You’ll see it. When you do, you go, and you don’t look back, and you make him wish he’d stayed home.”

River nods, too fast, eyes huge.

“You belong here,” Beau says, quiet, just for him. “Play like it.”

And the kid sits up an inch, and I watch it land, and something goes through me sideways and sour that I don’t examine too hard. Because that — what Beau just did, the building-somebody-up — nobody ever did that for me. I built myself, in the gap, alone, out of spite and my mother’s double shifts. It works. I’m good. But I watch Beau hand River Callahan a thing I never got handed, and I feel the shape of the hole where it should’ve been, and then I lace my skates tighter and put that away too, because the box is getting crowded and it’s almost puck drop.

Beau catches my eye on his way out. “You good?”

“I’m good.”

“She’s here, you know.” Mild. Nothing in his face. “Margo. Section up behind our bench. Case you were wondering.”

I don’t say anything. I don’t have anything that isn’t a tell.

Beau’s mouth does the twitch. “Cool. Just, you know. Passing along team information.” And he’s gone before I can decide whether he knows or is just fishing, which is exactly how Beau likes to leave a room.

During warmups, I find her without meaning to.

Section 108, six rows up behind our bench, wedged between Sloane and June with a Ravens beanie on that is definitely Sloane’s, holding a paper cup of something hot in both hands. She’s not looking at me. She’s very deliberately not looking at me, watching the other end of the ice with the studied casualness of a woman who knows exactly where I am and refuses to prove it, and it makes me want to laugh in a way I haven’t since I was a kid.

I don’t wave. Obviously. We’re nothing to each other in public, that’s the whole deal. I just do one lap of my crease and let myself have three seconds of knowing she’s there, and then I put my head down and go to work.

And I play a better first period because of her. That’s the truth I’ll never tell her. There’s a shift, early, where I step up at the blue line and separate their big winger from the puck with a hit that puts him on the ice and the whole visiting-team-hostile barn groans, and some animal part of me knows she saw it, and I skate back to the bench with my blood up in a way that’s got nothing to do with hockey.

It’s a war out there, the way these games always are. UVM’s fast and mean and they’ve got the crowd, and we trade the first two periods blow for blow — Wyatt buries one on a rebound in the first, they answer on a power play, we go into the third tied at one and both benches know it’s going to come down to who wants it more and who makes the last mistake. My legs are heavy. My knuckles are split inside my glove from a scrum I don’t fully remember. This is the part of a game I love the most, the part where everybody’s tired and it stops being about skill and starts being about who’s willing to pay.

I’m on the bench, chest heaving, when Coach leans down between me and Wyatt during the line change and says it low, right in my ear, so it doesn’t carry.

“Mercer. Bruins scout, upper bowl, blue jacket. He’s here for you.”

And the whole rink goes quiet in my head.

Here’s what that sentence does to a person.

The Bruins. Not a scout — the scout, the one wearing the crest of the exact team that’s been the shape of every plan I’ve made since I was seven years old and my mom took me to the Garden on a night we couldn’t afford it and I decided, right there, that I was going to get us out this way. My team. The one that gets her off her feet and me off my father’s money in one signature. And he drove up to a barn in Vermont to watch me, tonight, this third period, this tied game, this exact eighteen minutes of my life.

For one second, the pressure of it is so big I can’t breathe around it. Everything I want, sitting in a blue jacket in the upper bowl, watching. One bad shift. One turnover, one dumb penalty, one moment where I let the dangerous thing through, and the door I’ve been clawing at my whole life just — closes. Quiet. No slam. Just gone.