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“I didn’t say that,” I say.

The corner of his mouth goes all the way up. All the way. I’ve never seen it go all the way up.

Then he drops the puck back on the ice and skates off backward, toward Lucas and the other guys, still looking at me.

I stand in his mother’s skates, holding my arms out a little for balance, and I don’t know what to do with my face.

I skate around while they play.

Then more cars come.

By two, there are eleven guys on the ice and a real game going, three on three, then four on four, with Lucas yelling about whose turn it is in goal and nobody listening. I get off the ice when it gets real and sit by the fire in a folding chair with a blanket somebody left on it, and watch.

Girls come, too. In twos and threes. Down the slope from the farmhouse in big coats and boots with fur around the tops, carrying thermoses and bags of marshmallows, calling out to guys on the ice. I know some of their faces. Not their names. Faces from the hallway. From the center tables.

And then a white SUV pulls in at the end of the line, and the passenger door opens, and Emma Cole gets out.

She hasn’t changed. Blonde, longer now, in a cream coat with a fur hood. Her green eyes are bright. She slams the door, calls something back into the car, and laughs, and the sound carries across the snow to the fire.

My stomach drops. Suddenly, I’m colder. My shoulders come up around my ears. My hands go tight on the blanket. And for half a second, I’m fifteen, at the end of a lunch table, watching her laugh at something, waiting to see which way she’s going to look.

Then I stop myself. I think about my friends. Not just Payton and Elsie, but Kylie, Paige, and Kenzie. Kylie would tell me to keep my head up. Paige would say fuck that bitch. And I immediately realize that it’s okay. I’m okay.

Rafe is thirty feet away on the ice, chirping Lucas Palinski about his skating.

I don’t need him to come over here. I don’t need anybody to come over here.

I let my shoulders down. I let go of the blanket.

Emma comes down the slope with two other girls. She sees the ice first, and her eyes go across it, and I watch them find him. They stay there for a long moment. I’m well aware of the effect Rafe has on people, and she’s not going to be immune. They dated. Then I think she finally sees me because she stops walking.

I ignore her, but I can feel her blazing eyes on the side of my face like she’s trying to put together why I’m here. Just like Lucas did. I straighten my spine and watch the guys.

“Tessa Canten,” she says. “I thought that was you.”

I look up at her.

“Hi, Emma,” I say kindly. I don’t flinch. I just say hi, the way you say hi to anybody.

She looks at my hat, my coat, my boots, which are my grandma’s old snow boots that are ugly. Then she lands on my face.

“Wow,” she says. “I haven’t seen you since—graduation, I guess.”

She sits down in the chair next to mine. Her friends sit down on the other side of the fire. One of them is Brianna Hale, who sat next to me in chemistry junior year and never once said a word to me. The other one I don’t know.

The guys keep playing. The puck cracks off a stick. Somebody yells. The fire pops.

And it’s quiet around the fire. The kind where everybody remembers something, and nobody wants to be the one to say it.

Brianna holds out a bag of marshmallows. “You want one?”

“I’m good.”

I don’t want one. I’m not going to take one, so they’ll think I’m easygoing. I’m not going to sit here and perform being fine. I’m just going to sit here.

Emma looks at the ice.

I watch Rafe, taking the puck off some guy in a camo jacket like it’s nothing.