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That’s exactly what they say. Every time. Nobody’s lying. Nothing’s wrong. It’s handled. My family could fall through the floor of that house, and my mother would call me from the basement to tell me everything’s fine.

“I have to go, sweetheart,” she says. “I love you.”

She’s gone before I decide whether to say it back.

I sit there with the phone in my lap, the engine off, and the heat ticking in the vents.

I don’t like liars. I said it last night to the back of Tessa Canten’s head, and I meant it, and I’ve been hearing her voice all day in my head.

I have no idea who he is.

She said it to Kennebeck’s girlfriend with a straight face. Same face she used in the stairwell. I’ll withdraw. Quiet and easy. Two lies in seven months, both of them about me. She’s good at it. I didn’t know that about her.

She doesn’t know me. That part’s true. We were never friends. She sat at the end of a lunch table for four years, and I walked past it. There isn’t a single person from that school who knows a fucking thing about me, and she knows less than any of them.

But she knows who I am. She knew it at the rink, with her eyes nailed to the ice. She knew it in that kitchen before I opened my mouth. She knew it, and she looked Kylie in the eye and said otherwise, and Kylie looked at me like I was some drunk asshole from a frat bothering her roommate at a party.

That’s the part I can’t get past. Not the lie. The look.

So I went out after her. Down the porch steps. Hey, little Tess. She didn’t turn around. I told her I told her not to come here. I told her she lied. I told her to look at me, and she didn’t, and the whole porch was standing there with their drinks watching me talk to the back of a girl’s coat. I stopped at the bottom of the steps. I wasn’t going to chase her down the street like a dog.

I don’t like liars.

Her shoulders jumped. That’s all I got.

Then I went back inside and drank a beer I didn’t want and stood in that kitchen doorway for another hour, so nobody would think I’d left because of her.

I looked her up again this morning. Same thing as Tuesday. First Year. Business Administration. Her school email, sitting there like an invitation. I’m not going to email Tessa Canten.

It doesn’t say where she lives. I don’t know where she lives.

Berwyn runs a scrimmage at the end, second line against the third, and I have the best forty minutes I’ve had all week.

I pick up the puck behind our net on the first shift and carry it the length of the ice. Wide on Greeley, inside on Weber, backhand five-hole on Fernandes, who should have had it and didn’t. Kennebeck’s at the far post with his stick on the ice the whole way, open enough to wave at, and he skates back to the bench past me without a word.

Second shift, same thing, except Fernandes gets a pad on it.

Third shift, I’m in the corner with the puck and two guys on me, and Barnes is in the slot yelling my name, and I spin off both of them and shoot from a bad angle, and it goes in off the post and the back of Fernandes’s leg.

“I was open,” Kennebeck says at the bench.

“You were covered.”

“By who? The fucking Zamboni?”

“It went in.”

“It went in off his ass.”

“Still counts.”

Barnes is laughing into his water bottle. Kennebeck looks at me like he’s doing math about how long a suspension would be for killing his own winger, and then he looks away and takes his next draw cleaner than anything I’ve ever seen him do, which is how Kennebeck tells you to go fuck yourself.

Berwyn blows the whistle on the next shift, before I’ve even crossed the blue line.

“Waleska.”

I stop.