Page 115

Ray Marrack resigned from Harrow in May. The conference report was sixty pages long. Cole and Mikey and five other guys are seniors at Harrow now, on full money, with a new coach who doesn't make anybody sweat in a ninety-degree room.

Dane came to Easter in Ashby. My mom made pot roast. Dane ate three plates of it and fixed the leak under her kitchen sink without anybody asking him to, and my sister, who has braces now, told him he was "kind of scary but fine." My mom hugged him at the door for a very long time.

In July, Nico went to public skate at a city rink in Duluth on a Sunday afternoon. Forty-five minutes. He skated laps with a bunch of nine-year-olds at a birthday party, and Priya filmed all of it, and he sent it to me at midnight with no caption except SWEDE. I watched it twelve times.

Mark Duvall called Halvorsen in August. He said his organization had reconsidered. He wants to talk to me after my senior season. Halvorsen told him he'd think about it.

At the Lantern, Marcy took the SIN BIN sign down off the card table for good. She hung it on the wall of the back room instead, in a frame, next to a picture somebody took at center ice. Two guys on their knees on a painted lantern. Walter the fish got a friend. Her name's Gloria.

The card table's still there. It's my table. On Thursdays, there are four of them pushed together now, and Gunnar sits at one of them, and pretends it's because the long table's too far from the bathroom.

The first puck goes in. Low blocker.

The second goes in. Five-hole.

The third one, he gets a pad on, and it goes off the post and in anyway, and he swears at the post like it betrayed him.

The fourth goes in high glove, and the water bottle jumps.

I go back to the blue line. I stand there with the fifth puck under my blade.

I'm going to score this one. I'm going to bury it so hard the net jumps off its pegs. I'm going to make him do whatever I say all day, starting with lying in bed until noon, which he has literally never done in his life.

I come.

I come in fast. I give him the shoulder. He doesn't bite.

He doesn't bite.

I pull it to my backhand anyway, and he's already there, his pad sliding across, flat and perfect, and the puck hits the toe of it and dies.

I stop at the top of his crease. I stare at him.

"You read it," I say.

"You drop your right shoulder." He pushes his mask up. He's grinning. He never grins. He grins now. "You've done it since you were twelve."

"I have not⁠—"

"Four," he says.

"I know it's four."

"Equipment room."

I look at him. He looks at me.

"Yes," I say.

Doug's cage still smells like metal and leather and the burnt-hair smell of the sharpener. Dane punches the code. The door clicks shut behind us on its slow arm.

He doesn't turn on the light. Just the one bulb over the bench that buzzes.

"Truth," he says.

"What?"

"Did you miss on purpose?"