Page 55 of Nowhere to Hide
“Strangers don’t walk down the hill together.”
“They do not.”
She looks at me for another second, then turns left along the upper path toward where Ivy and a couple of girls from Sterling have already spread a blanket. I go right, down toward the pitch and the guys, telling myself not to look back.
I look back.
She’s already looking. She mouths something that might be strangers, and I laugh as I jog down to the pitch, where Luca is running the show at the cone line with a clipboard nobody needs.
“What’s funny?” Luca asks.
“Nothing,” I say.
He sizes me up for a second, then shrugs. “You’re skins.”
“Why are you the commissioner?” I say.
“Because nobody else is up to the job.” He flips an imaginary page. “Seb is angry about the team selection, so ignore him. Theo is over-caffeinated, so also ignore him.”
I pull my shirt off and toss it onto the pile at the corner cone, then join the guys — some hockey dudes and some randoms — on the pitch. The sun hits my bare skin, and suddenly I’m hoping last night’s scratches didn’t leave marks. I glance over at her, and she turns away.
Then the game starts.
The game is unstructured chaos. Seb plays the way he plays hockey: full body, zero concern for other people’s joints. Theo flashes enough genuine skill to make you forget he’s a freshman, right until he celebrates like one. Luca is everywhere, talking nonstop.
As the game goes on, water breaks happen whenever someone gets winded or turns an ankle, players sub in and out, and nobody really manages to keep an accurate score while simultaneously arguing like there’s a trophy.
Around us, the green keeps filling: blankets multiplying, towels across the grass, coolers appearing out of nowhere. When two guys keep lobbing a Frisbee onto the pitch, Seb sails it back as far as he can.
“Assholes,” he mutters.
Mason turns up late at the edge of it all, the last hockey guy to arrive, and somehow looking settled by the time you notice him. He plays for a while, then drifts off to sit under a tree with a water bottle and his phone.
The whole time, Sloane and I are very convincing strangers who happen to glance at each other constantly. But then theagreement starts eroding in pieces I can almost catalog, because we can’t seem to stop smiling at each other.
When I score — ugly, off my knee, barely a goal — my head goes up before my brain does. She’s already watching, chin propped on her hand, fighting a smile. I hold the look past the point of safe before Seb slaps the back of my head as he jogs by.
“Put your tongue away, Hale,” Seb says.
At the next water break, I peel away toward the cooler. Sloane’s already there when I arrive. As per the agreement, we stand six inches apart, and I feign casual as I pop open a can of soda and take a long gulp.
“Pretending is agony,” she says. “And that’s from someone who’s used to it.”
“You literally suggested this,” I say.
“You agreed to it.”
“That makes me complicit, not the architect,” I say. “Hey, Sloane?”
“Mmm.”
“Strangers don’t talk to each other this much.”
“Shit.” She takes a sip of her soda. “We’re going to get caught.”
“Caught doing what?”
“Discussing the unbearable agony of standing three feet from a stranger.”
