Page 68 of On His Mind

I sat on the ice at fourteen years old in secondhand pads with a bruise coming up on my hip and told a man with a beard fuck college. I meant it. College was for kids who have a future.

I’ve got a 3.9. I stand in an empty kitchen and look at it on my phone until the screen goes dark, and then I turn it on and look at it again.

Josh calls that night. He never calls. He texts maybe four times a year, in complete sentences, with the period at the end.

“You did it, Pers,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“He’s good, Mare,” he says to Mary, off the phone. Then, back to me, “Grades came?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Three point nine.”

There’s a pause on the other end.

“Say that again.”

“Three point nine.”

Another pause. And then a sound I’ve heard maybe six times in my life, which is Josh Simpleton clearing his throat.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Alright, then.”

We talk about the season. He asks how it ended, and I tell him. He says that’s how most of them end, and he’s right. He doesn’t ask whether I played. He knows I didn’t. He asks about the other goalies instead — about his hands — and I talk for four straight minutes about another goalie’s hands, which is more than I’ve said out loud all week.

Before he hangs up, he says, “You still got that note?”

The one he put in my hand in a room too small for the both of us. Folded twice. Move-in day.

“Yeah.”

“You read it?”

“No.”

“Okay,” he says, and he laughs, and he’s gone.

It’s in the top drawer of my desk, under a broken watch. I put my phone down. I don’t open the drawer.

The house scatters through the first week of May.

Stanley’s going home to a hockey camp he’s helping his dad with, which he describes in such detail that Benson eventually asks him to shut up. Benson is going home. Rowan’s going home. Blue’s going home. Everybody’s got somewhere to be, and not one of them thinks about it twice.

Marco’s giving me forty-five hours a week at the Camerie through August. Nobody’s said anything about the house. Benson mentions summer subletters once, in passing, and I put my head down over my plate. There’s a lease somewhere with my name on it and it covers a school year, and school ends Friday, and the question is whether I can stay here. I have asked that question before in my life. I know what it does to a room. So I don’t ask it. I’ve got four hundred and eighty dollars in the drawer, and I know how to keep a bag half-packed. I know how to be no trouble.

They leave the ice in for two more weeks before they pull it for the summer. I go every day. Nobody’s there. Fuller’s at a coaching thing somewhere, upperclassmen are done for the year, and if another teammate stays, I don’t catch whiff of it.

I let myself in with the code and turn on the lights over the ice, only the ice, and I skate. I run the drill sheet I’ve been carrying in my head since October. Depth. Post to post. Drop and recover. I put a bucket at the top of the circle and bank pucks off the boards and track them off the angles, over and over.

On the last day, before they pull it, I stay after I’ve swept the pucks into the corner. I take one slow lap around the crease. My edges leave two clean lines in the ice. Somewhere under the floor, the compressor hums, and that’s the only sound in thebuilding. I stop on the goal line and look up at the banners, the gold names, the rows of dark seats climbing up out of the light.

In my bag, there’s a puck nobody said I could keep and a stick with another man’s tape on it. In three weeks, I might not have anywhere to sleep.

I bang my stick on both posts. Left, then right.