Page 49 of The Faceoff

She scrolls for a long time.

When she hands the phone back, her face has lost the brightness entirely. What’s underneath it is something quieter and much harder.

“How long has it been like this?”

“A while,” I confess.

“Sloane.”

“Since the summer. Since the break. It got worse after I —” I gesture vaguely “— after the apartment.”

Margo is quiet. She sets her plate down again. She reaches over and, without asking, which is the only way I’d ever permit it, she pushes my sleeve up — gently, two fingers — and looks at the bruise on my arm, the faint yellow-green ghost of Evan’s hand, and then she looks at me, and I watch her decide something.

“Do it,” she says.

“Margo—”

“You asked me what I think. I’m telling you. Do it.” Her voice is completely level, which from Margo is the loudest she gets. “Not because of the Yale cover and not because Bella deserves to lose and not because it’s a fun story, though it is a fun story and I’m going to enjoy it enormously. Do it because that—” she nods at the phone, at my arm, at the whole shape of the last four weeks “—needs to stop, and you’ve tried doing it alone, and doing it alone hasn’t worked, and there is no prize at the end of your life for having white-knuckled through everything by yourself.” She holds my eyes. “Let the door be a person for once. You can fire the person when you’re done. There’s an exit clause. You said so yourself.”

I look at her.

The lamp with the scarf over it is making the light the right color. The chicken’s gone lukewarm on my plate. On the paused screen, a woman in blue and white is frozen mid-leap, suspended, not yet landed.

“I’ll think about it,” I say.

Margo picks the remote back up, and presses play, and the woman lands.

“You’ve already decided,” she says, not looking at me, settling back into the sofa. “You just need a night to pretend you haven’t.”

She’s right.

I hate that she’s right.

Chapter 9

Beau

The transition is supposed to come at the blue line. Mine comes two strides late, and Walsh sees it, and so does everyone else.

“Sorensen.” O’Grady’s voice carries across the ice the way it always does, flat and unhurried, which is worse than yelling. O’Grady yelling means you’re part of a group failure. O’Grady saying your name like that, just the name, means he’s looking at you specifically. “You want to join us, or you running your own practice over there?”

“On it, Coach.”

“You’re a step behind on everything today.”

“Yes, Coach.”

He skates off to ride someone else, and I reset at the dot and try to put my head back where it’s supposed to be, which is the problem. My head is not where it’s supposed to be. My head has been somewhere else since Tuesday, and the somewhere else has a name, and tomorrow at the exhibition game she’s going to give me an answer, which means I’ve got about twenty-six hours of not knowing left and apparently my body has decided to spend all of them two strides late.

This isn’t like me.

That’s the part that’s bothering me almost as much as the actual lateness. I don’t carry things onto the ice. The ice is the one place in my life that’s never required performance, because you can’t perform a transition — you either make it or you don’t, the puck either goes where you sent it or it doesn’t, and there’s no version of Beau-being-who-everyone-needs that helps you win a faceoff. It’s just the work. It’s the cleanest thing I have. And right now I’m fouling it up because a theater major hasn’t texted me back, which she also has no reason to do, because I never gave her my number, which is its own separate problem I haven’t solved.

We run the drill again. I’m better. Not good. Better.

Cash flies past me on the backcheck and bumps my shoulder, the bad one, not knowing it’s the bad one, and I eat the flare of it and keep my face still. “Wake up, Cap,” he says, grinning, already gone.

I take a knee at the boards on the next whistle to retie a skate that doesn’t need retying, just to get thirty seconds, and that’s when Wyatt coasts over and stops beside me in a soft spray of ice.