Page 55 of The Faceoff

On my way.

The reply comes fast, like he was holding the phone.

Beau

Good. There are 4 seats reserved for you and your friends. Behind the home bench.

I stop on the bottom porch step.

That’s presumptuous.

Beau

I know what I want.

I read it twice. There is no good reason for three words to do anything to a person, and I would like to formally note, for the sealed internal record, that they do not do anything to me. The warmth that moves up the side of my neck is a circulation event. It is September. The evening is cool. My body is regulating.

“Why are you smiling like that?” Margo asks.

“I’m not smiling.”

“You’re smiling like a girl in a commercial for allergy medication. All soft-focus. What did he say?”

I give her the look. She knows the look. The look means not in front of them, and Margo — who is the only one who knows about any of this, because we agreed to keep it from Wren and June specifically on the grounds that they will, with the best intentions and approximately four combined hours of argument, try to talk me out of it — reads the look and arranges her face into something innocent that fools no one and is not meant to.

“We have seats,” I tell the group. “Behind Whitmore’s bench.”

Wren’s eyebrows go up. “Behind the bench? How?”

“Margaret,” I say, which is the kind of lie that is also a load-bearing truth, because Margaret would absolutely take credit, and because Wren accepts it instantly, the way you accept any explanation involving Margaret Sorensen and the unreasonable reach of a woman who has run a bookshop in this town for forty years.

We follow the crowd up toward campus.

Corbin Arena — the Nest, everyone calls it, and you can hear the capital letter when they say it — sits at the east edge of campus, and on a game night it does a thing to the whole approach. The lit-up entrance, the crowd thickening as you get closer, the smell that I will learn is the smell of every rink everywhere: cold air and rubber and concession sugar and something underneath that’s just ice, a clean mineral nothing of a smell that I’ve only ever encountered at Wren’s games and that I associate, against all logic, with my brother.

Danny played in high school. Not seriously — small town, small program — but he played, and for two winters before he left, the only reliable warmth in my week was sitting in a freezing set of bleachers watching him do the one thing that made him uncomplicated. I was nine, ten. I didn’t understand the game. I understood that he was happy out there in a way he wasn’t anywhere else, and that being near it meant being near the happy version of him.

I have not thought about that in a long time. The rink smell pulls it up whole, the way smells do, and I fold it and set it by the door, because tonight is not for that.

We get sodas. Margo gets one for the experience and abandons it within ninety seconds because her hands need to be free for what is clearly going to be a full-body spectating effort. We find the seats — and they are exactly where he said, four together, right behind the home bench, close enough to the glass that I can feel the cold coming off the ice.

Down on the rink, the Ravens are warming up.

And there’s Beau. Number Eleven.

I find him without trying to. He’s in motion — easy, unhurried, carving long lazy arcs through the warmup with a few teammates, stick-handling a puck like it’s attached to him by a thread only he can see. I’ve watched enough of Wren’s games to know what competence looks like on the ice. This is past competence. This is the thing Margaret means when she talks about him, the thing the whole campus means — he looks, even at quarter-speed, even joking with the guy next to him, like the ice is a place he was assembled for.

He hasn’t seen me yet.

I’m aware that I’m glad he hasn’t seen me yet, because it means I get to watch without being watched, which is the arrangement I prefer in all things and have built a personality around.

“This is the best part,” Margo says, vibrating. “The energy before. Feel it? The whole building’s holding its breath.” She’s already half out of her seat, reading the crowd the way she reads a room, feeding on it — the cheerleader in her doesn’t switch off just because she’s in the stands. “God, I love this. Don’t tell the football team.”

The lights do their thing. The anthem happens. The puck drops.

And Beau Sorensen wins the faceoff before I’ve fully understood that the game has started.

I don’t have the vocabulary Wren has, but I have eyes, and what I’m watching is one team that has decided the outcome and another team that is still negotiating with the possibility. Whitmore moves like a single organism with Beau somewhere near the center of it — not the loudest player, not the showiest, but the one everything seems to route through, the still point the speed organizes around. He wins another faceoff. Then another. There’s a rhythm to it I find unreasonably satisfying, the clean mechanical yes of him dropping his stick and the puck simply becoming Whitmore’s, over and over, like a fact being restated.