Page 51 of Choosing Her
I wasdesperate to find Saylor the moment the game ended, but I did my best to hide it as we listened to Coach’s speech in the locker room and as the boys joked around afterward. I was ripping off my gear with record speed, to the point that Mako asked me if I was okay, but I was on a one-track mind right now.
The Saylor Curse had been broken and I’d scored in a game for the first time this season—but at what cost?
I’d texted Saylor before I got on the ice and after, but I hadn’t gotten any messages back from her. Nothing responding to my question of how Naomi had taken the news. For all I knew, Naomi had killed her and hidden her body in one of the storage closets. I needed to find her now.
The problem with leaving the locker room first, which I hadn’t thought about, was that girls tended to congregate in this hall after games to talk to us. Normally, I was more than happy to chat but today, when I looked at the massive group before me, all I could see was a barrier between me and finding the girl I loved.
But that was what friends were for.
“Okay, okay, step aside!” Mako yelled. I hadn’t heard him come out of the locker room behind me, but when I looked back,I realized it wasn’t just him there—Mako, Tino, and even Bear were behind me. Mako had his hands cupped around his mouth to help his voice carry as he continued to yell. “Plenty of hockey players to go around, but let Crossy through!”
I smiled at him gratefully as the crowd parted just enough for me to push my way through, smiling at girls who were trying to catch my gaze but not stopping at all. Well, not until a freshman girl stopped in front of me.
“Hi!” She chirped. We were at the back of the crowd now, and my exit was in sight, but when I tried to sidestep, she moved with me. “I’m Cassidy.”
I sighed, knowing I wasn’t getting out of here without a conversation, but kept an eye on the end of the hall, willing Saylor to appear so I knew she was alive, at the very least.
“Hi Cassidy,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
Her eyes gleamed, like she’d ben just waiting for me to say that. “I’m doing a feature on the game for the school newspaper and I was hoping I could interview you.”
“Uh…” I glanced behind me at the guys, but they were all occupied talking to other girls. I turned back to Cassidy. “Okay, sure.”
My eyes kept darting up, just waiting to see Saylor come down the hallway.
“Great,” Cassidy said. She must have been a freshman. I hadn’t seen her around before and she looked really nervous as she opened up the notebook in her hand and got her pencil ready.
“So, um, it’s pretty well known that you’ve had a bad season,” she said slowly.
I frowned. “We’ve done well with every game.”
“Sorry, sorry,” she said, laughing nervously. “Not the team, butyouspecifically.”
Well, I guess she wasn’t wrong about that, though it wasn’t usually the first thing somebody said when they met a new person.
“Yeah, we’ve been saying that I’ve been cursed,” I said, laughing self-deprecatingly. “But I think I turned around this game. I’ve been playing the best game of the season by far.”
And although Coach hadn’t been willing to give me a full compliment given that I’d done so terribly the whole season up till now, he hadn’t yelled at me after the game so I figured it was a win.
The girl smiled and nodded. “So what would you say was the key factor in you being able to turn your season around?”
That was when my eyes locked onher. Saylor, at the end of the hall watching me. My eyes drifted to her, as if her mere presence was a siren’s call, telling me where she was. I knew I should have been looking at the girl in front of me who was asking me the questions, but how was I supposed to take my eyes off the love of my life?
I quickly ran my eyes over her, checking that she was okay. She wasn’t crying, which seemed like a good sign. And her hair wasn’t disheveled and she had no visible bruises, so I could only assume that she and Naomi didn’t get into a physical fight. Not that I really expected them to, but when you were forced to imagine your ex-girlfriend confronting her little sister who is your new girlfriend, the worst case scenarios came to mind immediately.
I blinked a couple times trying to refocus on the question at hand.What could I attribute my success to?
“Well, if I’m being completely honest with you,” I said, “I think the only reason I was cursed was because I didn’t have the girl I loved.” Even though I could only see her in my peripheral, I saw Cassidy blink.
“Um, sorry, could you elaborate?”
“I dated the wrong girl in the summer,” I said, the words spilling out of me even though I knew that there was no reason anybody in the student body would care enough about what I was saying for it to be included in the newspaper article. But right now, I couldn’t keep it in. “But now that I’m together with the girl I belong with, it’s like the world has righted itself.”
Cassidy followed my gaze, to Saylor standing at the end of the hall, staring at me and smiled softly. Suddenly, I realized where I recognized her from—all those horseback riding lessons Saylor and I had seen going on while we were studying.
“You mean Rebecca?” Cassidy asked.
“Saylor,” I corrected instinctively. “Her name is Saylor. And yes, I owe everything to her falling in love with me.”
