Page 100 of Facing Off
Fuck. The group chat. With us showing up together right after I sent those messages, it’s incriminating.Reallyincriminating. He’s going to guess my cock concerns were about Sonya!
Before Dmitri can say anything about that—not that he logically can right now—I knock on the glass. The defenseman grunts, trying to ignore the sound, but I don’t let up.
Kavi pulls out her camera. The one she always has on her.
Dmitri glances at her. One pleading look from his wife is all it takes for menacing Dmitri to give in. He scowls and taps his glove on the other side, across from my hand. Our own fist bump.
I beam.
Kavi snaps a photo. “Another memory for the best friends forever album!”
“I hate you all except Kavi and Sonya,” Dmitri calls out, before turning around and skating away.
I grin wider at the two women beside me. “It’s really a suffocating amount of love that I receive from him.”
We watch Dmitri skate over to Quinn. He points us out in the stands. Quinn does an energetic wave with his hockey stick, before squaring himself off in the net.
Things move fast afterwards.
As soon as the whistle blows, familiar adrenaline courses through me. I can taste the rush on my tongue as if I’m the one out there in my uniform, clutching my stick, warming up with the puck, slapping it so fast it becomes a dark blur.
When the puck drops, my teeth ache. I’m smiling but in this stuck way. I thought that I could handle this. That watching hockey at this international level wouldn’t be the same as playing it. That it didn’t count and I wasn’t betraying the memory of Jesse.
But it strikes me that I was wrong.
So wrong.
All of a sudden, I’m thrust back into the past.
39
ADRIAN
(Adrian,fifteen years old)
Normally, I drag myself out of bed to meet them at the rink, but this time I’m ready early because I’ve been awake all night. It’s cold sleeping in the garage, even with the space heater my mom plugged in for me.
“I’m sorry, Adrian. But I don’t know what else to do,” was what she told me.
We’re a family of nine cramped in a one-story house. Four bedrooms aren’t enough. Mom and the dude she thinks will stay but won’t are in one room with my newest sister. The second room is for three of my younger sisters, and the third room was for two of my oldest sisters, but now they’re fighting. Screaming. Threatening to run away.Normal teenage shit.
To separate them, Mom asked if I could give up my bedroom. Just for now to keep the peace.
That’s why I’m in the garage.
I made a big show of moving into it yesterday, packing up my stuff and making goodbye speeches to everyone (except for my fake dad) as if I’m never going to see themagain and am being shipped off to war. I told my mom to cook my favorites as a last meal, mashed potatoes from the box and mac and cheese, also from a box but spruced up with my mom’s special spices.
I told her to feed me extra, because who knows how quickly I’ll wither away in the dungeon. Demonstrating the process, I’d slid to the floor as if melting.
My jokes made her smile. And they made my younger sisters giggle and pretend to melt, too. With the last few days of teenage screaming matches, they had stopped playing. I hated that.
When dinner was ready, the fake dad took a lot of the mac and cheese for himself and talked about how he’s going to put all this work into building an extension of the house, so we all have more room.
He won’t. Us kids are waiting for him to leave. We like it better when it’s just our mom and us. And I hate that we need anyone else, but Mom tells us he pays the mortgage.
That was yesterday.
Today, the sun hasn’t fully come up, but I’m trekking to the ice rink behind our house, flashlight in one hand and a duffel bag of equipment in the other.
