Page 3 of Mister Hockey
She reached and almost... almost... almost... her fingers grazed the zipper.
Success.
She gripped the millimeter of metal and tugged. Stubborn little sucker refused to budge. Frowning, she tried again.
Same result.
At fifteen years old, the library’s Super Reader costume had seen better days. But last summer it fit fine.
“Ugh.” The bathroom scale had been an asshole since the Rory breakup. During last week’s move to her new—and first—home of her very own, she’d exiled the spiteful hunk of metal to the garage as punishment, but it hadn’t lied. Fifteen extra pounds padded her hips and butt, a result of an ongoing ménage a trois with Ben and Jerry.
Zzzzzzzerp!The zipper gave way.
“Sweet Sugar Babies!” Her voice echoed off the women’s room tile as she clutched her pancaked breasts. Her nipples inverted and her naval squashed her spine, but hey, she’d stuffed herself inside—victorious, more or less.
Now to survive the next hour without laughing, sitting or breathing.
Not that she’d ever been a slender, willowy sort of gal. Her body tended to softness and a good cheese plate was better than size six jeans. She owned her juicy ass and had an allergy to any talk about how a “real” woman had a) curves b) no curves or c) hard-won muscles.
Nope. Sorry. All a so-called real woman needed to own the title was a heartbeat.
Boom. Done. End of story.
But even still, she wanted to feel good in her skin... and right now, she didn’t. She hadn’t in too long.
Picking up the Jed West coffee mug from the edge of the sink—a recent twenty-ninth birthday gift from her big sister—she drained the bitter dark roast before glancing at his photo printed on the side.
Sigh.
Westy was the carrots to her peas. The cheese to her macaroni. The gin to her tonic. The... the... corned beef to her cabbage.
Those irises were a tug of war between June grass green and hickory bark brown. How many hours had she spent trying to bestow his perfect hazel eye color with the right poetic descriptors?
Spoiler: a lot.
No regrets, because that face was a gift to humanity; as if no matter what the nightly news indicated, the world couldn’t be going to hell in a handbasket if it had conspired to produce such a perfect male jaw. And those freckles. Yeah. Wow. Those freckles just weren’t fair.
She checked her reflection with a half-hearted shrug, nothing much to cheer or sneer there. On a positive note, yay for a good hair day. The half beehive paired well with a low side ponytail. Straight sixties glam. She leaned closer, wiping a lipstick smudge from her lower lip. Her usual cat-eye makeup was on point too. The black liquid liner gave her wings, even as the low hum from the crowd in the community room threatened to send her heart into an Icarus death spiral.
Everyone twiddling their thumbs in the folding chairs was expecting to meet the Hellion’s popular coach, Tor Gunnar, fresh from his second straight NHL championship victory, who was sidelined due to bad weather. Ugh. Bad news on a good day, a disaster when the Library Board of Trustees kept making ominous rumblings about pending cuts.
Municipal appropriations had plunged and to add insult to injury the library system had lost several hundred thousand dollars in federal funding. It wasn’t a question of if there would be branch closures or department belt-tightening, but when. Her department better shine if it hoped to survive the dark days ahead.
Breezy nibbled the inside of her cheek, wincing as one bite too hard flooded her mouth with a faintly metallic taste. No way would she get flushed down the professional tubes without a fight. Her department transformed the children’s zone for each holiday, made it a place where young patrons could come after school and get homework help from senior volunteers, reluctant readers were paired with the perfect book, or took part in a Lego or chess club, participated in drop-in Robotics or Minecraft, and where local parents could form connections with one another at toddler story hours or in a parenting class.
Anyone who wanted to dismiss librarians as boring bookworms had never heard Breezy rap out “I Like Big Books and I Cannot Lie” after one Jack and Diet Coke too many—bonus points for her twerking skills.
And if she ever daydreamed about opening an independent children’s bookshop, well it was nothing but another of her fantasies, like the one where she met Jed West and he fell madly in love.
Here!The phone buzzed with her sister’s text. Speaking of someone who lived their dreams, Neve had the perfect job for a card-carrying member of the Hellions Angels, the nickname of their family’s hockey fan club. From October to April (and the playoffs, God willing), Angel women spent Hellion game nights crammed into Aunt Lo’s creaky Victorian in Five Points behaving like unashamed dorks: Mom, Granny Dee, Aunt Joanie, Aunt Shell and her best friend, Margot, who was basically an honorary member of the family.
Those were the evenings when her stepdad and the uncles retreated to the man cave above the garage to shoot pool, play foosball and pout over their loss of the living room’s sixty-inch flat-screen. The men were Bronco diehards to a one, obsessed with fantasy football leagues.
But the Angel women?
They were all about the puck, a tradition started with Granny Dee and proudly passed through three generations.
Some folks were obsessed with Marvel Comics or Doctor Who or Harry Potter. She self-identified as Ravenclaw, but the rest of her family didn’t know the wordcosplayor that Comic-Con existed. And yet they donned red devil horns, smeared their faces with crimson-and-white paint and brandished plastic pitchforks without a shred of embarrassment.
