Page 101 of Canadian Boyfriend

Was she being willfully obtuse? “You know what I mean. Someone who might leave her.”

“Are you sure you’re talking about Olivia and not yourself?”

I tried to issue a rebuttal. I even moved my mouth. No sound came out. Because there was no air in my body.

“Life is full of risks,” she said, oblivious to the fact that I was silently suffocating before her very eyes. “People leave. You should know that better than most. You’re afraid someone is going to leave you because without all the hockey trappings, you’re not enough. So you try to prevent that from happening by curating the people who get to be around you, making sure they don’t care about hockey, which, ironically, is the thing you love most, after your family.”

The air whooshed back into my body, so fast and so violently it felt like my lungs had been sliced in half. I didn’t understand how someone I had trusted for so long, and so elementally, could say these things to me.

“I mean, maybe,” she went on. “That’s my take. But who am I? I’m just your friend you used to sleep with sometimes.”

Used to.

“Are you leaving?” I wasn’t sure exactly what I was asking. Was she leaving me? Us? The house right now?

“I know you have training camp in a few weeks. If you can’t find someone for Olivia before then, I’ll stay on until you do, but only when you’re not here.” She picked up her overnight bag, which I hadn’t noticed she’d brought upstairs with her. “So yes, I’m leaving.”

23—CANADIAN BOYFRIEND

RORY

I called an Uber as I stumbled out of Mike Martin’s house, and I had a full-on panic attack en route to Gretchen’s. Hello, darkness, my old friend.

When I got to her house, I sat on the porch and did my tapping until the storm passed.

The panic eventually receded, and I discovered something unfamiliar underneath the regret and heartbreak: peace.

When Gretchen answered my knock and got over her shock to find me at her door in the middle of the night, I told her everything. How I’d met Mike Martin at the mall and spun him into my Canadian Boyfriend. How when I’d remet him all those years later, I hadn’t told him about it. How I’d slept with him under the northern lights after I’d remade myself.

“Didn’t people from high school notice that you never went to visit your ‘boyfriend’?” she asked after installing me on her sofa with a cup of tea.

I smiled through my pain at Gretchen’s question. I’d dropped this emotional bomb and her first question was logistical. “I think you’re overestimating how much people noticedme to begin with. But there were trips over the years that I may have… embellished. Like to the Youth America Grand Prix.”

She cozied up next to me and threw a blanket over our legs. “You mean you’d go to New York for ballet competitions and tell people you were making a stop in Canada on the way home?”

I nodded.

“But if people didn’t notice you, why did you need him to begin with?”

“I don’t want you to pity me, and I’m not excusing it, but people were crappy to me. They thought I was a snob because of ballet.” I’d explained all that to her before. “I was out of school so much, I didn’t really know people. And when I was there, I probably seemed aloof when really I was…”

“Racked with as-yet-undiagnosed clinical anxiety that manifested itself as shyness your peers mistook for snobbishness?”

“Exactly.” As painful as the memories were, I could smile at her spot-on assessment.

“So, what? You made him up one day? Just like that?”

“Just like that. I still remember the moment I invented him.” I sent myself back to that handshake.I’m Mike Martin, he’d said, slaying me with that smile. I told Gretchen about everything: about dissecting frogs and not having a date for homecoming. “And then I met Mike. And I thought,Well, if I can’t go to the dance…”

“At least here’s a good reason,” Gretchen supplied.

“Exactly.”

“And everybody bought the lie?”

“There were enough details that rang true, I guess. Hockey teams really did stay in the hotel at the mall. And people didn’t know me, not really. So maybe it didn’t seem that implausible?”

“And they probablydidmistake your shyness for maturity.You were leaving school all the time for ballet, clearly headed for a professional career. Why couldn’t you have an older boyfriend?” She paused, studying my face. “Let me ask you another question.” I nodded, preparing for her to want more details about the mechanics of my lie, but she bowled me over with “Are you in love with him?”

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