Page 15 of Canadian Boyfriend

“The only downside I see in your arrangement with our local star athlete is that I wish Ian was around to witness it. He was a hockey fan, wasn’t he?” Gretchen wrinkled her nose.

“It’s not like that. Atall.”

“If you say so.”

Gretchen, surprisingly, hadn’t given me a hard time about my new habit of leaving on Tuesdays with Mike Martin and Olivia, and I wanted to keep it that way. “His wife just died!”

She stopped Swiffering and sobered. “I know, I know.” Her serious expression was soon replaced by a mischievous one. “His wife died nine months ago, though. That’s almost a year.”

“So,” I said loudly, derailing the train of thought she’d gotten on, “if you don’t see any problem with this gig, I’m going to take it. I like Olivia, they need the help, and not having to buy and insure a car is really going to help with my finances.”

“You know you can always pick up Riley’s classes, right? Say the word, and I will actually get around to firing her.”

Riley was a college student who taught several classes at the studio—when she could be bothered. She was unreliable, and when she did show up, she was often quite obviously hungover. Gretchen had been stressing about whether and how to fire her.

“No, thanks.” The answer came as a reflex.

“Still postballet?”

Maybe it was stupid, but when I left ballet, Ileftit. I didn’t even want to teach it to kids in a strip mall dance studio. I had settled into teaching tap and jazz, but ballet was a no-go. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just be you. And don’t ever change. ’Cause you’re great.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that I might have met Mike Martin before, thirteen years ago in passing at a mall. That I’d manufactured a whole imaginary boyfriend based on that meeting. That I’d used that imaginary boyfriend as an excuse to get out of all sorts of social events at which I was not wanted anyway.

But I was an adult now. I didn’t need imaginary people. The fact that I once had was embarrassing.

Imaginary people do have one perk, though: you can abandon them at will, leave them in the past where they belong, with zero consequences.

Or so I had always thought.

I started writing my Canadian Boyfriend when I was in high school. I sat in the cafeteria and wrote him letters, and in so doing, I felt less alone. He became a diary. Well, sort of; those letters were half diary, half fiction. Half what was happening, half what I wished were happening.

I stopped writing when I quit ballet. By the end of my time in New York, I was starting to get a little worried about how much I needed him, this fake person I’d created when I was a teenager. About how I was pouring out my heart to him—myfears and humiliations—even as I was making him into the lifeline I so needed. Since ballet had been the source of my problems, I reasoned, quitting ballet should also mean quitting writing. Quitting lying. So when I came home to Minnesota and had it out with my mom, I put the red binder of letters in a box in my closet. Cold turkey.

All of which meant I had never imagined my Canadian Boyfriend, who when I stopped writing to him had still been at the University of Denver—one of the top hockey schools according to my research but also far enough from New York that he was never going to be able to visit—going on to have a pro career. He hadcertainlynever grown into an actual adult who might do things like get married and have a kid and live in a fancy house on a lake.

Gretchen’s was not the kind of spot that drew people from far away, which was exactly why I was there. So most of the kids at Miss Miller’s of Minnetonka lived in or near the well-to-do suburb the studio was named for. And thanks to Wikipedia, I already knew Mike Martin lived on Lake Minnetonka. Still, I went a little wide-eyed when we started passing actual mansions on our way to their house on the lake—or on Crystal Bay, as Olivia informed me from the back seat of the Depression Car. “Lake Minnetonka is actually not one lake, but a collection of kettle lakes, did you know that? Do you know what kettle lakes are?”

I had the vague notion that Lake Minnetonka had a lot of squiggles in it, but I’d never really looked that closely on a map. “I don’t, but I bet you can tell me.” Spending time outside of class with Olivia had shown me an outgoing side of her I hadn’t seen in the studio.

“They’re lakes inside depressions left by retreating glaciers,” she informed me. “We’re doing a geology unit at school.”

Mike Martin smirked as he turned up a graveled driveway.

The house was more modest than I’d expected. Made of gray-painted wood accented with white trim, it looked vaguely Cape Cod–ish. “I’ll leave the car here since we’re driving you home, but let me show you the garage,” Mike Martin said.

We went around the side of the house. He fiddled with a keypad, and one of three doors rose. “I’ll give you the code, and an opener and all that.”

Olivia went inside, leaving us in a garage bigger than my entire apartment. It had bikes mounted on one wall and a truly astonishing amount of firewood stacked against another. There was a home gym in one corner and a ginormous black SUV in another.

“Oh, I don’t think I can drive that thing.” My parking spot at home was at the end of a row, flush with an exterior wall of one of the buildings, and I was not at all confident about my ability to maneuver that beast into what had already been a snug fit for my old Hyundai Accent, may she rest in peace.

“Oh, no, that’s my car. It’s for hauling hockey gear around.”

“I’m not borrowing the Depression Car!” A loaner was one thing; a loaner vintage Mustang was another.

“I have another car,” he said quickly. “It’s a… normal sedan.”

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