Prologue #3
My mom had ironed my dress shirt the night before and hung it on my closet door with a Post-it note that said proud of you in her handwriting.
My dad knocked on my door at eight and handed me a tie without being asked.
“You want me to do that?” He nodded at the tie in my hand.
“I know how to tie a tie.”
“You know how to tie it bad.” He took it back, looped it around my collar, and fixed it in about fifteen seconds with the practiced ease of a man who'd been wearing them to work his whole life.
He stepped back and looked at me and his expression went through something I wasn't supposed to notice. “There you go.”
My mom appeared in the doorway with her phone already out. “Stand together. Ro, fix your collar. Martin, put your arm around him.”
“Martha, he doesn't want—”
“I want the photo, Martin.”
My dad put his arm around me and I let it happen and my mom took six photos in a row and then came over to check if any of them were good and took four more. I stood there and let her because she'd been planning this morning since September and I wasn't going to be the reason it went wrong.
I checked my phone while she was scrolling through the photos.
Nothing from Soren. Which was fine. It was early. He was probably in the same chaos I was, his mom fussing with a camera, some version of this same morning playing out at his house.
I pocketed the phone and reached for my gown.
The gym was packed by the time I got there.
Families with cameras, underclassmen looking bored, the smell of too many bodies in a space with bad ventilation.
I found my spot in the alphabetical line and immediately started scanning the room for Soren.
He was always easy to find. He had a way of landing in a crowd that pulled the eye without trying.
But the gym was full of navy gowns and I lost him in the chaos.
When the march started, I caught him three rows up. Hands in his pockets, shoulders pulled in, walking with his eyes on the floor in front of him.
He didn't look for me once.
The speeches came and went. People laughed at the right moments and I watched the back of Soren's head and counted my breaths and told myself I was overthinking it.
When they called his name, I watched him stand and walk to the stage. The handshake with the principal, the diploma, and then he turned to face the crowd and for a second his expression was completely open.
My own name got called eventually. I walked across, shook the hand, heard my parents cheering from somewhere in the upper rows. None of it reached me.
The cap toss went up and the room broke into chaos and I was already moving, pushing through parents and camera flashes and clusters of gowns, scanning for Soren's dark hair.
I caught a glimpse of him near the side exit, already heading for the door, and tried to call out.
The noise swallowed my voice whole. By the time I fought my way through to the exit, the parking lot sat quiet and bright in front of me with no sign of him anywhere.
My mom found me before I could figure out what to do with that.
She came through the crowd with that lit-up pride on her face that always made me feel guilty, and she pulled me into a hug and I let her, going through the motions of being someone's son who had just graduated.
My dad clapped my shoulder. My grandmother straightened my collar.
The camera came out. I stood between my parents and produced a smile that felt like it cost something I didn't have to spare.
“You okay, Ro?” My dad said it low, meant just for me.
“Fine.” I adjusted the collar my grandmother had already fixed. “Just want to get to the rink and clear my gear before the new skate session takes over the locker room.”
It was even almost true. My dad looked at me for a second like he was deciding whether to push on it, and then let it go. My mom started the speech about dinner being at six and everyone coming over and I nodded through it and kissed her cheek and told her I'd be back before then.
I drove to the rink.
The parking lot was mostly empty at that hour, just a couple of staff cars and a Zamboni trailer parked around the back.
I pushed through the side entrance and stood at the top of the ramp that led down to the ice level, letting my eyes adjust to the dim.
The rink smelled like it always did — cold air, rubber matting, the ghost of sharpened steel.
The ice was freshly surfaced, glossy and undisturbed, reflecting the overhead lights in long pale strips.
The stands were empty. The rink was empty.
I checked my watch. Four ten. I was late by ten minutes, which meant he should have been here first.
I went to the locker room.
My gear was where I'd left it, piled in my stall with the taped sticks leaning against the wall beside it. I started pulling things down and putting them in my bag without really thinking about it, listening for the door. After a few minutes I crossed to Soren's stall.
The hook was bare. The shelf above it was clear.
His gear bag was gone, his skates were gone, the roll of stick tape he'd left wedged in the corner was gone.
Someone had run a cloth along the top shelf, too, wiping it down.
Even the small photograph he'd taped inside the door — the two of us at regionals sophomore year, arms around each other, both of us grinning like idiots — was gone.
I stood there for a long moment looking at the clean empty space.
Then I pulled out my phone and called him.
It rang once. Then the recorded voice came through flat and automated. “The number you have dialed is not in service. Please check the number and try your call again.”
I lowered the phone and looked at it. Called again. Got the same recording. The same automated flat voice saying the same words. Not voicemail picking up after a few rings. Not the phone ringing out to nothing. The number itself was gone, the account closed, the line cut.
That required a decision. That required planning.
I finished packing my gear. I didn't let myself sit down. I just pulled everything off the hooks and into the bag and walked out of the locker room and drove to his house.
I already knew before I turned onto his street. The driveway was empty in the way that driveways are empty when everyone is gone, not just out. Both cars missing. The windows bare, curtainless, the glass catching afternoon light and giving nothing back.
I parked and got out. Knocked on the front door and waited, then knocked again, and the sound came back hollow the way it does in empty rooms. I went around to the side of the house.
His bedroom window faced the back yard, and we'd gone in and out through that window more times than I could count.
The blinds were up now. The room was stripped bare.
No bed, no desk, no stack of games on the floor beside the dresser.
Just carpet and walls, and on the wall above where his dresser had been, a faint rectangular outline where the paint underneath was slightly less faded.
His Leafs poster. Twelve inches of unfaded paint where the poster had blocked the light for four years.
He'd taken the poster with him.
I put my palm flat against the glass. The cold went straight through.
The dinner at home lasted two hours. My mom had made lasagna and garlic bread and my Aunt Sarah was there and my Uncle Tom, and there were jokes and stories and several rounds of asking me about college in September and whether I was nervous or excited or ready.
I ate most of what was on my plate and said the things that were expected of me and laughed at the jokes in the right places.
Afterward I climbed the stairs to my room and sat on the edge of my bed in the dark with the diploma still in my hand.
The team photo from sophomore year was on the wall where it had always been.
Regionals, both of us post-win, my arm around his shoulder and his arm around mine, the kind of grinning that happens when you're seventeen and you've just won and the future seems like something you get to design for yourself.
I set the diploma on my desk and lay down on my back and stared at the ceiling.
There was an explanation I couldn't find.
There had to be one, because people didn't just make plans and then disappear without one.
People didn't pack up entire households in the week after graduation without saying a word, not to the person they'd eaten lunch with three days ago, not to the person who had been their best friend for years running.
There had to be something I'd missed. Some conversation I hadn't picked up on, some sign I'd let slide past me without registering its weight.
I picked up my phone. Pulled up Soren's contact and stared at his name for a long time.
I could call again. I already knew what I'd get.
I could text. I didn't know if it would send to a dead number or just vanish.
I put the phone down face-up on the nightstand and closed my eyes and waited for sleep that wasn't coming.
Outside my window the neighborhood was doing its normal nighttime things.
A car going by. A dog somewhere down the street.
The ordinary machinery of a world that hadn't noticed anything was wrong.
He'd made his choice. I didn't know why he'd made it, didn't know if it was about me or his family or something else entirely, didn't know if I'd said the wrong thing or missed the moment when saying the right thing might have mattered.
All I had was the empty locker stall and the bare window and that automated voice cutting the line before it even had a chance to ring.
Eventually I stopped trying to find the thing I'd done wrong and just lay in the dark and let the night run out.
I never called again.