Chapter 12 He Always Had That Vibe, the Kind You Could Get Lost in, and I Guess I Did #2
Harper backs in. Getting out, my legs are pudding, and my stomach is a beehive. We’re late, but that’s why we’re lucky and there’s not much going on at the entrance. The girl at the front sells us two tickets and shoots me a sympathetic look—my skin color must not look all that healthy.
“Harper,” I whisper as I hurry after her down the hall. “Is my face green?”
She turns. “A bit. If you talk to Paxton, try not to be standing under one of these terrible neon lights. Otherwise, it won’t be noticeable at all.”
“Sweet. Next Halloween we’ll be the perfect team, a lobster and the Incredible Hulk.”
“I think we need to go down here.”
We come into a huge entrance hall where various drink stalls are set up in preparation for the onslaught during the break.
Several digital advertising pillars are towering up toward the ceiling, each of them showing a different team member’s face.
The one of Wyatt lights up next to a drinks stand with Bud Light signs.
He’s grinning, a dimple to the left, a dimple to the right, beneath his arm a helmet, his shoulders puffed up thanks to the thick pads underneath his jersey.
His number has been sewn on with white thread and stands out against the green fabric.
My footsteps fade as I come to a stop. Harper is already about ten feet ahead before she notices and turns around. She follows my glance, exhales, and comes back. She puts her fingers on my upper arm. “Aria.” Her voice is soft. Caring. Compassionate.
“His number.” I have to clear my throat to get rid of the lump. It doesn’t really work.. “He chose the number twelve.”
Squinting, Harper looks from me up to his picture and back. “I don’t get it. Why’s that important?”
Because it’s all I’ve got left.
“We got together in December. December 12, 2012. Afterward, he changed his number from seven to twelve and said… He said…”
Harper presses my arm. “What did he say?”
I take a deep breath. It hurts to think about, but talking about it is even worse. “That’s for forever, Aria. Just like us.”
Silence, broken only by our breaths, mine choppy, hers slow.
“I’m sorry,” she says eventually and sighs. “But he was the one who didn’t want any more of forever, A. Don’t forget that.”
That’s something I’ll never be able to forget, Harp. Never.
“Yeah. But… He could have changed it. The number, I mean. After everything was over.”
She shrugs. “Habit?”
“Maybe.” My eyes bore into the digital reproduction of my ex’s face.
It hurts so bad; I want to scream and cry and rage.
Why did he have to do that? Why wasn’t what we had enough for him?
Why did he take my heart and break it? Well, not simply break it but cut it into pieces, throw it away, and leave it behind as an empty shell?
Six years tossed away just like that, in a single night, in one single night.
I take a deep breath, then turn away from the picture, look up, and move toward the big double doors to our left. “Come on. Let’s go find seats.”
Harper follows. Opening the door and stepping into the arena, I’m met by a blast of cold air. It is ear-splittingly loud. The fans are screaming; the red folding seats are completely full. Players in green jerseys are racing across the ice and playing the puck so quickly that I can hardly keep up.
“No chance!” Harper bellows. “I think we’re going to have to stand!”
“I don’t want to stand!” I yell back. “It’s cold!”
“It’s going to be cold if you sit down, too, fool. Whatever, let’s go down there, by the players’ entrance, behind the penalty box; it looks like there might be a few seats there.”
“Fine.”
To be honest, I don’t think we’re really allowed to be here, but at least we’ve got a really good view. We’re right behind the plexiglass and next to the tunnel that leads to the locker rooms.
“Cool.” Harper rubs her hands together and blows into her palms. “During the break they’re going to come this way. Most of the time, they stop to talk with fans. And that’s when you’re going to snatch Paxton, got it?”
The girl next to us casts Harper a dismissive glance that says as much as, Hands off Paxton, bitch!
“I’ll try.”
Harper looks content. “Now let’s pay attention to the game. I haven’t been to a game in years. I don’t even know what you’re supposed to yell.”
“I don’t yell,” I protest right as a player zips past us, skillfully avoiding a defenseman.
I notice him because the way he pulls off the quick change of direction seems familiar.
His taunting way of moving about the ice.
His self-assurance of movement. As if he knew exactly what he could do, how to play the puck, confuse his opponents, and wear them down.
As if he knew he was the best. Something’s tugging at my memories, reminding me of something I buried long ago and never wanted to bring back up to the light.
But my mind is remote-controlled; it forces my eyes to focus and understand the player’s number. All the same, the information reaches my brain in fragments.
Twelve.
Wyatt.
Wyatt’s number twelve.
That’s him. It’s him.
Oh. My. God.
I clamp my hand over my mouth and stagger back a few steps but end up bumping into the scowler and have to stay where I am.
It’s not like I haven’t seen Wyatt since being back in Aspen, but this…
slays me. This is like someone ramming a drill into my chest, pounding memories and emotions into my head, each and every blow causing me such violent pain that I feel sick and start to see black dots while all the shouts in the rink swell into a single noise.
Out on the ice, Wyatt symbolizes everything we were because this is exactly how things got started. Between us. Back in high school.
“Hey, Moore,” he’d said, by my locker, his baseball hat on backward even though we weren’t allowed to wear hats in the first place.
He didn’t care. Wyatt always wore them. And whenever Principal Johnson took it away from him, he’d show up the next day with a new one.
Wyatt smiled at me, backpack hanging off a single shoulder, wearing his Aspen High hockey jacket.
“You coming to my hockey game this weekend?”
“Why should I?” I asked, trying to play it cool, while inside I was completely done, my head a simple loop of Lopez, Lopez, Lopez, oh my God, Lopez, Lopez, Lopez.
“Because I want to make a bet with you. I know you like betting.”
“Whatever.” I closed my locker, American history books in my arm, and simply looked at him because that’s what I wanted to do, look at him, madly, for hours, maybe even forever.
He laughed. “Not. At Will’s last fundraiser, you bought tickets all day long even though the prize was simply a bunch of painted stones.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. I watched you.”
“The whole time?”
He didn’t even bat an eye. “The whole time.”
And so I asked, “What kind of bet?” and he said, real cool, real self-confident, as if he knew what I was thinking, as if he knew that night after night I would lie in my bed staring at the ceiling, whispering Lopez, Lopez, Lopez until I fell asleep.
“If I score a goal, I’m going to ask you out.
Out there in the middle of the ice, in front of everyone. And if I don’t, I’ll leave you alone.”
At that second my heart decided to slide into my pants. I still remember how out of breath I was even though I was simply standing there with my books in my arm.
“You could just do it now,” I answered, scared shitless that he wouldn’t get a goal and really would leave me alone.
It would have been a disaster not to find any more notes in my locker saying that he liked the way my hair shone, that I had the most beautiful freckles in the world, or that he got dizzy whenever he looked at my legs because they reached all the way up to the sky and he was afraid of heights.
He had tilted his head and grinned, and how, with those dimples of his and that face that was the cause of numerous crying fits in the girls’ bathrooms.
“But you could say no.”
“I could do that in the rink, too.”
He laughed that raw laugh of his that stole into my heart forever. “We both know you would never do that in front of all those people.”
He was right.
“That’s your plan?”
“That’s my plan.”
Then I was the one who had to grin. “Make that goal, Wyatt Lopez.”
It was a relief to say his name after it had been on my lips for so many months.
He made the goal. And asked me out in front of everyone, right out there on the ice. He roared it. After that, we were together every single day.
We were Wyatt and Aria.
And now we’re nothing.
He races past me, full of self-confidence, full of energy, as sure of scoring a goal as he was back then.
But then he catches sight of me, grinds his skates into the ice, and comes to a stop.
Just like that. He loses the puck. Just like that.
He stares at me, everything like it was before, but shocked now, as if we were fourteen again. But as if this time I’d said no.
I stare back.
Just like that.