Chapter 3
three
SLOANE
The student section is already a full-contact sport and the puck hasn’t even dropped yet.
I’m wedged between Ivy and a boy in a Halden Hockey beanie who has very strong opinions about how terrible the team’s backup goalie is. As Ivy and I try to have a conversation, The Den hums with noise and energy, and even though it’s a pre-season practice game, it feels like a playoff game.
“You are so overdressed,” Ivy says happily. She’s in a vintage Halden Ravens navy hoodie that’s two sizes too big over a skirt I could fit in a pocket. “Like, depressingly.”
“I’m not overdressed.” I look down at my outfit, pretend I don’t, and ultimately concede that I am overdressed. “This is a casual sweater.”
“A cashmere casual sweater…”
“It’s a blend.”
“Uh-huh.”
A group of boys behind us starts a Ravens chant, but it doesn’t catch.
“We should have sat in the upper rows,” I say, turning to look at them. “It feels a bit… overzealous… down here.”
Ivy scoffs like I’ve proposed attending mass. “It’s the student section. We’re students. This is where we’re supposed to be.”
“Hey, I can make my own decisions.” I bristle at her. “I don’t always need to go with the crowd…”
“Okay.” Ivy turns to me with the expression of someone about to deliver a performance review. “Let’s recap the week,” she says.
My brain serves up the courtyard boy again — Monday, the whole blue-eyes-and-chiseled torso combo, and two minutes of conversation. The moment has flashed back countless times this week, and I still don’t know what to think about that.
“Let’s not,” I say instead.
“Number of clubs joined, Sloane?”
“Four.” I set my jaw. “Which is a reasonable number.”
“Four in four days.”
“Spread across my interests.”
“Your interests.” She’s grinning. “Swimming… garden club… literary magazine…”
“I like plants… and books… and water…”
“Pre-law club.”
“I like… structure.”
“You’re not pre-law.”
“I’m open to it.”
“Sloane.”
“What.”
“How many times did you raise your hand in Intro Comm this week?”
I almost laugh, but I catch the laugh halfway and wrestle it down because the boy in the beanie has looked over and I don’t need an audience. I sit in the student section, perfectly pleasant, not standing out, or trying not to, anyway.
But Ivy saw it. “Oh,” she says. “There she is.”
“There’s who?” I sigh.
“That girl. The one who just laughed.”
“I didn’t laugh,” I say. “And I didn’t hear anyone laugh.”
“You laughed like a human, then you put her back in the box.” Ivy pokes my arm. “But I bet if you let her out, she’d admit she doesn’t like gardening or the literary magazine.”
“She’s super keen on locking herself into a pre-law path in the first week of freshman year, though,” I say, trying to deflect.
“Sloane.” Ivy raises an eyebrow. “Just be yourself.”
“I am being myself.” I smooth a crease in my jeans that doesn’t exist. “This version has better posture and fewer incidents.”
“You know what I think?” Ivy says, and her voice has dropped the teasing. “I think you’re so busy making sure nobody notices the real you that you won’t let yourself enjoy any of this.”
I don’t have a good answer, so I don’t give one, and Ivy lets it drop. Around us The Den keeps building: a pep-band drumline thudding, the lights sinking to deep navy, and the jumbotron flaring silver as the whole rink leans toward the tunnel, waiting.
But for some reason, I can’t keep from telling her. “The last time I let myself get excited about something in public, Ivy, it became a story people told at parties. So yes, I keep it all measured, I show up prepared, I do the work, and I don’t make a mess. And it’s worked well enough so far.”
She’s quiet for a moment — quieter than I’ve ever heard her — and then she sighs. “I know I barely know you, but that sounds like a leash, Sloane.”
“Let’s drop it.”
She holds my look, then lifts both hands. “Dropped.”
But as the house lights cut, I know she hasn’t dropped it. Not really. But dropped for now is good enough, and as The Den goes dark in one swallow, the crowd starts pounding the boards. Then a silver light rakes down the tunnel, music kicks, and the Ravens skate out.
I get actual goosebumps.
“Told you,” Ivy says, without looking.
“Shut up.”
And just like that, we’re fine.
During warmups, she leans forward on the railing, chin on her wrist, turning into a tour guide. She points out the assistant coach everyone swears is a sadist, then tells me the backup goalie — who Beanie Boy is still mocking — is a ladies’ man.
But when the game starts, she does something Ivy doesn’t do.
She goes quiet, watching the game with an expression that isn’t for me — the look of someone who grew up in rinks watching her brother. But when she catches me watching, she shakes it off and gestures at the ice.
“My brother’s there,” she says. “Hovering near the net and being responsible as always.”
I make a sympathetic noise and look, but don’t linger on him. I’ve been sorting Ivy’s mentions of her brother under responsible, older, boring — because Ivy communicates exclusively in adjectives and complaints — but he looks fast and powerful from up here.
The first period is fast. Faster than I thought hockey would be. Boys hit each other into the boards, and it sounds like furniture breaking. A whistle blows every now and then, for reasons I do not yet understand, and through it all I’m vibrating with second-hand adrenaline.
Then comes the hit.
It comes out of a scrum along the boards, right in front of us — there’s a tangle of jerseys, a Briarhaven forward gets the puck, and a Raven closes on him and buries him into the glass. The student section erupts, my hand rushes to my mouth, and I jump to my feet.
The Raven who threw the hit skates a tight circle and coasts back toward the bench, head down and not looking at the crowd. I let my eyes stay on him longer than I mean to, and it feels like someone is fanning the embers of a fire I thought had died last year.
But I let myself look, because nobody’s watching.
Nobody except Ivy.
I drop my hand from my mouth. “What.”
“Nothing.”
“Ivy.”
She’s grinning as she follows my eyeline out onto the ice, where the Raven in question glides to the bench, taking his time, and then she laughs — one short note, fond, almost pitying — and wraps her arms around me tight.
“That’s Rowan,” she says. “My brother.”
I glance at him for one more second — helmet, visor, number, nothing that would help me pick him out of a lineup — then at her, and the look in my eyes must be a dead giveaway. On the ice, Ivy’s brother sits on the bench, while beside me his sister reads my face.
“Oh,” Ivy says, watching me.
“It’s nothing,” I say.
“Mm.”
She leaves it there, turning back to the game, chin on her wrist. On the jumbotron, the hit plays again in slow motion, and I watch my roommate’s brother drive a boy into the glass for the second time in a few seconds, and my body does exactly what it did the first time.
Ivy hums beside me, but I don’t ask why.
It takes fifteen minutes just to make our way out of The Den.
As Ivy and I spill outside with the mass of humanity, a ragged chorus of the school fight song breaks out nearby.
Nobody’s taught me the words, but — somehow?
— Ivy knows them, and she blasts it out with her arm hooked through mine as we walk.
“Listen to me,” she says, when she’s done. “I need you to prepare.”
“For what?” I say.
“For the crushing disappointment of meeting my brother.”
“Ivy.”
“I’m serious.” She grabs my hand and pulls me to the side of the path, looking me square in the eye while others stream past. “I mean, I love him, but he’s the most insufferable person in our family, which is an extremely competitive field.
He answers texts with one word. He alphabetizes things.
He eats the same breakfast every single morning of his life. ”
“He alphabetizes?” I grin. “I like him already.”
“No!” She’s serious now in that Ivy way that always lasts three seconds before she flips back into teasing.
“And the rest of those hockey dorks will be in there with their chests out and their big fucking goofy grins because they won. So I just need you braced, Sloane. I need you to walk in with low expectations and promise not to hate me after the experience.”
“Ground floor expectations it is.” I laugh, not the big one, the manageable one.
“Lower. Basement.”
“Got it.”
We swing by Sterling to change first. I swap the cashmere blend for a more casual sweater, and Ivy changes out of her hoodie into a different hoodie that she insists is completely different, because it has a pocket.
The detour takes forty-five minutes, and when we’re ready, we walk to Maple & Main, our go-to coffee shop.
The number of students has thinned out by now, but there’s still excitement in the air. A pack of boys in Ravens jerseys jogs past, whooping, one of them stage-bowing at Ivy like she’s royalty, which, given her brother threw that hit, she kind of is.
I enjoy the walk — two friends arm in arm, a win behind us, coffee ahead — because this is the picture I’ve been trying to paint since I got here, and it’s starting to feel real. It feels like the plan is working, and I’m fitting in without standing out.
“Are you listening to me?” Ivy says, when she realizes I’m daydreaming.
I shrug. “Absolutely not.”
“Wounded,” she says. “We’re here.”
The door to Maple & Main swings open, and I’m hit by the scent of espresso and the chatter of a post-game crowd crammed into too few booths. The front windows are fogged, and behind the counter a milk steamer is screaming.
“No tables,” I say, looking around. “Should we go somewhere—”
“No,” Ivy says. “Hockey guys have a standing reservation.”
Ivy doesn’t leave room for questions. She’s already elbowing a path through the mass of students, so I follow her and see her wave at a long table in the corner, and my eyes follow her wave. Then my heart stumbles for three beats.