8. Chapter Eight
Aspen
I wake before the sun comes up and roll out of bed.
The first thing I do is get coffee, and then I trail back to my bedroom and sit at my desk.
I open my laptop and start with homework.
I love a good Sunday. It’s the perfect day to relax and do nothing.
I get to lie around and reset for the week.
Eventually, I take my laptop to my bed and stretch across my comforter.
My coffee goes cold, and the sun rises, so I get up and start cleaning my room.
I glance at Stanley’s hockey stick near my closet door. I don’t really know what I’m doing with it, transferring it between my car and my room over and over. And it’s crazy that he doesn’t seem to mind –– at least he’s acting that way, so I’m going to draw this out to see what’ll happen.
Once all my clothes are folded and put away neatly, I reach for my curtains because there’s enough sunlight to fill the room. As soon as I pull the curtain back, I jump.
Stanley Ermington’s face is taped to the outside of my glass.
Six times.
Six laminated copies of the same photo — a magazine shoot, a real one, the man holding a hockey stick and staring directly into my bedroom at eight in the morning — pressed flat to my window in a neat grid, top corners and bottom corners, taped down so the wind wouldn’t take them.
My brain does nothing at all for a second. Total static. And then it catches up to my eyes, and I step back from the window.
And I laugh. Out loud. A real one. I clap a hand over my own mouth, because what in God’s name am I doing laughing at this? This is psychotic behavior. This is a man who needs a restraining order and a hobby.
I step up to the glass and read it.
MISSING.
Last seen Friday night, Camden Arena. Believed to be taken by a known accomplice operating out of Hawthorne Street.
REWARD: A moment of my time.
“Asshole.”
He is so unbelievably arrogant that I almost have to admire the engineering of it.
I grab my hoodie and throw it on. I pull up my sweats and march outside barefoot.
I peel all six laminated papers off my window.
The lamination does it for me. He knew they’d get wet in this weather.
He was fully committed to the crime, and when did he put them up? When I was asleep. Ooh, that creep!
Then I think better of it. This could be worse, I think, gathering the stack. He could’ve taken something. He could’ve done anything, and this is what he chose to do.
I bring all six inside and walk straight to my room. I don’t crumple them, and I don’t throw them out. I stack them, square the edges, and set the little pile on my desk — right next to the framed photo of my father with the Cup over his head.
And I stand there a second and look at his stick, leaning by the wall. Then my eyes dart to six of his grinning faces on my desk.
I sit down on the edge of my bed and breathe.
I wonder, for one honest second, whether I went too far. Whether the stick was a mistake.
Then I remember the way he played last night — the points, the new stick, the two fingers he pointed at it across the ice like he was thanking me — and I stop wondering.
He isn’t bothered. He has never been bothered by anything in his entire charmed life.
The stick didn’t wound him; it apparently upgraded him.
So we’re even on that. Maybe.
I pick up my phone from the nightstand.
Four unread from Ermington.
Ermington: How’s my new tenant settling in?
Ermington: Take notes for me, princess. There’s gonna be a quiz.
Ermington: For your reports.
Ermington: Linwood_Game1_FullTape.mp4
I stare at the file for a long moment.
I don’t open it. I don’t respond, and not because I can’t think of anything cutting.
I could write three sentences right now that would ruin his whole Sunday.
Silence is the better weapon. He’s a man who lives on attention the way the rest of us live on oxygen, and the single most devastating thing I can do is give him none of it.
Let him sit three doors down with absolute certainty that he’s winning and let the quiet do the work.
I chug the rest of my coffee and decide I need more if I’m going to function properly today.
The kitchen smells like coffee and the day is truly ordinary.
Kirra’s at the counter with a bowl of oatmeal, and Bree’s beside her with her laptop open.
We have another roommate, but she has a boyfriend, so she’s never home.
I pour myself a second cup of coffee and set my own oats going in the microwave.
“So,” Bree says, closing her laptop. “Last night.”
I shake my head. “No.”
Kirra lifts her spoon and points it at me. “Was that Stanley Ermington standing in your bedroom at midnight, or did I dream it?”
“He was leaving.”
“What happened?”
“He was drunk.” I take my oatmeal out and stir it. “And bored.”
Bree laughs into her coffee. Kirra raises her eyebrows.
“What’re you guys working on today?” I ask, changing the subject.
Bree’s group project is being held hostage by a man named Tyler who hasn’t opened the shared doc in nine days. Kirra’s going to Sunday yoga at eleven and wants to know if the studio validates parking.
“Oh —” Kirra turns to me. “There’s a thing next weekend. My cousin’s friend knows the people throwing it. It’s supposed to be huge. You should come, it’ll actually be fun.”
“No, thanks,” I say, before the sentence is even finished.
Kirra shrugs and lets it go, and the morning rolls on.
Back in my room, I have my laptop open. I focus on work next. I clear my paid assignment first — an hour of tagging, zone entries, type and side and result, clean and fast. Then I open the file I actually dread, which is the one my father wants. The Ermington report.
And there’s the irony, sitting right in my lap: the man who laminated his own face and taped it to my window before sunrise is now, for the next twenty minutes, my professional subject.
I have been assigned to watch Stanley Ermington by my father, who loves him, and Stanley –– knows.
Take notes for me, princess. There’s gonna be a quiz.
For your reports. He knows exactly why I’m at every game.
I haven’t told him, so I wonder if he speaks to my dad often.
I actually haven’t asked. That would be weird.
Wait, would it be weird? He trained Stanley over the summer, so maybe it wouldn’t be weird if they talked. I don’t know.
I make myself focus on the tape and not the texts. And the maddening, undeniable thing is that he is such a good hockey player. Better than good. So I type what’s true, because I will not let him turn me into a liar even in my own private war.
Player 11 — 1G, 1A. Strong rush instincts. Excellent puck movement in transition. Reads pressure two steps ahead.
I look at the word excellent.
I delete it and type competent. I look at competent, and it’s a lie, and I delete it. I type the word excellent again and leave it there.
I reach over to my desk and grab the paperback from my drawer. I need something to distract myself for a few minutes, but I’m barely reading the words on the page. The video is running in my mind on a loop.
I get two pages in, and my phone rings.
“Hi, Mom,” I say, answering her call. And I’m thankful for the distraction.
“Hi, sweetheart.” Her voice comes through warm and a little far away, the way it always does, like she’s holding the phone slightly off her ear while she does three other things. “Is this a bad time? You’re not studying?”
“I was just taking a break, reading a book. How are you?”
“Oh, fine, fine. How’s school? How are the girls — Kirra, Bree, and Lily?”
“School’s good. The girls are doing well.” I lean back against my headboard. “Bree’s doing a group project that’s slowly killing her.”
“Aren’t they always.” A little laugh. Then, lighter, the way she passes things along, “Your father called from the hotel last night. He’s so proud of how hard you’re working out there, honey. He said so twice.”
My stomach does a small thing it has no business doing, a quick clench and release, because proud of how hard you’re working is not the same sentence as proud of you, and I have spent my whole life parsing the difference.
And this is my mother. She tends to fib to make me feel better about things.
“That’s nice.”
“He said the Ermington boy is playing well. You’re keeping track of him for your father, aren’t you?”
I’m instantly annoyed but hide it. “Yeah, I’m tracking him.”
“Your father thinks the world of that boy.”
“I’m aware,” I say, in the exact same voice.
“Mm.” A pause, and I can hear her turn down a radio or a kettle, settling in. “And how are you doing, sweetheart? Not the work. You.”
I freeze for a second with the phone against my ear.
Because nobody asks me that. My father asks about the reports.
My roommates ask about my plans. The men on the Tuesday call ask what I noticed.
My own mother is the only person in my entire life who asks how I am, the actual me, separate from what I produce — and the terrible, tender thing about it is that even she doesn’t quite know what to do with the answer if I ever gave her a real one.
We’ve never built the muscle for it, the two of us.
She asks the door, and I keep it shut, and we both call that closeness.
“I’m good, Mom.”
“Okay, honey,” she says.
And she doesn’t push. That’s the wound and the gift of her, all in one breath. She will always ask, and she will never make me answer. I have never once had a word for how much I love her and how alone that particular kindness has always left me feeling.
We talk for ten more minutes about nothing that matters and everything that’s safe — a soup she’s making, a novel she can’t get into, the church organist who quit in a huff over the hymn selection.
Then she tells me she loves me, and I tell her I love her too.
I mean it more than I can say in the format we’ve agreed to use, and I hang up.
Then I get back to studying.
By evening, I’ve cleared everything. Homework. The paid assignment. And last, the Ermington report, polished and flattering and true, which I attach to an email and send to my father.
Sent.
I close the laptop and lie back on my bed in the dark with my phone in my hand, and the thread with him is right there, and the file is right there.
Linwood_Game1_FullTape.mp4.
I open it.
Five seconds. Just to see what he sent. Just to know.
It’s the broadcast cut from Friday — Friday, the night I took the stick, which is its own little needle — trimmed clean and tight, his shifts strung together from the angle behind the bench.
And I watch, and I keep waiting for it, the reason a man like him would send a girl a tape.
It must be the reaction shot. Me in row three, frozen, white-knuckling my phone while he drew in the air at me.
The humiliation, served back to me on a platter, for your reports.
It never comes.
Every shot of the crowd on the blue-line side has been cut. Every angle that would’ve caught row three is gone. He didn’t send me the tape of my worst thirty seconds. He went through and took me out of it, on purpose, and left only the hockey.
I watch forty seconds of clean, anonymous footage and then I close it and lie there staring at the ceiling.
Because that’s the third one now. The closet he didn’t push past. The photo he set down gently.
And now a tape with me carefully, deliberately edited out of it — a small, quiet, infuriating consideration dressed up as a taunt, and I do not know what to do with a single one of them, because none of them belong to the man I thought he was.
I have no idea what to do about the damn stick. If I give it back, it looks like I came to collect the reward, and I would rather die in this bed than let him think I want a moment of his time. I roll my eyes. He knows how to take a situation and make it worse.
At midnight, I’m still awake, so I get up. I cross to the desk in the dark. I pick up the top poster. His smirk. Last seen Friday night, Camden Arena. Reward: a moment of my time.
I take a Sharpie out of the desk drawer, and I uncap it, then across his perfect, laminated face, in block letters I can press hard enough to feel, I write two letters.
NO.
I put it back on top of the stack.
And I go to sleep.