10. Sloane
Sloane
Ilock up the shop at five-thirty, walk home, and find my house already in a state.
The Sailmaker has a particular energy on a game night, which I have witnessed but never been a participant in until now.
Wren is in the front hall doing something aggressive with her jacket zipper.
Margo is on the stairs in a Whitmore tee she has somehow tailored to look intentional.
June is on the sofa with her shoes already on and her book still open, holding the exact posture of a person who has been ready for twenty minutes and is choosing to spend the wait reading rather than acknowledge that anyone else is running late.
“It’s not fair,” Wren says, by way of greeting, “and I want that on the record.”
I drop my bag by the sofa. “What isn’t fair?”
“Their game is televised.” She gets the zipper to cooperate.
“Ours aren’t. It’s an exhibition. It doesn’t count for anything and there’s a camera crew and a broadcast slot and a graphics package, and our games — which count — get a livestream that buffers if more than nine people watch it.
” She pulls her hair into the braid she wears for everything.
“I scored a hat trick against Boston College last February and the footage cut out during the second one. So the official record shows two.”
“That’s genuinely infuriating,” June says, not looking up.
“Thank you, June.”
“I’m agreeing with you.”
“I know. It’s the only reason I haven’t left without all of you.”
Margo comes down the last three stairs. “We have ages. Sloane just got home.” She looks at me. “You’re not changing, are you?”
“I’m wearing a sweater. It’s a hockey game, not a gala.”
“I’m not judging, I’m gathering information.” Which is a Margo sentence if I’ve ever heard one.
June marks her page — finally — and holds up her phone as I sit to swap my work boots for the ones I can walk in. “Did you see, the one everyone’s losing it over got a sequel deal. The fae one. With the —” she gestures vaguely “— the wings situation.”
“I saw. Margaret’s ordering forty copies.”
“Forty.”
“I told her thirty and she said forty because she trusts my read and also because she watched a woman buy six copies of the same book last week to give to what she described as ‘my entire wine group.’” I get the second boot on.
“We’re doing a whole section now. BookTok.
I made her a little sign. She pretended to hate the sign. ”
“She loved the sign.”
“She loved the sign. She’s already telling customers it was her idea.”
June makes the soft pleased sound she makes about books, and Wren makes the impatient sound she makes about everything, and we’re finally moving toward the door when my phone buzzes in my pocket.
I check it on the porch.
You coming tonight?
I look at it for a second longer than the question requires, and it takes me a moment to realize who the text is from Beau. I sigh and sace his number, knowing I’ll need it if we’re going to run this plan right.
On my way.
The reply comes fast, like he was holding the phone.
Beau
Good. There are 4 seats reserved for you and your friends. Behind the home bench.
I stop on the bottom porch step.
That’s presumptuous.
Beau
I know what I want.
I read it twice. There is no good reason for three words to do anything to a person, and I would like to formally note, for the sealed internal record, that they do not do anything to me.
The warmth that moves up the side of my neck is a circulation event.
It is September. The evening is cool. My body is regulating.
“Why are you smiling like that?” Margo asks.
“I’m not smiling.”
“You’re smiling like a girl in a commercial for allergy medication. All soft-focus. What did he say?”
I give her the look. She knows the look.
The look means not in front of them, and Margo — who is the only one who knows about any of this, because we agreed to keep it from Wren and June specifically on the grounds that they will, with the best intentions and approximately four combined hours of argument, try to talk me out of it — reads the look and arranges her face into something innocent that fools no one and is not meant to.
“We have seats,” I tell the group. “Behind Whitmore’s bench.”
Wren’s eyebrows go up. “Behind the bench? How?”
“Margaret,” I say, which is the kind of lie that is also a load-bearing truth, because Margaret would absolutely take credit, and because Wren accepts it instantly, the way you accept any explanation involving Margaret Sorensen and the unreasonable reach of a woman who has run a bookshop in this town for forty years.
We follow the crowd up toward campus.
Corbin Arena — the Nest, everyone calls it, and you can hear the capital letter when they say it — sits at the east edge of campus, and on a game night it does a thing to the whole approach.
The lit-up entrance, the crowd thickening as you get closer, the smell that I will learn is the smell of every rink everywhere: cold air and rubber and concession sugar and something underneath that’s just ice, a clean mineral nothing of a smell that I’ve only ever encountered at Wren’s games and that I associate, against all logic, with my brother.
Danny played in high school. Not seriously — small town, small program — but he played, and for two winters before he left, the only reliable warmth in my week was sitting in a freezing set of bleachers watching him do the one thing that made him uncomplicated.
I was nine, ten. I didn’t understand the game.
I understood that he was happy out there in a way he wasn’t anywhere else, and that being near it meant being near the happy version of him.
I have not thought about that in a long time. The rink smell pulls it up whole, the way smells do, and I fold it and set it by the door, because tonight is not for that.
We get sodas. Margo gets one for the experience and abandons it within ninety seconds because her hands need to be free for what is clearly going to be a full-body spectating effort.
We find the seats — and they are exactly where he said, four together, right behind the home bench, close enough to the glass that I can feel the cold coming off the ice.
Down on the rink, the Ravens are warming up.
And there’s Beau. Number Eleven.
I find him without trying to. He’s in motion — easy, unhurried, carving long lazy arcs through the warmup with a few teammates, stick-handling a puck like it’s attached to him by a thread only he can see.
I’ve watched enough of Wren’s games to know what competence looks like on the ice.
This is past competence. This is the thing Margaret means when she talks about him, the thing the whole campus means — he looks, even at quarter-speed, even joking with the guy next to him, like the ice is a place he was assembled for.
He hasn’t seen me yet.
I’m aware that I’m glad he hasn’t seen me yet, because it means I get to watch without being watched, which is the arrangement I prefer in all things and have built a personality around.
“This is the best part,” Margo says, vibrating.
“The energy before. Feel it? The whole building’s holding its breath.
” She’s already half out of her seat, reading the crowd the way she reads a room, feeding on it — the cheerleader in her doesn’t switch off just because she’s in the stands.
“God, I love this. Don’t tell the football team. ”
The lights do their thing. The anthem happens. The puck drops.
And Beau Sorensen wins the faceoff before I’ve fully understood that the game has started.
I don’t have the vocabulary Wren has, but I have eyes, and what I’m watching is one team that has decided the outcome and another team that is still negotiating with the possibility.
Whitmore moves like a single organism with Beau somewhere near the center of it — not the loudest player, not the showiest, but the one everything seems to route through, the still point the speed organizes around.
He wins another faceoff. Then another. There’s a rhythm to it I find unreasonably satisfying, the clean mechanical yes of him dropping his stick and the puck simply becoming Whitmore’s, over and over, like a fact being restated.
“Number nineteen is Cash,” Wren narrates, because Wren cannot watch a game without coaching it.
“He’s reckless but he’s fast, watch — there, see, that’s a stupid pinch and it worked, which is the most Cash thing that exists.
And twenty-two is Wyatt, the big one, he’s solid, he’s the one who actually helps the freshmen instead of yelling at them.
And four —” she points “— that’s Theo. Mercer. ”
Margo, who has been relatively contained for a full six minutes, perks up. “Which one’s Theo again?”
“Four. The defenseman who looks like he’s filing a complaint with the universe.”
“He’s very —” Margo tilts her head. “Tall.”
“He’s a grump,” Wren says, with the authority of someone who has shared an athletics complex with him for two years.
“Dual major, which nobody believes when they look at him — game development and creative writing, which is an insane combination, so he’s either going to design video games or write novels, and he’s good enough at hockey that he might not have to do either.
Scouts come for him. He acts like he doesn’t notice them, which is its own kind of arrogance.
” She shrugs. “He helped me carry equipment once and didn’t say a single word the entire time. Just carried it. Then left.”
“Huh,” Margo says, in a tone I clock and decide is none of my business, and file anyway, because old habits.
I tune them out.
I keep my eyes on Beau.