17. Lucy
LUCY
THEN
While my mother packed twenty years of our family into cardboard boxes, Naomi and I stood in a line wrapped halfway around North Metro Arena and pretended the cold was our biggest problem.
“I thought you said Marion saved us seats,” Naomi sniffled, pulling the collar of her coat higher over her mouth.
“She did.”
“Inside?”
“That is generally where arena seats are located.”
Naomi narrowed her eyes at me through the strands of dark-blond hair escaping her knit hat. “I’m trying to determine whether we’ll reach them before graduation.”
The line moved another three feet.
Around us, the parking lot had disappeared beneath rows of cars, school buses, and television vans with satellite dishes rising from their roofs.
A police officer in a reflective vest directed traffic near the entrance while another tried unsuccessfully to stop a group of Northbend students from climbing onto the base of a light pole to hang a navy banner.
The banner read FINISH IT in white block letters large enough to be seen from the highway.
Across the lot, Eden Prairie students poured from two buses dressed in black and red, already chanting loudly enough to make several Northbend parents glare in their direction.
This did not feel like high school hockey. It felt like the entire state had been waiting for this game all winter.
Naomi followed my gaze toward the television crew setting up near the main entrance. “You neglected to mention there would be cameras.”
“I didn’t know.”
“That man has an earpiece,” she gasped dramatically, pointing to a news crewman setting up a large tripod.
“I can see that.”
“High school sporting events should not require communication technology normally used by the Secret Service.”
A laugh escaped me, brief and visible in the freezing air.
Naomi looked at me instantly. Not because the joke had been particularly funny. Because she had been monitoring me since she picked me up.
She had not called it monitoring. Naomi would have described it as driving her emotionally compromised best friend to a hockey game because allowing me behind the wheel while my mother dismantled our home seemed irresponsible.
I had called her dramatic. Then I had checked my phone eleven times during the drive.
The screen remained dark inside my coat pocket now.
No missed calls. No new messages. Nothing from my mother telling me she had changed her mind.
Nothing from her explaining why she had chosen this weekend, while Dad was traveling with the Frosthawks, to begin moving her things into an apartment across town.
She had told me that morning. Not asked me to sit down.
Not tried to soften it. She had stood at the kitchen counter with both hands wrapped around a mug she was not drinking from and said she and Dad had been having problems for a long time.
She said they had tried. She said nobody had done anything wrong.
Then my mother explained she would be gone before he returned Sunday night. I had nodded because she kept looking at me like she needed permission.
Afterward, I had gone upstairs and stared at Ty’s name on my phone for almost ten minutes.
He had sent me a message before his team meeting:
Big night. Try not to miss me too much before warmups.
Then another thirty seconds later:
Actually you can miss me a normal amount. Builds character.
I had typed three different responses before settling.
Focus on hockey, Burns.
Bossy. Hot. Motivating.
Two days ago, he had held me in the dark inside Betsy and told me he had loved me since he was fifteen.
This morning, my mother had told me love was not always enough to make people stay.
I had not known how to place those two truths inside the same body.
So I had told Naomi.
Because Ty had spent his entire life preparing for nights like this, even before any of us understood they were coming. I could tell him tomorrow. Or Sunday. Or after Dad came home and our family officially became whatever it was becoming.
Tonight belonged to him. I could survive one night without asking him to hold something that had nothing to do with hockey.
Naomi bumped her shoulder carefully against mine. “You’re doing it again.”
I dragged my attention back to the entrance. “Doing what?”
“Leaving without physically going anywhere.”
“I’m standing right beside you.”
“Your body is. The rest of you has been staring off into the nether since Maple Grove.”
“I’m fine.”
We reached the arena doors nearly twenty minutes before warmups. The moment they opened, sound slammed into us.
Voices rose toward steel rafters in one continuous roar.
The Northbend pep band played somewhere beyond the concourse, brass notes colliding with the Eden Prairie drumline at the opposite end of the building.
The Zamboni rumbled behind the closed rink doors.
Vendors shouted over one another while students rushed past carrying signs, foam fingers, and enormous paper bags of popcorn that arena staff were pretending not to notice.
Blue-and-white streamers hung from the second-level railing on one side of the building. Black and red covered the other. Every section appeared full.
People stood two deep along the upper concourse behind the final row of seats. Local reporters had claimed an entire platform near center ice. Camera operators adjusted equipment beneath the press box while an announcer tested the microphone, his voice rolling through the building in broken pieces.
“Lucy.”
I turned.
Marion Burns stood several yards away beneath a sign marking Section 114, one hand lifted above the crowd. A stainless-steel thermos was tucked against her side beneath one arm, and two knitted scarves hung over the other.
Relief moved through me before I could stop it. Not because I had been worried about finding the seats. Because Marion always looked like the person you found when everything else became too loud.
“There you are.” She reached us and swiftly pulled me into a hug, pressing her cheek briefly against my cold hair. “I was beginning to think the parking lot swallowed you.” Marion laughed at herself and drew Naomi into a hug too. “I’m glad you came, honey.”
“Lucy promised snacks.”
“Well, good,” Marion said. “Ruth brought enough food for the county.”
“Wonderful!”
Marion turned toward me again and wrapped one of the scarves around my neck before I could object. Navy wool settled over my coat, warm from wherever she had been carrying it. NORTHBEND had been stitched across one end in white thread.
“You don’t have to keep dressing me,” I told her.
“You came into a hockey arena wearing green.”
“It is a coat.”
“It is the wrong coat.”
Naomi nodded solemnly. “She embarrassed us both.”
“You are also wearing green.”
“I’m not dating the star player.”
Heat climbed into my cheeks so quickly that Marion’s smile softened. That had been happening since my birthday. Not the blushing. Unfortunately, Ty had been causing that for years. The noticing.
Every time someone said his name, my body remembered something before my mind could stop it.
The careful pressure of his hands at my waist. His breath against my skin.
The quiet break in his voice when he told me he loved me.
The way he had looked at me afterward, almost startled by the fact that I was still there.
We had talked about it the following afternoon during the twenty-three minutes we managed to steal inside Betsy before his practice. Not in detail. Neither of us had been capable of that without becoming painfully awkward.
No regrets.
No pretending it had been casual.
No acting as though saying I love you had belonged only to the dark.
Ty had kissed me slowly afterward, one hand resting against the side of my neck, and asked twice whether I was sure I was okay.
Then he had looked so relieved when I said yes that something inside me had settled.
Now Marion studied me for half a second longer than usual.
I resisted the urge to touch my face. There was no possible way mothers could tell. Probably.
Her expression remained warm but oddly thoughtful as she looped her arm through mine. “Come on. Your grandmother has been defending your seats like property rights are involved.”
“My grandmother?”
Marion gave me a small squeeze. “You know what I mean.”
The words landed somewhere tender before I could prepare for them. She did not appear to notice. Or perhaps she noticed and understood enough not to make me acknowledge it in the middle of a crowded concourse.
We followed Mrs. Burns down the steps toward the lower bowl.
The ice opened beneath us, white and impossibly bright beneath the arena lights.
The Northbend student section occupied the entire end behind one goal, already dancing in uneven rows while the band stumbled through the school fight song for what sounded like the third consecutive time.
Half the students held popcorn bags. The arena had technically banned the tradition last season after someone threw an unopened box instead of a handful and nearly hit an official. The ban had not survived contact with Northbend High.
“They’re going to throw that onto the ice, aren’t they?” Naomi asked.
“Only after we score.”
“Why?”
“Tradition.”
“Who cleans it up?”
“The freshmen who didn’t make varsity.”
She stopped walking. “You’re joking.”
“Mostly.”
“This entire town needs supervision.”
“I’ve been saying that for years.”
Our section sat several rows above the glass near Northbend’s blue line. Marion had not simply saved two seats. The Burnses had occupied a complete block of them.
Kendrick, Hal, Fraser, and Thane sat across the back row.
Kendrick had stretched one arm along the empty seat beside him while speaking to Hal, who held a folded paper roster on one knee and a sharpened pencil in his large, weathered hand.
Fraser sat forward with his elbows braced on his thighs, his attention already fixed on the empty Northbend bench.