I Know It's Over (9 page)

“Me too,” she said, after we’d inched apart. Her cheeks were flushed and she glanced guiltily at the door. “You make me crazy sometimes, you know that?” She pulled me back down towards her and kissed me again. She threw her whole body into it, pressing up against me like she couldn’t get enough. She tugged at my hair and licked my neck. She made
me
crazy, kissing me like that when we both knew I had to go.

“I make you crazy?” I repeated, breathing heavy. “I’m not the one holding everything back.”

“How am I supposed to feel when you say something like that?” she said, pulling away. “It sets the whole relationship up wrong. Like we’re on opposite sides.”

“Hey, it’s not like that. I’m just saying you could trust me a little.” I pinched the hem of her top between my fingers. “I don’t even know what you look like under this. Has anyone ever found out?”

Sasha furrowed her eyebrows like I’d just proven her point. “Why do you have to push it?”

“This is coming out wrong. I’m not trying to get you to do it.”
But we could be closer in other ways.
I didn’t say that last part. I dangled my hands at my sides and slowly exhaled. “It’s just…things were going really well earlier. I really like you. I guess that makes it hard for me to slow things down in my head.”

“You know how it is, Nick,” she insisted. “I really like you too, but I told you from the beginning—I’m not ready for all the heavy stuff yet. Why can’t we just hang out and enjoy whatever we’re doing without any pressure?”

“We can,” I said, and meant it. I knew I’d get home, replay the whole night in my head, and be completely pissed off with myself for opening my mouth in the first place. “You’re right. I don’t want there to be any pressure between us.” I kissed her on the forehead, innocent as could be. “Hey, what about the kid? Will he tell his parents?”

“I’ll tell him not to,” she assured me. “He’s okay. I think we’re safe.”

“Good. The last thing I need is to get in trouble for something I didn’t even finish.”

Sasha’s lips spread into a smile. She smacked her mouth against mine, then opened the front door. I grabbed my in-line skates and stepped outside thinking how things were never this confusing with Dani.
Pure. Unplanned. Perfect.
All hope of that had disappeared at the beginning of July. I bladed home, warm summer wind at my back, and let the good and bad feelings pile up on top of each other until I didn’t know what I was feeling, only that I couldn’t stop and that I wasn’t sure I’d want to, even if I could.

eight

Sasha was right
about fall. There was barely enough time for us. I had two hockey games a week, practice, shifts at Sports 2 Go, and a steadily increasing amount of homework. Sasha and I were in the same law class and she handed her homework over for me to copy at least once a week. At first I didn’t like doing it, not as a general thing but specifically because it was hers and I wasn’t into the idea of using my girlfriend. After a while it became almost a necessity, like the lying. Besides, I usually lent my math homework to Keelor, which balanced the whole arrangement in my head.

Holland had started at Courtland Secondary that September and sometimes I checked up on her in the hall. She was hanging around with a bunch of smart arty kids mostly—kids that’d probably devoured the Lord of the Rings trilogy in grade school and now wrote angst-filled poetry for their blogs. Holland refused to give me the Web address for hers. She said anonymity was the whole point, allowing her to say whatever she wanted. “So what’re you hiding?” I asked jokingly.

She stuck out her tongue at me and said, “You’ll never know.”

I figured it was nothing to worry about. She was a good kid. She could’ve been part of Sasha’s family if it weren’t for the rainbow-colored hair Mom had agreed to at the end of August.

One night, after a subdued Grayson-free shift at Sports 2 Go, I asked Holland what she thought of high school. “It’s the same old thing with a few new faces,” she said with a shrug. “Hannant is really good. You ever have him for history?”

“Nope.” That was the word around school, though, and it definitely wasn’t based on his looks. He was one of those guys who had a single thick eyebrow slashed across his face and furry, paw-like hands. “Raines is good too. Not by the book all the time, you know? Like she’s really into what she’s doing.”

“Yeah, I heard that,” Holland said. “Diego said she was the best teacher he had last year and that she had a book of poetry published a few years ago.”

“You know Diego?” The only Diego at Courtland Secondary was in twelfth grade. He had a heavy Italian accent and was the star of the school soccer team. We had a couple mutual friends and ran into each other at parties.

“Small school,” Holland said. “You know how it is—everybody knows everybody.” Yeah, and everybody definitely knew Diego. He was one of those guys all the girls wet their pants over. Last thing I heard he was acutely serious with some girl in Quebec, which seemed to make him all the more attractive to the female side of the student body.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Anyway, high school is just a stopover,” Holland added. “It has nothing to do with what’s really happening.”

“Let’s hope not,” I said grimly.

Holland cocked her head and gave me a funny look. “These are the best years of your life,” she said in an auditorium voice. Then the phone rang and she snapped it up and repeated it into the phone before pressing the receiver to her ear. “For you,” she said quickly, passing me the cordless.

“Nicholas, was that your sister?” Dad’s voice boomed.

“She’s a freak,” I confirmed.

Dad chuckled dryly into the phone. He never knew what to say when it came to Holland, not since she’d decided to ignore his existence. “How’s the hockey going?” he asked. “Keeping your head up?”

“You bet.”

“Good, good,” he said, an unmistakable spring in his voice. “I thought I’d come up and catch a game sometime. It seems like the only way to work myself into your busy schedule.”

“Really?” I asked doubtfully. “When?” Dad always made a big deal of trying to get me down to Toronto to visit him, but sitting around his condo, watching the sports network and wondering what everyone in Courtland was doing, got old fast. I’d spent thirty-six hours there in the middle of August, three and a half of which were spent in a French restaurant listening to Bridgette rave about the production of
Giselle
she’d seen two days earlier. Even Dad had looked bored.

“Well, what’s your game schedule look like?” Dad asked. I filled him in on the details and he said he’d come to my next home game. “I’d like to meet your girlfriend too,” he added. “Why don’t you ask her to come along?”

I didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm for that idea. I still felt weird about having Sasha around Mom and Holland. Don’t get me wrong, the three of them liked each other well enough; I was the problem. I’d never minded my friends and family mixing, but it was different with Sasha. She made me feel sort of exposed. In a way it was what I wanted, but I didn’t want to feel that with everyone. You had to protect yourself a little.

Sasha got all excited about meeting my dad, even though I’d already explained what he was like. “He’ll probably ask a lot of questions,” I warned. “Don’t feel like you have to answer everything. It’s just his way of trying to get a handle on you.”

“Why does he need a handle on me?” Sasha asked.

“I don’t know. To try and figure out why we’re together, maybe.” He was always trying to figure something out. I remember this fight he and Mom had when I was about eleven. We were on our way to Niagara Falls and disembodied eighties synth music was on the car radio. I hadn’t been listening to what my parents were saying, but then Mom’s voice spiked up: “It’s only ever your analysis of circumstances that matters, isn’t it? How do you keep from getting lost in your own bullshit?”

Dad had groaned noisily, rolling his eyes as if to say, “It’s not my fault that your mother’s emotionally unstable. I am clearly the voice of reason.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sasha said, grinning at me. “We’ll be evasive. Drive him crazy.”

I laughed, but I knew Sasha wouldn’t be like that on the day, that she’d probably answer just about any question he asked.

In fact, the questions started in the car with Dad projecting all his charm into the backseat. “Are you a hockey fan, Sasha?”

“Not much,” she admitted. “I like watching Nick play, though. He’s a great skater.”

“He should be. He’s been skating since he could walk.” Dad looked over at me approvingly. “Same thing with swimming.”

I mentioned Sasha’s interest in sailing and Dad launched into a full-blown Q&A that continued until we got to the arena. Nervous energy danced under my skin as I swung into the dressing room. Partly it was the upcoming game, which always made me a little edgy, even when we were playing a sloppy team like the Garrytown Braves. Mostly it was the thought of Dad and Sasha’s eyes on me and Sasha’s willingness to please. The potential free flow of information made me more uncomfortable than it should and I threw my hockey bag down on the floor and tried to clear my head of everything but the game.

Keelor was halfway through taping his stick, the first step in his pregame ritual. He raised his chin and said, “How’s the old man?”

“Same as always,” I confirmed. Keelor’s parents had been great about chauffeuring the two of us to and from games since Dad’s departure. Mom didn’t come close to pulling her weight in that department.

“Yeah?” Keelor said. “You’re lucky he’s not in the picture more often. Mine grounded me for life this morning.”

“What for?”

“The grass in my desk.” Keelor rolled his eyes. “Can you believe that? They went through my fucking desk. How’s that for trust?” I shook my head and unzipped my bag as Keelor continued. “They said I’ve been acting erratic lately.” He snickered. “Do I seem erratic to you?”

“Where’d they get that idea?” I asked. There were probably only three or four people I knew who didn’t seem erratic.

“That time with Karyn in the living room,” he reminded me. “And Bekker called my house about the geo classes I missed. Man, what a joke.” Geography was the one class you could normally skip without fear of retribution. Mrs. Bekker was this uncoordinated, walking disaster area of a woman with a bizarre mash-up accent that translated words into unintelligible sounds like:
highgraascoppik coeefishint.

“That’s rough, man. You should tell them you and Karyn are finished. It might help.”

“Oh, I told them,” he said forcefully. “Didn’t make any difference. I don’t even think they believed me.” It was the truth too. Funny how the people that have known you the longest can’t recognize the truth when they hear it. Maybe that meant I didn’t have anything to worry about with Sasha and Dad after all.

My head emptied out the moment I stepped onto the ice. Cold air rushed into my lungs and I forgot everything. Just us and the puck and the wide-awake feeling under my skin that said something real good was going to happen. Sometimes the game goes better when you’re feeling good and sure enough, I got an assist twelve minutes into the first period, feeding the puck to Keelor in the upper slot. He took a snap shot and scored the first goal in what ended up being a hat trick. The Braves drove him into the boards all night, but Keelor didn’t stop. He kept going to the net and so did I. I was just behind the goal line when I caught the Garrytown goalie napping and banked a shot in off his shoulder.

Back in the dressing room, Gavin, Keelor, and the rest of the team walked around slapping each other on the back, congratulating each other on the 4–1 win and talking about how the Braves couldn’t get it together out there on the ice.

“Nick, was that your dad out there?” Gavin called from across the room.

“He’s having a get-to-know-you session with Sasha,” Keelor confirmed. An elbow pad sailed through the air between us as Gavin groaned sympathetically. I lobbed the pad back in the general direction it’d come from and began unlacing my skates, in a hurry to get the rest of the night over with. At least Bridgette hadn’t made the trip. I didn’t think I could endure another ballet lecture, not politely anyway.

And polite I was, listening to Dad and Sasha chat about science, politics, and the depletion of the ozone layer. I dove in and out of the conversation while checking out the Toronto Maple Leafs game on the monitor across the restaurant. “Do you ever think of giving it up?” Dad said, suddenly focused on me. “Hockey seems to keep you very busy. You want to keep your grades up for university, you know.”

“I know that.” This was the part of the evening where he began to demonstrate fatherly concern for my well-being.
Got it, Dad. Could we move on to the next act?
“I’d give up my job before I’d give up hockey.”

“So why not do that?” he asked.

I focused a level gaze in his direction. “Because I need the money.” Mom’s job and the child support payments covered the basics, but since when did the basics get you anywhere?

Dad raised his eyebrows at me before shifting his gaze to Sasha. “Do you have a part-time job too?”

“I do a lot of babysitting,” Sasha piped up, “but the pay is lousy.”

“And there’s the sick kids and power saws,” I reminded her.

“Right,” Sasha said, eyes dancing. I asked her how our young friend Elijah was lately and for a few seconds it felt as though it was just the two of sitting there in that wooden booth, letting the conversation wander effortlessly back and forth between us. I actually missed her when Dad’s voice joined in again.

All in all, the evening wasn’t too bad. Things never go wrong at the moment you expect them to. When you’re completely relaxed, oblivious to any potential dangers, that’s when bad things happen. Someone should flick you in the head and tell you to keep your head up when they see you walking around like that.

Sasha’s parents insisted on having Dad in for coffee when we dropped her off. Mrs. Jasinski had a good look at him, like she was trying to memorize his features for a police description. “You two look so much alike,” she commented. “You must hear that all the time.”
Uh-huh.
Then Mr. Jasinski asked about Dad’s job as a city planner, which provided plenty of fuel for conversation.