Twenty Miles (13 page)

Boz leaned forward. ‘Oh, babe, I’m sorry I brought it up. I just didn’t want to say ‘because I love it.’ I’m sorry. I’m disturbing you.’

‘No worries, no. You’re not disturbing me. Yes, I’d trade. I’d – I’d give up the finger.’

I’d never cut off a finger for hockey. I wouldn’t cut off my hair.

I kept going. Boz tilted her head. I wanted to know: how could anyone punch her? I’d tell her the right things, the words that would keep her nodding like that, nodding and nodding and saying ‘mm hmm’ like I was infinitely interesting, like she understood, like she had fought for this interview with me, this was exactly where she wanted to be.

I told her about Kristjan, about his nickname – Norse Giant – and how he’d gotten it. I told her about that playoff game in Junior when he scored all the goals for his team and then the overtime goal too, and how his picture had been on the front page of the
Kenora Tribune
the next day with a headline reading,
Norse Giant Does it Again.
I told her about all the trophies in the Rec Centre engraved with his name. About how he’d died, the bridge of sticks at his funeral, how Sig told me sometimes people looked like they’d seen a ghost when
they saw me as a kid, with my mushroom haircut and boy’s swimming trunks. I told her about Buck’s lake rinks, the way he measured and scraped them perfectly square, and then more snow came, and he was out there the next morning with his measuring tape, Sig laughing at him out the window but never to his face. I told her about Sig naming me after Isobel Stanley and my suspicions that the original Isobel had been an ankle-bender.

Boz leaned back and examined my face. ‘And that’s why you play?’

I nodded.

She smiled quickly and paused. ‘Those are all really good reasons,’ she said. ‘They are.’

Nodding again and again. Not like she was convinced, but like she was trying to convince me. Patience in her voice as though she’d forgiven me for something.

I
knew right then
is a bullshit line, as Sig would say. As though a life might be beaded together into a string of gaudy epiphanies, one long, lustrous highlight reel.

Like Sig, I refused to believe in such moments, a goal frozen in a highlight reel, the red light behind the net flooding the ice. Call it a
TSN
Turning Point.

I placed myself in that tree with Hal and Toad, passing a rock between my hands, the heaviest I could find, waiting to launch it at the boyfriend’s skull, but I also felt a brief glimmer I would never admit to. Understanding flung from the branches, a cold and brutal thread of it, out to the crying boyfriend, how he might have wanted to test Boz’s forgiveness, the self-mutilating love she could lay out there so calmly – to me, a person she’d sung ‘Getting to Know You’ to, practically a stranger, who didn’t understand, who could watch her gestures of hockey adoration like a play, but never move that way, never speak those words, without acting.

I looked around the room. They were all in on it, all my teammates. Their huge love for the game eclipsed any need for reason. It was simple. I felt far away then, floating away from Boz, from the team. As though I’d been watching them from the stands.

My decision wasn’t made right then. But I began to turn, to open toward its possibility. And as possibilities tend to do, it began to grow.

That night, I started to quit hockey.

S
ig felt silly, as though she were being tugged unwittingly into ceremony, the dusky shove of the sky, the wind’s lean casting the scene around her with a portentous tenor. Of course, it was Grace’s fault that such things would even cross her mind, all that spiritual jazz she spouted mixed up now, despite Sig’s best efforts, with the eager waves there around the dock, the area she regarded as being as much hers as the jagged square of yard behind their house. She seriously considered, as she shifted the skates in the crook of her arm, disowning Grace.

Of course, her trudge down to the dock, skates in hand, held as much ceremony as did her march down the hallway, magazine in hand, to the bathroom. Truth was, she had no other option. She couldn’t just chuck them out with the trash. She’d imagined their presence out there at the dump among the piles of shunned junk, everything irrevocably broken. She would not subject the skates to the noncommittal nosing of the dump bears, one of which Sig had recently seen with a sanitary pad stuck to the side of its face.

Nor could they go to the Sally Ann. They’d be scooped up, no doubt, by some heavy-ankled woman who would buy them because she didn’t know any better about skates, and she wouldn’t really use them, but they were cheap, so what the hell. And they’d fit the woman’s feet like a boy’s jacket on a fat man, the leather unfailingly loyal to the contours of Sig’s feet. And the woman would be a shrieker, undoubtedly a Bloody Murder type, whooping and flailing her arms like a drowning swimmer as she toddled around the ice.

No.

Sig stood for a moment at the end of the dock and made an effort to hold the skates casually. She allowed herself a final glance down at them, nothing too lingering. With the same discipline, she forced
from her mind the calluses on Buck’s hands – jagged reefs of skin – passing over the skates’ eyelets. Ridiculous to wait when she’d made up her mind. And with every second she stood there the skates gathered to their beaten edges a significance they weren’t worthy of.

She heaved the skates with a grunt. They strained away from each other, laces still binding them together, and flapped vaguely, an ugly moth, rusted wings, before dropping. They splashed Sig’s shins when they went in, and she felt the lake seeping cold through her pants while she watched them sink, parts of blade untouched by rust gathering green as the algae claimed them. They sank quickly.

She bent for a moment, scrubbing angrily at the spots of water on her leg, avoiding the ripples still spilling out from where the skates went in. Then she turned and limped back down the dock, conjuring a Scotch into her hand and wool socks onto her feet. Straight-armed up toward the house that seemed to shrink and shiver on the cusp of winter like a blue-lipped girl. She stopped only briefly and, without looking back, cursed both the loon and train that were sad somewhere across the lake.

T
he big red W on the left side of the team winter jacket, over the heart, was supposed to forgive the jacket’s lack of fashion. Long and black, the jacket was boxy when the drawstring hidden in the waist wasn’t in use. When I cinched it in, the top part ballooned, the bottom becoming triangular. The first day I wore it, I felt big and puffy and hyper-visible, like I was wearing a mascot costume. The Scarlet crest whittled away my anonymity, narrowed me down.

When I walked down to Dr. Spencer’s desk at the end of English class to pick up a handout, he noticed the jacket and pointed to me, winked and then mimed a slapshot. I gave him a fake laugh, hurrying back to the stairs, and got stuck behind a guy on crutches. I wanted out. Should I have pretended to be a goalie? Should I have pretended to get hit with the puck? What did he want from me? The slapshot, had it been real, would never have gotten off the ice, would have been a low-slow. His flimsy, professorish arms. Imagining Dr. Spencer as an ankle-bender made me feel sad and apologetic.

As I was walking toward University Centre, a few people gave me looks, or maybe I was making it up. Definitely a double-take from a guy in a Canadiens baseball cap – he caught the crest and then looked back at my face like maybe he knew me. I’d started taking the tunnels to the rink for practice, walking through University Centre, past The Rock, a ledge of the wheelchair ramp next to the Snaxtime where the football guys gathered to drink protein shakes together and look at girls. A couple of them nodded at me as I passed.

‘Tough Bruce,’ Darius said at the end of their line-up. He stood and swaggered toward me, pants sagging. Raised his hand. ‘Touch it.’ I slapped his palm. He’d never talked to me before.

‘I love you chicks. You tell Boz I say hi, all right?’

‘I will,’ I said, palm still ringing as I walked.

The jacket had made me less careful. Jacob rounded the corner, coming at me with that careless amble, eyes jerking when he saw me. Wearing an identical jacket. It was the embarrassment of wearing the same outfit to school as a girl in your class – but twisted, like a balloon animal, into a hermaphroditic elephant. I didn’t stop. I pivoted on my toes, mid-step, heart thudding in my ears, and walked the other way. Jacob caught up and walked next to me, head wedged down as though trying to pry up my chin.

‘We’re twins,’ he said. I could see his teeth in the corner of my eye.

‘Absolutely not,’ I said, kept walking.

‘Could you stop for a second? I promise – just a second.’

I stopped, body perpendicular to his, eyes on his shoes. The University Centre lights sizzled yellow. Jacob didn’t say anything, too close. I took a step back, raised my eyes slightly and caught the birthmark under his chin. My eyes snapped away, and back again into the rink, nighttime, trying to lift the skin of that person who had rolled on the ice with Jacob. Impossible. I could only watch the two bodies, the strange alphabet etched by their limbs; the words my fingers had held were now an impossible story. He was looking at my face, I could feel it.

‘I guess I just wanted to apologize?’ he said.

I tucked my chin down farther.

‘Are you hiding from me?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Well, then you disappeared.’

I looked up quickly, down again. Teasing eyes.

‘I’ve been right here,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to be embarrassed – I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have left you there.’

‘We’re not talking about it.’

Jacob laughed. ‘Well, how about if we eat ice cream and not talk about it?’

‘I have to go to practice,’ I said. I looked up as he pulled his wallet from his back pocket, whipped out his dining-hall meal card and flashed it at me like a big spender. Same jacket, same crest, same drawstring.

‘Daddy’s paying,’ he said, straightfaced.

I laughed a bit. ‘I’m late already, so.’ I started to walk toward the tunnels again.

‘Isabel,’ he called. I half-turned. ‘You’ve pulled off an impossible feat. Looking beautiful in the team jacket. Just so you know.’

Toad and Pelly walked up to us then, Toad’s face lit with an expectant smile.

‘It’s the lovebirds in their matching shit. You’re like one of those old couples on a two-seater bike that dress all matchy, eh?’

‘Tweet tweet,’ Jacob flapped his hands at his sides, then he did a Michael Jackson pivot and walked the other way.

‘Toad,’ I said, face hot, as we walked into the tunnels.

‘What, accuser-face? Where’s your lover pride, eh?’

‘He’s not my lover.’

‘But he’s cute,’ Pelly said. ‘No, he’s handsome.’

A small bump of pride.

‘You know, you’re allowed to like boys, champ,’ Toad grinned. ‘You have our permission.’

‘I know I’m allowed to like boys,’ I said. This was the kind of logic Toad inspired.

‘So where’s your boyfriend then?’ Pelly said to Toad.

Toad looked at her like she was crazy. ‘What would I need a dude for when I’ve got all you losers harassing me at all times?’

This made strange sense. We were triplets in our jackets. They’d rescued me from Jacob. I imagined my stride sharper, heavier, calves biting off the end of each step with teeth. Legs that could swagger if I wanted them to.

I
went to the bathroom after practice and when I came back, Jacob’s hockey card was lying in my stall. A picture of him taking a slapshot, following through, eyes wide. On the back, they’d circled part of his player profile in purple marker:
Premier power forward.
Scrawled below,
Reach for the stars! Dream big! Go for the gold! Yer Lover.

Toad was grinning at me. ‘
Premier power.
Like the sounds of that.’

‘Come on,’ I groaned. Stuffed the card into my backpack.

‘I’m telling you, he’s handsome,’ Pelly said.

‘Whatever,’ I said. Put my hands up. Surrender: the only safe strategy. ‘Okay, whatever.’

‘And I resent – ’ Toad dropped her jaw as she looked at Heezer. ‘Ooh, Nelly! Heez. You getting some action tonight?’

Heezer turned toward us and looked down at the bra, a lacy, rose-pink push-up, a fake diamond heart in the middle nearly eclipsed by the cliffs the bra made of her breasts. The underwear some of them wore beneath their ordinary clothes – under their T-shirts and jeans, their sweats even. Different lives under there, hidden glittering worlds – after they’d peeled off the sweaty bondage of sports bras we all wore under our equipment and to the gym. I was still trying to figure some of it out. The complicated wiring, the delicate bones of Heezer’s bras that allowed them to stand upright in her stall, as though on legs. Hal’s minuscule thongs, which Toad called butt floss.

‘Nah, working,’ Heezer said. She shrugged and glanced at her watch. ‘Shit!’ She turned to her stall and whipped a white tank top over her head, a blur of orange lettering on the back before she threw on a hoodie, quick, zipping it up to her chin.

‘Holy shit,’ Toad breathed, gripping her chest. ‘Whoa. Okay, stop. Back the truck up, Heezy. You’re – no – I didn’t just.’

Heezer ignored her, throwing a limp handful of gym clothes into her backpack.

‘What happened?’ Pelly asked me. I shrugged and Pelly rolled her eyes at Toad, who was taking tentative steps toward Heezer, hand outstretched.

‘Just take the hoodie off for a second, Heezer. Please.’

‘Toad, I’m late.’ Heezer turned to face her, cheeks red, her orange hair twisted into a swinging bauble at the nape of her neck.

‘What’s going on?’ Hal rifled a brush into her stall as she walked across the room from the bathroom. She stood, fists on hips, and tilted her head at Boz.

‘Just let her go if she’s late, Toady,’ Boz said.

‘Hal. You have to see this. Come on, Heez.’ Toad reached for Heezer, and she jumped backwards, pulling her backpack over her shoulders.

‘I’m outta here!’ she announced, grinning wildly, taking another step back, and Toad lunged at her, grabbing her arms, twisting them behind her back.