Twenty Miles (16 page)

‘Better go collect her before she slips him her number,’ Mo said, grinning, and stood up. ‘Buy her a coffee or something.’ He headed toward the stairs.

‘It’s awful when they get hurt, isn’t it?’ Terry said. ‘I remember once when Chris was young, she sprained her ankle in a ringette game – real bad sprain, big swollen lump the size of a tennis ball.’ She cupped the shape of a ball with her hands, pink nails poised like claws. ‘I saw her go down, and I don’t even remember the rest of it. The coach said she’d never seen anyone sprint across the ice
like that. And, you know, I can’t even walk on ice without falling all over the place. Tried curling once, and spent more time on my butt than on my feet, I think.’

‘Well.’

‘I don’t know what it is.’ Terry shook her head. She gazed out at the ice. ‘There’s something about daughters in pain. Makes you crazy. Crazy and brave.’

T
he door to the toilet stall was open a crack. Pulling at a tangle in my damp hair, I pushed it open and took a step in.

Hal slumped on the toilet, cheek resting on her knees. Her face whipped up, eyes welted red over the eyelids and down into the darker crescents beneath, her cheeks wet. She looked at me and a sound twisted from her throat. She threw her hands, shaking, over her mouth.

‘Shut the fucking door.’ A muffled croak.

‘I – ’I said. ‘Do you want me to – ?’

‘Please, just close it.’ Hal kicked at the door with her foot. I pulled it shut carefully and then stood for a moment, registering what I’d just seen. Boz walked into the bathroom, makeup case in hand, and positioned herself in front of a mirror, squeezing moisturizer into her palm. I went over to her.

I leaned toward her ear and whispered loudly, fighting the Guns n’ Roses coming in through the doorway. ‘Boz?’

‘Yeah, hon?’ she said, unsurprised by the whisper. Hers were ears accustomed to secrets, to confessions.

‘Hal’s in there,’ I pointed to the stall. ‘And she’s pretty upset.’

Boz cocked her head at the stall. ‘Like,
upset
?’ she said.

I nodded. She touched my shoulder.

‘Thanks for telling me, babe,’ she said and moved toward the stall.

I went back to my spot. The room was emptying out in carpool-sized chunks, everyone headed to Boston Pizza for our post-game meal. Next to me, Pelly rubbed her scalp violently with a towel. She journeyed a Q-tip into her ears. She applied vigorous layers of chap-stick. Boz came out of the toilet stall eventually. She went to the
CD
player and turned down the volume and when Heezer began to protest, she shook her head in warning, her mouth a line.

Soon afterward, Hal stalked out, blotches all over her face and neck. In front of the mirrors, she grasped the edge of the counter and leaned forward, shoulders bunched up around her ears. She froze like that and the room didn’t skip a beat, the slow swarm of departure continuing, oblivious, while Boz and I watched from a distance. Hal turned her head slowly to the side and rested her mouth on her shoulder. She stared down at the microwave next to her hand. Heezer brayed loudly. Pelly threw a tape ball at the garbage can and groaned as it rebounded off the rim. I caught Boz’s eye, then looked back at Hal.

In one quick motion, her arms unhinging suddenly, as though jerking awake, she yanked up the microwave and threw it against the opposite wall, a tinny din. All eyes chasing Hal as she ran from the room. Stung silence for a few moments, set to the hushed, whining backdrop of Axl Rose, then Toad said, ‘What in fuck’s name?’ Her voice dripping wonder. Boz went over to her, said something in her ear and then they both went and, together, lifted the behemoth microwave. They eased it back onto the counter and Toad ran her fingers over its busted wall, gently.

‘Bitty!’ she barked. ‘Get over here. We need an engineer.’

Bitty, pulling an arm into her track jacket in the West End, blushed. ‘Toad, I’m in my, like, first year. I don’t – ’

‘Engineer. Stat. Useless or whatever.’ Toad bent her face down close to the microwave, brow furrowed, and gave something a forceful poke.

Boz looked up and caught me watching. She came over, brushed my hair back from my ear, bent over and whispered. ‘It’s Terry. Hal’s mom. She’s sick.’

Nobody mentioned the microwave at Team Meal, Hal eating her spaghetti, eyes down, at the head of the table. Monday, Toad showed up carrying a gleaming white microwave in her arms. Put it on the counter, plugged it in, went to her stall. We played on.

When we walked through the yellow door to the dressing room, it was easy to believe in the pulse of the room, to change our clocks
to the long sweeping circles of the Zamboni. As if nothing could get in.

‘G
ood evening, could I speak to Miss Isabel Norris please?’

I rolled over to my back on the bed, crooked the phone into my neck. My history text fell to the ground. ‘Hi.’

‘Miss Isabel?’

‘Who else would it be?’

Jacob laughed. ‘I’m trying to be a gentleman.’

‘Okay. Yes, this is Isabel.’

‘Brilliant.’ He cleared his throat. ‘So, I was wondering if you wanted to come over here to watch the game? A few of us are setting up in the common room.’

‘What game?’

He laughed. I didn’t say anything, his laughter even harder to navigate on the phone.

‘Oh, you were serious? Flames and Oilers. Is there another game?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You coming then? It’s going to be a pizza and wings event.’

‘I don’t watch hockey.’

Jacob laughed. ‘You play.’

‘Yeah, but I don’t watch it. It’s boring. Don Cherry’s a jerk and always says the same things.’

Jacob paused.

‘No offence or anything,’ I said. ‘I just never watch it.’

‘I’m speechless over here.’

‘Why?’

‘So have you been fooling me? Do you even play?’

‘I’ve always played.’

Jacob gave a surprised snort. ‘What next, Isabel?’

My teammates followed the
NHL
with a mixture of lust, envy and hockey love. Heezer wanted Eric Lindros and also wanted to be like him: ‘Did you see that bastard’s goal last night? How does he do that? Bastard. Father of my first-born son.’

‘Pat Quinn makes me horny,’ Toad responded.

They discussed games the next day in the dressing room, dissecting plays and moves and fights. They negotiated trades among our stalls, placed bets, yelled. Scheduled their bar plans around
Hockey Night in Canada
when we weren’t playing ourselves.

It was all the same to me, though. Same characters, different teams. Same ending, with Don Cherry rattling on like he was saying something new. I’ve always known about hockey being the Religion of Canadians. But what about the other side: the hockey atheists, the disbelievers, the half-believers? I played, so I’d never thought to look in that direction. The ones sitting on the fence. Jacob made it sound like I was headed to Hell.

‘H
ere, could you pass these down please, doll?’ Boz fished out a noisemaker and passed the bag to Pelly.

‘Whose birthday?’ Pelly asked. Boz puffed out her cheeks and blew out slowly. ‘It’s not a birthday,’ she said. She hit her thighs with fisted hands, and then stood up, whistled on her fingers as she strode out into the middle of the dressing room.

‘Could you guys just listen up for a sec, please?’

The sparse pattern of heads dotting the stalls turned toward her, the room draining to quiet. Practice had been cancelled due to the upcoming travel weekend, so we had open ice instead, no coaches. Some had opted out, some of us had come to shoot around, to savour the rare anarchy of no equipment, no whistles, no drills. Just pucks and skates and sweats.

Noisemakers trumpeted around the room as Boz cleared her throat. ‘Well, okay, um, most of you know about Duff and Hugo – about their relationship. There’s been a lot of talk. And they know that, so they asked me a couple of days ago to just kind of make it known, so it wasn’t this gossip, like, flying around behind their backs. They’ve kept it quiet for a long time, and that was probably really tough. So, anyways, there it is. But we thought – me and Toad – we thought that instead of just saying it, telling you guys, and then all of us just pretending it never happened, we thought we’d have a little celebration. Just to let them know that, well, that we know, and
we’re happy for them. And we’re here for them. Okay? Um, if any of you don’t feel comfortable you don’t have to participate, of course. We’d understand. But I’m just handing out the noisemakers now and we have confetti. Toad’s with both of them in the gym right now, holding them up, so what we’re going to do is, when they come out on the ice, we’ll just give them a little surprise. Blow these, throw some confetti, say a couple words. Like a surprise party – ’

‘A coming-out party,’ Hal said dryly, lips curled. She rolled out the noisemaker absent-mindedly with her forefinger.

‘Exactly,’ Boz said, smiling uncertainly. I looked over at Pelly. She chewed gum placidly, unsurprised. She’d failed me. I’d thought Duff and Hugo were best friends, inseparable, a kind of odd couple: big Duff with her army boots and spiky hair, earrings like nail heads scaling both lobes up into the cartilage. A stay-at-home D, she planted herself in front of our net and flung members of the other team out of Tillsy’s way like she was shovelling the sidewalk. Stan called that cleared area the Duffer Zone. Hugo pulled strands of pale orange hair through her cage during games and chewed it like a rabbit. They wrestled, Duff jerseying Hugo after practice at centre ice, delivering flying elbow drops to her exposed stomach. Headlocks in their stalls across the dressing room. Hugo squealing, grinning hysterically, begging Duff to stop. ‘Say Uncle,’ Duff always said. ‘Uncle, Uncle,’ Hugo whispered in her kid voice. I pictured them kissing.

‘Are you sure they’ll be okay with this?’ Bitty piped up from across the way. ‘Don’t you, uh – well, Hugo’s so shy. They’re going to be embarrassed as hell.’

‘Sure they’ll be embarrassed at first. But, the point is, we’re their team, you know? They shouldn’t be embarrassed. I mean, Tillsy came out to us, right?’

She nodded toward Tillsy and Tillsy pointed at herself –
who me?
– and then smiled, clasping her hands victoriously beside her head.

‘Okay? Listen,’ Boz sighed, looked up at the ceiling. ‘They’re in love, you know? You can just see it. And what could be better than that?’

She sat back down.

‘How is Toad making them to stay in the gym?’ Pelly asked her.

‘You know Toady. She works in mysterious ways.’

‘I can just imagine the stupidity occurring down there as we speak.’ Hal snorted, shaking her head.

‘Oh – the hats. I forgot.’ Boz craned around and pulled another plastic bag from her stall. She handed cardboard party hats to Pelly, Hal and me. The hats bore the faces of girl clowns, different hair colours, winking long eyelashes. Crooked letters in red marker on the backs of the hats read
Duff and Hugo are Gay!!!
Pelly hiccupped a laugh and I touched the writing, red coming off on my finger.

‘Subtle,’ Hal said.

‘Do you think it’s too much, babe? I left Toad in charge of decorations and this is what she came up with.’

‘She wrote this on every hat?’ I asked.

Boz nodded, wincing.

‘Boz, you’re holding a party to stuff down their team’s throats – the team they’ve successfully been hiding their situation from – that they’re gay. You bought a cake. Relatively speaking, I don’t think you could say the hats are going overboard.’

‘You think we shouldn’t do this.’

Hal shrugged and blew on the noisemaker, eyebrows raised.

‘There’s cake?’ Pelly asked.

‘No, you know what?’ Boz tugged on a skate lace. ‘Toad had a good point. She said, what do we do to everyone else when they like someone? We bug them, right? You will get teased if you have a crush. Lord help you. And you know, Toad comes on to Dufresne every time we’re at the bar, because he’s Bitty’s boyfriend and she has to bug Bitty. She just has to. So the fact that Duffy and Hugo have been ignored by us, that they haven’t even gotten harassed, that’s just – tragic, you know?’

W
e huddled on the ice beside the gate, about ten of us, ridiculous in the clown hats, noisemakers clutched in our palms. Heezer and Tillsy performed a half-hearted sword fight. Duff and Hugo saw us, of course, through the glass as they walked up to the ice behind Toad. They smiled in a frowning way and Toad smiled modestly, the
smug conductor. When she opened the gate and the three of them glided onto the ice, Boz yelled, ‘Surprise!’ She skated over to them and flung her arms around Duff’s and Hugo’s shoulders, squeezing them in.

We looked at each other and followed her lead, shouting weakly, blowing on the noisemakers. Pelly, Heezer and Boz launched handfuls of white confetti toward them, but it didn’t quite reach, and we watched their faces through the confetti falling in the middle of our circle, slow as snow. Then, quickly, silence.

‘I don’t get it,’ Duffy said. Hugo’s eyes flared green against her crimson face. I watched her gaze reach Heezer, who wore the hat on the side of her head, covering one ear, and backwards. I saw her read the red letters.

‘Oh my God,’ she breathed quickly, as though someone had jumped out at her just then, hand flying to her mouth. Heezer smiled, apologetic, and pulled the hat on top of her head.

‘Okay, you guys,’ Boz said, releasing their shoulders. ‘Okay.’ She cleared her throat. Pelly blew on her noisemaker in a nervous succession of lengthy honks. Toad snatched it from her hand and launched it over the boards. I looked to Hal. She stared grimly at Boz, arms crossed, hat resting against her back like a hood. I squirmed and prayed that Boz would make us seem less mean.

‘All right, guys ... so we’re gathered here today to celebrate the relationship between our girls Hugo and Duffy,’ Boz began, her voice ringing hollow against the ice, breath just visible in front of her face. She smiled brightly at them, and Duff’s scowl deepened, the tips of her ears flaming red above the nail-head earrings, Hugo spreading her fingers over her mouth until her hand covered half her face. Heezer trumpeted hopefully at Boz’s shoulder. But it failed, ringing out like a fart at a funeral.