Page 67 of Almost Ravaged

As understanding dawns on me, I come around the corner and crouch low so we’re eye to eye. “Oh. Can I tell you a secret?” I mock-whisper.

Eyes widening, she nods and steps closer. One of her younger siblings creeps forward, too.

“The best figure skaters in the whole world all learned how to skate on hockey skates, just like those.” I tip my chin toward the skates in her mom’s hands.

“Really?” she whispers.

“Really,” I promise. That factoid may not be 100 percent accurate, but most young kids do learn on hockey skates. That was standard back home, and the tots and level one and two classes here require them.

“Try those on again and let me know what you think. It should feel like the skates are giving your foot a hug, but make sure you can still wiggle your toes. It’s okay to feel a little wobbly when you stand up. That’s why we have benches inside the rec rink.”

“Okay.” The girl races off toward the rec rink, one sister giddily darting after her.

The mom lifts the youngest onto her hip. “Thank you,” she says with an exasperated laugh.

“Hey, new girl,” a man calls as she walks off. “Where’s your uniform?”

Bryant saunters up, wearing a tight-fitting standard-issue ice arena tech shirt and the required khaki pants, cradling a clipboard in one arm, with a pen tucked behind his ear.

“I’m wearing the uniform,” I defend, eyeing my outfit. Like him, I’m dressed in an ice arena shirt. And my pants are both khaki-colored and made of khaki material. The importance of that was emphasized in the handbook, then again at new-hire training, ensuring everyone who works here is aware of the multiple definitions of the wordkhaki.

Though I did slip the flannel Noah let me borrow over it. It’s unbelievably soft and fits surprisingly well. And according to the employee handbook, layers are encouraged as long as they aren’t linked to another school or team.

He grunts, his chin lifting, as he gets a look at me from the front, where my ice arena shirt is visible.

“Why are you calling me new girl? Did you forget my name?” I ask.

“Of course not. You’re Cam and Kai’s new friend. The girl from Canada. We all went out together on Thursday night.”

Lips pursed, I tilt my head and blink. “And my name is?”

His attention flits to my shirt, where my nametag should be. Joke’s on him. I haven’t been given a name tag yet. And if I’m not mistaken, he’s the one who was supposed to make it for me.

“Dude. Her name is Sawyer,” Arjun hollers from the doorway that separates the skate rental counter from the concession stand.

“Sawyer. Sawyer, Sawyer,” he repeats, hoisting his enormous frame onto the rental counter. “And your name tag is where, exactly, Sawyer?”

I cross my arms over my chest and take a step back. “I haven’t been given one yet. I was told you—”

“Right.” He hops off the counter, whips the pen from behind his ear, and makes a note on his clipboard. “On it.”

He strides toward the back offices, clearly on a mission. For a moment, he hesitates outside Cam’s door, but with a shake of his head, he powers forward and pushes through the next one instead.

“He givin’ you trouble?” a gruff white man with a straggly ponytail asks. We haven’t been introduced, but he drives the Zamboni, and yesterday, he was behind the skate counter replacing the latch on one of the cabinets.

“Oh, no. Not at all,” I insist. The last thing I need is to unwittingly get a coworker in trouble.

The older man thrusts his hand out. “Name’s Tobias, but everyone calls me Tony.”

Tony.

And he drives theZamboni?

I press my lips together, but my poker face has always been shit, and a smile breaks through.

He chuckles. “Ridiculous, I know. But Tobias was my father’s name, and he was a mean old bastard. The kids who worked here in the nineties started calling me Tony Zamboni, and it stuck.”

My stomach twists slightly. Atty and I both got our names from our dad, too. But he was the antithesis of a mean old bastard. Neither of us was named after him, but he chose monikers representative of two novels he categorized as the most important in American literature.