Page 18 of Fake Skating

“Okay,” Cassie said, “but you really need to listen to me.”

I walked down the hall with Cassie and two of her friends—Liz and Lillie—after school, pleasantly surprised that not only had Cassie yelled my name when she saw me so I could walk with them, but her friends seemed nice.

Like genuinely nice.

And they’d invited me to go with them to Applebee’s for half-price apps later.

It wasn’t in my nature to trust this, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

“I know you know nothing about hockey, but being a manager is so easy. Sometimes I film practice, sometimes I keep stats, sometimes I go on a hot dog run if someone’s hungry; anyone can do it.”

“For sure,” Lillie agreed, nodding. “You don’t have to know hockey at all.”

“I’m sure Alec is right, though,” I said, remembering how unhappy he’d looked when she’d suggested it. “It’s probably too late.”

“Yeah, but that’s the thing,” she said as we went past the office. “First of all, I don’t think that’s true; Coach Osman is super chill. But second of all, you’re friends with Alec.”

I felt like I should correct her—all of them—because that definitely wasn’t true, but I kept my mouth shut.

“Zeus is hockey around here,” Cassie said. “And he’s the captain. So if he brings it up, they will totally let it happen.”

“I get that he’s good, but he’s still just a student, right? He can’t have that much power.”

“Are you serious?” Lillie said, making a face like I was absolutely clueless. “I know you’re new here, but trust me—if Alec Barczewski wants something related to hockey, he’s going to get it.”

“But I don’t think he—”

“You need to ask him,” Cassie said, cutting me off. “Even if you guys don’t know each other anymore, your parents are still friends, right? I’m sure he’ll happily do you this tiny little favor, because he’s a good guy. I’m positive that if you ask him, he’ll make it happen.”

But is he a good guy?

“I don’t know,” I said, dreading the idea of swallowing my pride and going to him for a favor, because if he’d wanted to even be a simple acquaintance, he would have at least smiled at me by now.

But so far he was all cold sarcasm and avoidance.

“Do this for me because I’m sick of doing it by myself and I think we’ll have a blast,” she said. “ Pleeeeeeease. Come on.”

“And I won’t have to feel guilty anymore for quitting,” Lillie said. “Do it for me, too.”

“And for me so I don’t have to listen to this ever again,” Liz added.

“Hmmm.” My stomach was heavy with dread as they tried convincing me, because it sounded like a terrible idea. Not only did I know nothing about the sport, but the last thing I wanted was to be around Alec on a daily basis.

In a cold arena.

I was stressed at the mere idea of it.

But I wanted Harvard—so badly.

“How about this: Go with me to practice today,” Cassie said. “They have a game tomorrow, so it’s shorter than usual, just a run-through. Ride over with me, see what I do, and then you can make the call. If you want to do it, you can wait for Zeus and beg him after practice to talk to the coaches.”

“Maybe I should wait—”

“Think about it,” she interrupted, emphasizing her words with hand gestures. “If Harvard said you needed to lick the floor to get in, would you?”

“Eww,” Liz said with a look of disgust.

“Eww, but you would, wouldn’t you?” Lillie said, pointing her finger in my direction. “Wouldn’t you? You might go behind a locker so no one could see you, but you’d definitely touch your tongue to the tile, right? Don’t lie, you know you would.”

“Gross,” I said around a laugh. “But yeah—I guess I would.”

“So be willing to ask a simple favor, then,” Cassie said. “It’s way less disgusting.”

It was a stupid analogy, but she was right.

Of course I could beg Alec for help if it meant getting into Harvard. Who cares if he’s a dick now? Swallowing my pride and begging him to help me was nothing if it gave me the extracurricular I needed to get in.

Honestly, I probably wouldn’t even have to see him at practice because I’d be too busy doing manager-y things and he’d be… like, hitting pucks with sticks and stuff.

“Okay,” I said, nodding and suddenly kind of excited. “I’ll do it.”

“See? This job is so not hard,” Cassie said as we walked around the hockey arena. “If you can fill water bottles, take skates to get sharpened, and press play on a video recorder, you’ll be fine.”

“I can do all those things,” I said, relaxing a little.

“Of course you can,” she said with a smile. “Let me show you around.”

She showed me the girls’ locker room, the maintenance closet, the equipment room, the snack bar—basically every nook and cranny of the Doug (what everyone called the Douglas Gowo Arena, apparently).

She walked me past the huge mural that stretched all the way down the back wall, a photographic history of Southview hockey.

“I think that’s your grandpa, isn’t it?” she asked, pointing at a team from the seventies. I narrowed my eyes and, holy shit , the big guy in the back row was, in fact, Grandpa Mick.

He was grinning—something he rarely did now—but his eyes were exactly the same. He was young and handsome, sweaty, holding up a finger just like everyone else in the picture.

It was shocking, in a way, to see him looking so unabashedly happy, like he’d burst into laughter the second the photo was snapped.

What happened to change him so much? I wondered.

“Yeah,” I said, running my hand over his image, curious if he’d been here when they’d unveiled the mural.

Surely he had, and I wondered how he’d felt.

I knew so little about his life, aside from being my grandpa, and suddenly I wanted to know more.

“Come on.”

After that, Cassie did a quick tutorial of the skate-sharpening machine—the Sparx—which she talked about like it was the easiest thing in the world to use (but it terrified me).

“What if I screw up someone’s skates?” I asked.

“You won’t,” she said with the wave of a hand. “Most of the guys have a specific preference on how they want them sharpened, and the ones who don’t usually go with the average. It’s not a big deal at all.”

It was so a big deal, I suspected.

“Okay, let’s go closer to the ice and I’ll show you how to film.”

Yes. Filming. That I could handle.

And as I followed her, I knew this was manageable, that this extracurricular was something I could do without screwing up. Every muscle in my body felt more relaxed, less tense, because I could finally check the “find an activity” box on my whole “make Harvard love me” list.

That was if Alec would help make it happen.

As if my brain conjured him just by thinking his name, suddenly the guys started coming out of the locker room and onto the ice. I felt… breathless as I watched them warming up, and I wasn’t sure why.

Surely it had everything to do with the impressive speed as they took a few laps and nothing to do with my eyes locating the tallest player as he appeared to sprint down the ice in skates.

Cassie showed me the camera and let me do the filming while she sat down beside me and started her homework, which was apparently what she did at practice a lot of the time.

But my eyes kept wandering to Alec, even as I told myself I didn’t care. I knew nothing about hockey, but it was easy to see he was the leader and insanely good. In every drill, he seemed to go faster and harder than everyone else.

It was like the rest of the guys were playing a high school game while he put on an exhibition of the sport.

And how did he skate that fast? Backward??

A tiny part of me was proud of him—my little Alec—but it was hard to remember that version of him while watching him be so big and physical.

Those were two characteristics I never would’ve linked to my former best friend.

“So he actually is good, holy shit,” I said to myself, watching as he shouted something to the guys who were doing the drill he’d just finished doing. I couldn’t make out his words, but he was definitely cheering them on or yelling something… athletic .

The job really was pretty easy. And the time went by pretty quickly.

“I think we’re done,” Cassie said after she locked up the camera. “I have to leave to pick up my little brother, but you’re waiting around to talk to Alec, right?”

“Right,” I said with a smile and a nod, even though the word “dread” didn’t begin to cover how I felt about the idea.

“Make sure you’re very convincing, okay?” she said, pulling her car keys out of her coat pocket. “I don’t want to do this alone anymore.”

“Okay,” I agreed.

“By the way, he’s always the last one out, just FYI,” she said. “He reads scouting reports and does… hockey shit after practice, I don’t know, but he’s usually the last one in there. So don’t feel like you missed him.”

“Got it.”

It was loud for a few minutes while players filed out of the locker room, but then it got quiet, as in I was literally the only one left at the rink. For what felt like hours.

Where is he?

I nearly had a heart attack when my phone started ringing with a FaceTime call, sounding crazy loud in the big empty rink. I was shocked to see it was my dad, because this was the second time he’d FaceTimed me since we’d arrived in Minnesota.

We didn’t usually dothat at all, much less twice.

We’d always been way more into tense telephone calls filled with guilty silences.

“Well, hey,” I said in a perky voice as I answered, smiling when his face appeared on my screen.

“Hi, honey,” he said back, wearing the beige T-shirt that was like a second uniform for him after-hours. He squinted and said, “Where the heck are you?”

It was dumb, but I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to tell him I was at a hockey rink. My dad had always acted like Minnesota, and everything tied into it, was a problem. My grandparents, Sarah, my mom’s childhood… it was all bad in his eyes.

When I was a kid, Southview was something he rolled his eyes about but begrudgingly let my mom run away to for a month every summer. He’d always had zero interest in joining us, but he accepted it for what it was.

His wife wanting to go home.