Page 19

Chapter 19

Nat

I feel like I witnessed a miracle.

I stare through the glass at the freshly cut ice. Everyone else has gone home for the night, so it’s just me. Me and the bleachers and the ice. I thought about stealing a private skate, but I don’t want to cut the ice again or keep the lights on longer than I have to.

So instead, I sit up here. Pondering.

I saw the Dingoes win—no, not just win. I saw them rile a crowd. Own it. Dominate it. Take back what they lost years ago when Jesse left.

And it’s all because of Olli. Somehow, after a few short weeks of being in this broken-down town, he’s figured out what it needs. Figured out how to bring it together, give it just that.

I wasn’t lying when I said I thought he could turn the team around. That he could be the one to do what so many others in the sixteen years since Jesse left could not—bring back the Dingoes.

I’d doubted him at first. Until that first practice, when I’d started to wonder. And then at the Ice Out, something inside me, some unwilling piece started to believe. After this game, I know he’s got something nobody else does, something nobody else has dared to bring to the table.

He might actually be able to save this team .

Obviously, saving the Dingoes is what I want. I want to see the team, the rink, and the town flourish. I want to see them restored to their former glory, just like the days when Jess was around.

My hands clench tightly together.

But what happens after? Olli saves it, catapults his own career. The scouts come looking, stardom finds him and . . .

He admitted it himself. His goal is the NHL. He doesn’t plan to stick around here. Neither did Jess, and I can’t fault either of them for that.

Shit. I shouldn’t think about this.

I should go to Brenda’s—she and Syd are planning some kind of celebratory dinner. But Syd mentioned her friend Maggie, and Brenda will probably invite Mary . . . and that’s a lot of girl talk.

So here I am.

I head back into the Dingoes’ locker room. I’ll give it a quick clean, then hit the lights and head over to Brenda’s.

I pause at the janitor’s office—also my office, since we haven’t had a separate janitor for months now—to gather my backpack. I dig out my headphones, jam the buds into my ears as I dip into the locker room.

The plus side of playing janitor to a bunch of guys whose skates you sharpen . . . most of them try not to make a mess. So cleanup takes just a couple of minutes, and then it’s just me and the music and those two jerseys hanging on the wall above my empty cubby.

R. Taylor, 14

J. Taylor, 15

Father and son.

I plop down in the empty cubby, let the music wash through me. Call it a strange post-game ritual, but there’s something about being here after everyone else has left that makes me want to write songs.

I dig through my backpack again, open a notebook against my folded knees, and let the music take me away.

My fingers itch to perch on the strings of my guitar, to dance their way through tangled notes and weaves of melody twisted into poetry. I feel those notes, pulsing in my blood, lingering in my eardrums beneath that life beat. I crave to capture them.

I let my fingers trail over the notebook. The pencil scratches.

I start by transcribing the song in my headphones, tuning my ear. Hearing the notes and laying them down, but as always it deviates, as the melody in my head, in my blood, in my imagination, whites out all other sounds.

The music in my headphones becomes a throb of background noise, meditation music, the soft pulse of the ocean.

My fingers and imagination start to write of their own accord.

There are never any words, just the notes, the sound, because I don’t bother with the poetry of it. It’s the music that’s got me in a chokehold, that owns me.

But today, I can’t help but hear the words beneath the trickle of melody. Words I didn’t write, words that crave music, words that call out to be woven into a song.

I didn’t want the world to see my true colors

The true darkness of my soul

So I shattered that image

Into a million tiny shards

Each shard for a different person

A different version of my broken whole

None see the whole picture

But a shard’s still a shard

A broken piece

Broken, broken, broken

I set the notes beneath each line, my fingers moving faster, faster, as the melody takes shape. My pencil scratches against the page, but I can’t hear it, can’t hear anything over the song in my heart.

Distantly, I’m aware of someone moving across the locker room, stopping beside me. Distantly, I register the low murmur of his voice through my headphones and the song in my soul.

It’s the snap of his fingers that draws me out of the music .

My head jerks up, pencil going down as my gaze lifts.

Olli James stands in front of me, his brown eyes rounded with what might be concern or surprise or amusement or a combination—but all that pales in comparison to a much more important fact.

He’s wearing only a towel, slung low around his hips.

I tear my headphones out of my ears, trying with all my might to keep my eyes on his face, his now-grinning mouth, and not on the display of skin and muscles beneath. It’s not like I haven’t seen him in less, or been in a position to see him in less.

“Hey, Nat.” Olli’s mouth twists a smile. “You seemed pretty . . . lost?”

“Um. Yeah. I kinda was.” Eyes up, Taylor. Eyes the fuck up. “I didn’t realize anyone was still here. Sorry.”

Olli’s eyes drift down—to the notebook flattened against my legs. “That’s my poem.”

“Um.” I snatch the pad back up, but the damage is done. He’s seen it, and now this is another strange thing to lurk in the space between us. Olli steps back to sit on his own cubby. His expression’s neutral, almost unreadable, but his eyes study me as though searching out an explanation.

I sigh, and lay the notebook flat again. So he can see the notes, enmeshed with the words. “I told you I could hear the song.”

“Dang. I thought . . .” His eyes trail down the page. “I thought you were joking. Or making fun of me or something.”

“Why would I do that?” I flip the notebook closed, finished with exposing so much of my soul. Except it’s not just my soul on that page, is it? Not just my inner pieces laid bare. Both of us, tangled together, between the lines and over them, enmeshed, ensnared, entangled.

Just like that night at the bar—

“I dunno.” Olli fiddles with a loose string on the corner of his towel, and this time I don’t bother to stop my eyes as they trail down his long, lean form. “Because I’m . . . me and you’re . . . you?”

I drink in the sight of him—the swells of his shoulders and pecs, the cut of abdominals. No tattoos visible from this angle, no big scars .

“What’s that mean?” I lift my gaze back to his face, trying to read the wrinkle of his brows. I come up empty.

“I’m an introverted loser, and you practically define cool.” He snorts, then scoots to lean back against his cubby. “Guys like you don’t look twice at guys like me. Even in a friendship sense, I mean.”

“What is this, middle school?” I ask, and my voice is soft, not bitter or judging. Teasing. I’m still looking at his face, studying the way he stares at the ceiling, eyes out of focus, unseeing. “I wouldn’t make fun of someone else who loves music. Especially when it’s . . .”

I direct my opened hand towards the notebook. “Creating music in any capacity is beautiful.”

“You think so?” Olli’s head tilts towards me, his brown eyes wide, earnest. That look does something to the inside of my chest, like a hand stretching the muscles too taut, almost to the point of hurting. “Even if it’s lame-as-crap poetry?”

“It’s not lame as crap.” I chuckle, tilt back against my own space so I can more easily not look at him, not let his expression affect the physical function of my body. I don’t want to feel things like that, not with him, not with anyone. “You really think I’d bother to take a poem I thought was lame and put music to it?”

“Well, I don’t know how it works. No one’s ever—” He cuts off suddenly, and when he speaks again, his words drop to a murmur. “Do you do that? Write songs?”

“Yeah,” I say, which should feel wrong, because I don’t tell people about the songs, not even Charlie or Syd. Only Brenda knows. “Sometimes I do.”

“But not the words?”

“I’m not a poet.”

“So.” He wriggles, drawing my gaze down to the floor. His bare feet wave side to side like windshield wipers. “What does it, um, sound like?”

I tear my gaze from his wiggling feet. “Sound like?”

“It’s music ,” he groans, smacks a palm against his forehead. “You gotta sing it for me, Nattie. ”

This brutal new reality strikes sharply against the inside of my ribs. Of course I do, because it’s not just a song, not just words, it’s both , and that’s what happens when you’ve got the song and the words—you sing it. You fucking sing it.

“I’m not going to—”

“Sing it.” His brows arch towards his hairline. “Don’t be a shy little mouse.”

I can’t help but laugh at that. “Right. Because everything about me says shy little mouse .”

“That’s what makes it funny.” Olli’s grin turns crooked, teasing. “Mouse. It’s a perfect nickname.”

“You’re not calling me that.”

“Sing it, Mouse.”

“Only if you never call me that again,” I say, but I’m smiling too, because the way that smile blossoms across his entire face makes me lightheaded.

“I make no promises because I’m kind of forgetful.” He lifts a hand over his heart. “But I will do my best.”

“Okay.” But another idea blooms in my chest. A bold one. “I’ll sing it, but first you tell me about the tattoo on your back.”

His smile softens, brows lift. “You want to know about my teeny little ink?”

“Yes,” I say, caution to the fucking wind because I want to know, so I’m going to ask. “What is it?”

He turns away to face the opposite wall, so the length of his spine is exposed to me. I’ve never looked before, after that initial glimpse, never let myself look. But now, I drink in the sight of it.

“It’s a spine,” I say, confusion lacing my voice as I study the lines of ink tracing along the center of his back. The outlines of vertebrae trace over the bone beneath the dark skin. “On your spine?”

“It is indeed.” Olli straightens, stealing the ink from my view. “Some of it, um, covers up surgery scars.”

“You had spine surgery ?” I ask, startling. “That’s terrifying. ”

“Yep. When I was fifteen. Bad check, broke my spine, this whole thing. They weren’t sure I’d ever walk again, let alone play. But . . .” He shrugs, keeps his gaze cast out across the locker room. “Here I am.”

“That’s fucking amazing,” I say, and I mean it. I worked hard at hockey, once. Fought to be better than my peers, to get out from under Jesse’s shadow. But in the end, my self-destruction overcame me.

“It’s not amazing.” Olli shrugs again. “It wasn’t ever a choice, really. Hockey’s always been my everything.”

“I get that.” When I tilt my head towards him this time, I see him in a new light—the boy with the spine tattooed down his back, with the song on his fingertips and the game in his heart. Just like me, so much like me, and yet so different.

Better.

That single word arrives on my tongue, ready to burst forth. But Olli speaks first.

“Hockey and music.” He sighs, almost a hum, a tiny taste of music itself. “Only things that ever make me feel calm.”

“Feel whole,” I agree, surprised at how easily those words slip from my tongue and into the space between us. Something else to bring us closer.

“So.” Olli’s grin stretches wide, devious. “You gonna sing for me or what? Deal’s a deal, Mouse.”

“You promised not to call me that.” I snatch a glove from the back of my locker and hum it towards him, hitting him square in the chest.

“Nope!” he crows, waving the glove. “You opted for the spine story instead.”

“Fuck me,” I mutter, because shit, I did, didn’t I? So I open my mouth. And I start to sing. “ First I was afraid . . . I was petrified . . .”

My own glove smacks me in the face, muffling my intentionally off-key notes. “Screw you, Mouse. I want my song.”

I laugh as I fling it back towards him—except of course, he’s expecting just such a return fire and catches it well before it makes any critical bodily contact .

Before he can stage any more uncannily well-aimed protests or invent any definitely unfitting nicknames, I start to sing.

In earnest this time. For real.

Soft at first, like I don’t trust the notes as they build in my chest and flick off my tongue, through my teeth. Or maybe it’s the words I don’t trust, that I’ve gotten them all right, understood the meaning even as I set them to a beat.

My fingers tap the notes against my thighs, striking the chords to a silent guitar as my voice guides the melody.

I didn’t want the world to see my true colors

The true brightness of my soul

So I shattered that image

Into a million tiny shards

. . .

“You have a beautiful voice,” Olli murmurs as I let the notes fade away. “But you got the words wrong.”

My heart’s beating too fast, like I’m in high school all over again and Coach just sent me through a dozen rounds of suicides, like I’ve run miles through Olli’s woods, climbed mountains and snowshoed valleys and canyons. “Did I?”

Why does my heart feel like it’s trying to escape through my throat?

“It’s darkness ,” Olli says. “ Darkness of my soul.”

I tilt my head against the wall of the cubby, level him with a serious stare. “No, Olli. I think maybe you’re the one who got those words wrong.”

He opens his mouth to respond, but the sudden trill of a phone cuts off whatever he’s about to say. He leans back into his locker to dig through his discarded pile of clothes.

My brows lift with surprise. “Who has a ringtone anymore?”

He shoots me an impressively stern death glare and smashes the phone to his ear. “Hey, Mom. I can’t—”

“Aspen!” The high, female voice on the other end is so loud I can’t help but overhear. “You forgot to call me!”

“Yeah, Mom. Hi.” Olli fairly squeaks. “I’m about to leave the rink.”

I choke back laughter at the pained look on Ollie’s face as he whisper-yells into the speaker.

“Aspen?” I mouth, and he lifts a middle finger in my face.

“I’m actually, um . . .” He rolls his eyes, but there's something almost soft, fond, in his next words. “I’m headed to a party now, so I can’t really talk?”

God, why does the sight of Olli talking to his mom warm my heart? I should look away, but I can’t stop watching the softness of his face.

“Yeah, a party . . .” His mouth twitches like he’s holding in a smile, and when he sees me looking, he rolls his eyes again. “With the team, yes. And my friend is totally waiting for me right now . Actually, he might run away and leave me alone if I don’t hang up now—”

I hold in a burst of laughter. “What are you talking about—”

“Oh, Nat says we have to go right now!” Olli reaches back into the locker, a bundle of clothes in hand. “Bye, Mom!”

And that’s how I find myself in Olli’s wake, headed towards a bar party.

Looks like I will be missing the Syd-and-Brenda girl talk after all.