“So…” Emily said at last. “You wanted to talk to me, sir?”
“Yeah, I did.” He rummaged around on his desk for a moment, then came up with a plain blue folder that didn’t look any different to Emily than the other hundred she could see peeking out from amongst the clutter. He flipped it open and began thumbing through whatever was inside. “I wanted to show you a few things. I’ve been waiting for the right moment. Didn’t know when that would be, but looks like it finally showed up. Yeah, let’s start with this.” He pulled a sheet of paper from the folder and handed it across the desk to her. Emily took it, feeling a bit nonplussed.
It was a photocopy of the front page of the Lindsey Letter, their school paper. She’d seen this particular front page thousands of times, as an original copy was tacked to the wall beside her bed at home. It showed a photo of Emily herself, her stick caught halfway through its fall to the ice, and her fists in the air. She considered it one of the best photographs ever taken of her. What could be seen of her face through the visor was alight with excitement, turning her plain features into someone else’s—someone almost beautiful. The headline read: “Sophomore Emily Haven (No. 21) Scores Overtime Goal to Propel the Lindsey Timbre Wolves to Their First State Title”.
Emily’s stomach clenched. This was not making her feel better. What if it was gone? What if she never scored another goal like this one? She couldn’t trust the knowing anymore.
“Turn it over,” Anders prompted, and Emily did.
On the back side was another photocopied newspaper page, only this one was from the Edmonton Sun. Most of it was taken up with a picture of someone Emily didn’t recognize, with a hairstyle that had to be at least thirty years out of date…but below that was what Coach Anders clearly wanted her to see. It was a photo of a player in an old-fashioned Edmonton Oilers uniform. The picture was small and a little faded, but no less striking for that. The man in the shot had been caught with his stick halfway in its fall to the ice and his fists raised in celebration. The angle was slightly different, but it was so similar to the picture from the Letter that Emily was stunned. She simply stared at it.
“Read the headline,” Anders prompted.
Emily tore her eyes away from the picture and read: “Hattrick Goal Carries Gretzky and the Oilers to 8-3 Victory Over Flyers”. In surprise, she glanced back down at the picture. It was hard to tell, but yeah, she thought that was a 99 on the player’s shoulder. She’d seen countless photos of Gretzky, but she couldn’t remember ever seeing one where he seemed so very, very young.
“Gretzky…” she murmured to herself, not taking her eyes from the photograph. “How did you find this?”
“I have a wide range of hockey related materials in boxes at home. My wife calls it…well, never mind what she calls it. Point is, when I saw that picture of you in the Letter last year, I knew it reminded me of something, and I went digging around until I found that old copy of the Sun. Almost missed it. Terrible rag, really…but I’d held onto it. Figuring with a guy like Gretzky, I might want it someday. I was right, too.”
Emily stared at the picture for a moment longer, then looked up at Coach Anders.
“Why are you showing me this now?” she asked. “It doesn’t really make me feel better about…” She trailed off.
“Doesn’t it, though? Look, I’ve been coaching hockey teams for a long time, Emily. Too long, some would say. Some have said it, actually. And yeah, it’s true, you’re one of the best players it has ever been my privilege to coach. You missed a goal today. It wasn’t the first…and it won’t be the last.”
Emily opened her mouth to say something, though she wasn’t at all sure what, but Anders raised a hand to forestall her.
“Wait…let me finish.” He paused, and Emily closed her mouth again. “I know what you’re thinking…more or less. Just like I knew, more or less, what you were thinking when you got that silly look on your face at the sight of this miserable little room the school administrators try to tell me is not the janitor’s closet. You’re thinking that I don’t understand. That I don’t get it. That what you have is some kind of magical power, and that it’s somehow been breeched, and you’re afraid you won’t get it back. I don’t know if that is what you were going to say out loud, but it is more or less what you were thinking. Hundreds if not thousands of men and women who have laced up the skates have thought the same thing when they missed their first goal, or missed a save they should’ve gotten, or what have you. Even Gretzky had his off nights. What separates the great players from the rest is not whether or not they miss the goals. It isn’t even about how often or how well they score them, or how pretty they are when they do. It’s how they let the ones they miss affect them.”
He paused for a moment, and it seemed to Emily that his gaze was boring into her. She wanted to look away and found that she could not. All she could do was look back into those kind old eyes.
“You, Emily Brown Haven, have the potential to be a great player. That doesn’t mean much, sadly, but it means more than it used to. You won’t be playing for the Edmonton Oilers, but a lot can change in the next ten years, and you may have a place playing hockey in some capacity or other at a professional level. If nothing else, you may play for Team USA come 2018 or 2022. I don’t know. But all of that hinges on how you let today impact your confidence. It’s not magic, it’s talent and skill. The only real magic is in not thinking about it too much.” He held out the folder to her, and Emily took it.
“This is yours now, I think,” he said. “Look through it. Think about what I’ve said. Okay?”
Emily nodded, tucking the page she was holding back in with whatever else was in the folder.
“Oh, and I almost forgot.” He fished around in his coat pocket and pulled out a puck. “Here.” He held it out to her.
She took it, confused. “What’s this? I mean…it’s a puck, but…why?”
“You missed a goal today. That’s the puck you missed it with. I thought you should have it. Hold it…feel it…keep it. Hang on to it for at least a week. After that, I don’t give a damn what you do with it. It’s just a puck…like any other. Whether you make a goal or miss one, the puck doesn’t know or care.” He paused, watching her.
Emily fingered the puck for a moment. It was scuffed and scratched, warm from Anders’s pocket. There was something in his words—something that felt right, but not all the way right. He didn’t understand—couldn’t understand—but Emily found suddenly that that didn’t matter so very much. She felt better without knowing how or why exactly.
“Think about it,” he said gently. “Have a good rest of your weekend.”
The dismissal was so abrupt, it took a moment for Emily to recognize it for what it was. She slipped the folder and the puck into her backpack and stood, swinging it back onto her shoulders again. She moved to the door but stopped at the threshold, looking back.
Coach Anders was already absorbed in hunting for something else on his desk.
“Thanks, Coach,” she said.
“Sure…sure…” he said absently, running a hand through his hair and not looking up.
Grinning again, despite herself, Emily turned and headed down the hall.
Chapter Two
Emily turned her collar up against the wind as she made her way toward the bus stop. Traffic sped past, spraying sheets of slush and ice in its wake. The bank of snow to her left rose higher than her shoulders in places. It looked almost preternaturally white against the dingy backdrop of the cityscape around her. The sun reflected and refracted off the snow, but it’d be going down soon. The days were getting shorter.
She turned the corner and surveyed the little knot of people waiting for the bus. Many held cups of coffee in their gloved hands, and most were her teammates. She didn’t see Casey among them. Maybe she was still inside.
She sped past the stop, not meeting anyone’s gaze, and slipped into Starbucks. If Casey was here, she’d sit with her for a while after all. She was already fe
eling the pangs of guilt at having snapped at her after the game. It wasn’t Casey’s fault she’d missed that goal.
The tiny coffee shop was packed. Men and women in suits juggled iPhones and briefcases; teenagers silently bopped along, tell-tale white strands hanging from their ears. She scanned the crowd, but if Casey had stopped here after the game, she was gone now.
Emily pushed her way deeper inside and got in line behind a tiny little black woman ordering what sounded like half the menu.
“…no, I said soy. Soy in the pumpkin spice. Yeah…”
She waited, tuning out the noise and being jostled on every side by anxious people in a hurry. At last, the woman moved aside, and Emily stepped up to the counter.
The guy behind it looked tired and overworked, but he offered her a wan smile just the same. “What can I get for you?”
“Gingerbread latte,” she told him. “Grande.” He started to open his mouth but Emily beat him to it. “Emily. I’m Emily.”
“Four twenty-eight,” he said with a more genuine smile, and Emily dug a five out of her bag and handed it over. He made change, and she moved to join the rest of the crowd waiting for their cups of caffeinated bliss.
Customers came and went in a steady stream as their names were called. Behind the counter, a pretty, young barista dispersed orders, shouting to be heard over the babble. Most of the clientele hustled out with their booty, but a few claimed tables here and there. Emily hoped there’d still be one left for her.
After a few minutes of being shoved this way and that like a human pinball, Emily found herself wedged between a kindly-looking old woman with an unfortunate perm and a fat man in an ugly beige suit with sweat stains at the armpits. One of them, probably the man, though she couldn’t be sure, smelled vaguely of cigarettes and garlic. Fervently, she wished for her name to be called. Trying not to meet the gaze of either of her companions—or to breathe—Emily cast her eyes out the front window, tapping her foot nervously.
The sun was nearly down now, and there was more light from the fluorescents inside than from the street without. In the glass, she could see the ghostly reflections of herself and the old woman beside her—but to her right, where she would have expected to see the fat businessman’s flabby face staring back at her, there was the pale image of a boy. Not just any boy. The boy…with the ponytail and ragged clothes. He looked just as he had in the locker room mirror, as if he hadn’t needed to trudge two blocks through the snow and ice, weather for which he was distinctly not dressed.
The boy seemed sad and lost, looking around at the other faces in the window, as if desperately trying to find someone. Maybe only looking for a friendly face among the multitudes of stressed and harried commuters. Something in his manner, or perhaps simply in his eyes, gave the impression that he was far younger than he appeared. His posture was that of a child who is weary and afraid.
For a moment, the rumble of the crowd around her seemed to fade out and was replaced with the steady white noise of static, like a radio station moving slowly out of range—or maybe the hiss of skates on ice. She felt the old familiar thrum in her muscles, that electricity that she associated so strongly with the knowing. She heard the low whine in her head, mixing with the static in discordant harmony.
The boy’s eyes found hers, and his expression lightened a little. The faint ghost of a smile touched his lips, and he raised a hand as if to reach out to her. There was such hope—such recognition?—in his eyes that it made Emily’s heart ache. Here was someone he knew, his face seemed to say. Here was someone who would help him find his way, those sad eyes proclaimed.
An elbow hit Emily square on the side of her face. She staggered and flailed her arms, trying to catch her balance. All at once, the din of the crowd came crashing back over her again. The old woman reached out to steady her, then shouted after the fat man in a thick New York accent. “What the fuck are you doin’, asshole! Jesus Christ!”
She looked down at Emily with genuine concern. “You okay, sweetheart?”
“Fine…yeah…I think so.” Emily touched the side of her face gingerly. It didn’t really hurt. She’d been knocked around much worse than that by number 17 from Kennedy High, but still…
She looked back at the window. There was no sign of the boy reflected in the glass. She started to search the faces in the crowd around her. Surely, he must be here somewhere…
“Did you see someone…a boy?” she asked the old woman, still looking around. She felt a vague sense of urgency about him, though she had no idea why. She’d never seen him before in her life.
“Naw,” the woman huffed. Then, raising her voice, “Just a fat old bastard who doesn’t watch where the fuck he’s goin’.”
Emily barely heard. There was no one around who remotely fit the description of the boy with the ponytail.
“Emily! Gingerbread latte for Emily!”
In a kind of daze, she pushed her way through the crowd and took her drink from the girl behind the counter.
“Thanks,” she muttered and turned away quickly, still scanning the crowd. He had to be here somewhere. Nothing else made sense.
She found a small table that was miraculously unoccupied and sank into its chair. She clutched the warm cup between her hands and relished its heat. For a while, she continued examining each customer who went by, then gave up and began staring at the window, willing the boy to come back and half afraid he might.
I’m losing it, she thought. The knowing misfired today, and it freaked me out, and now I’m losing my fucking mind.
She sipped her latte. It was still too hot to drink, and it burned a little going down. She went on staring at the window, casting her mind back and trying to think of anyone she knew who looked like that boy. He did look a little familiar, but she couldn’t think of anyone she’d ever known whose appearance was quite that disheveled. Even her mom and stepdad, after the worst of their binges, came home with their clothing mostly intact—usually.
In her pocket, her phone buzzed against her thigh. She fished it out and looked at the screen. A text from Casey.
“Call me when u get home?”
Emily tapped out the same reply she’d sent in answer to that question a thousand times before, without even thinking about it.
“If Mom’s out.”
Her mom didn’t know about the phone. Emily wanted to keep it that way. It had taken her six months of shelving books at the used bookshop down the street from her school to save enough for it. Her mom would just pawn it or trade it for coke or something.
Casey’s response came back almost instantaneously.
“K.”
It was followed at once with a photo of Casey’s dog, a mutt that appeared to be two parts dachshund and one part everything else. He had a Christmas wreath around his neck and was half buried in the snow. Emily laughed. Casey was still trying to make her feel better. And God, she’d snapped at her. The thought made her insides squirm uncomfortably. She wasn’t sure what she’d ever done to deserve a friend like Casey, but she was grateful.
She switched over to her photos and began flipping through them, searching for something cute she could send in return. The first few she passed were goofy shots of various other girls on her hockey team. None of them quite fit the bill. She kept going, watching the steady stream of images as time flowed backward toward the beginning of the school year. Here was a shot of Lindsey High from last month, the morning of the season’s first snowfall. Here was another of Mr. Piper, her algebra teacher, wearing an Angry Birds mask for Halloween.
Flip…flip…flip…
Here were the photos from the House of Horrors she, Casey, and a couple other girls from the team had gone to the weekend before Halloween. They set it up in the old warehouse across from the Walmart every year now and filled it with mechanical monsters and counterfeit cobwebs. The four of them had run through it, screaming like maniacs and laughing their asses off.
Here was a picture Emily had taken of Casey beside Madame Ma
cabre’s fortune-telling table. She was leaning over and looking solemnly into a cheap, oversized crystal ball full of misty, indistinct shapes.
Here was one that Casey had taken of Emily in the hall of mirrors. A dozen versions of Emily, all tall or short or fat or thin, stretching out in either direction beneath the black lights.
Emily paused.
Along the far right edge of the photo, difficult to see with the crazy lighting and the mirrors, was the profile of someone else. It was little more than a silhouette, and still there could be no mistaking the slumped shoulders or the long hair pulled back and tied with something—something like a leather thong.
It was the boy. That goddamned boy.
Here, though, was also concrete proof that the boy was real. Unless, of course, she was seeing things in this photo, too.
She stared at the picture for another minute, debating, then tapped the share button and sent it to Casey with the text:
“Who is that way over on the right?”
She stared at the conversation screen, sipping her latte and tapping her foot impatiently for Casey’s response. At last, it came:
“Not sure. Can’t see too well. Doesn’t look familiar. Probably just some guy from the college or something.”
Emily read this over twice. She wasn’t sure if it made her feel better or not. Casey could see the boy. But was it really the same boy she’d seen in the mirror and the window? How could she know for sure?
She went back to her photos and flipped through the rest of them from that night, hoping to find another shot with the mysterious stranger. There was nothing.
She locked her phone, slipped it into her pocket, and downed the rest of her drink. She grimaced as the cooling remnants of it slid, sickly sweet, down her throat.
Should’ve drunk that faster, Em, she thought wryly, getting to her feet. It was time to head home.
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