Fake Skating(32)

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 wasif 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 waspretty 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 veryconvincing, 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?