Fake Skating(40)

I took a step back so Alec could join Benji on the porch.

“Oh, hey—did you get my text the other day?” Benji asked, smiling at me as if we texted all the time.

“Um, yeah,” I said, crossing my arms as the cold air poured in. “I—”

“Fucking go, Worthington,” Alec said, stepping out onto the porch and into Benji’s face, giving his chest a push. “She already said you’re bothering her.”

“I think that was for you,” Benji replied, smiling like he was absolutely unfazed by angry Alec in his personal space. “By the way, love the oversized bong, Zeus. Veryclassy.”

He turned and went down the steps, and I shook my head, because nothing made sense to me anymore. I looked at Alec and slammed the door, just needing to be done with the day.

But then he knocked.

I sighed and pulled it open. “Did you forget someth—”

“You already reconnected with fucking Benji, are you kidding me?” His voice was low and gravelly, his eyes narrowed as he said it like… like it mattered, like I’d done something terrible to him by talking to the neighbor.

“He… lives next door,” I said slowly, unsure what he could possibly mean by “reconnected.”

Alec’s face was hard, and even though he looked nothing like my old friend anymore, something about the moment was straight from our past, grabbing at my chest with a hard squeeze.

“But we hate that guy, Dani,” he said with a scowl, giving his head a shake of disbelief.

“I don’t even know him anymore,” I said, so confused by his reaction and the way he said my name like we were still friends. “Do you?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I sure as hell do.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to take your word for it, because I don’t know either of you now,” I said. “Good night, Alec.”

“Good night,” he said, sounding like he definitely didn’t wish me good night as I slammed the front door again.

But I couldn’t sleep when I climbed into bed, not when his words kept playing in my head, over and over again.

I thought maybe this one time you could think of someone other than yourself, maybe like a cool new thing for you to try out, but obviously I was wrong.

We’d exchanged weekly postcards for years, our own little coded system of keeping in touch, and then one day he’d just stopped responding.

I never heard from him again.

NEVER.

So if anybody was guilty of not helping somebody else out, it was him.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Alec




What the fuck was that?

I was still sitting up in bed at twelve thirty, “ricochet”in my ears and a pounding in my skull, because how the hell was Benji already sniffing around when she’d just moved back? He’d always been like a puppy at her heels, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

For all I knew, they were best friends.

Did you get my text?

Why would that fucking asshole even have her number?

It doesn’t matter anymore.

But yes—it kind of fucking mattered because I hated him.

Benji Worthington had been an annoyance as a kid, a douchey little irritant who lived next door to Dani’s grandpa and liked doing things like tattling behind my back and being passive-aggressive when he was too little to even know what passive-aggressive meant.

But once we hit middle school and I had to deal with him on the ice, he became a fucking menace. He was always on the best teams, the teams that recruited even though that wasn’t supposed to be a thing, and it bugged the shit out of me. He had a hockey IQ of zero, yet somehow always managed to make the cut.

Surely it had nothing to do with all that expensive equipment and those unlimited resources.

But as much as I didn’t like him, he fucking haaated me. It seemed to piss him off that no matter how much money he had, I was always the better player. Since he couldn’t do anything about that, he used to talk shit on my family all the time.

And I could handle assholes chirping at me—that was part of the game, right?

But Ben always managed to come up with “jokes” about my life that were too personal, that had just enough truth to sting. My mom’s crappy minivan, the time my dad got laid off when I was in eighth grade… he always had something to insinuate, then loved playing innocent when I lost my cool and lit into him later.

Then I was considered the “aggressor,” the one who was out of line.

I finally beat the shit out of him at a party after my dad’s car accident, which was probably what started the whole “Barczewski’s a loose cannon” storyline (even though it wasn’t true).

I’d been at the hospital that day, waiting for my dad to wake up after yet another surgery (he’d had seven), when my mom told me Dani and Hannah were on their way. Apparently they’d heard about the crash and decided to fly in for the day to see my dad and be with my mom.

And I’d been so fucking happy to hear that, not only because I hadn’t seen Dani in a couple of years, but because we were all drowning from the fallout of the accident, and I needed my friend—who’d stopped responding to my postcards—so fucking badly.

But when Hannah showed up, she was alone.

I asked about Dani, and she looked embarrassed when she said, “She’s not good at hospitals and wasn’t sure if she’d be intruding, so she had Benji just take her to the hotel.”