Fake Skating(71)

Suddenly I’ve got a killer sweet tooth.

The server came back and took our food orders, and after she left, I heard myself say, “So tell me everything that’s happened since the last time I saw you.”

She was picking up her drink, and her hand froze halfway to her mouth when she heard my question. “That’s, uh, a lot of time.”

“Yep,” I said, suddenly wanting to know everything.

“Well,” she said, shrugging. “Not long after we were here for my grandma’s funeral we moved to Texas, which I hated.”

“Why did you hate it?” I asked.

As much as I didn’t want to bring up trauma, I wanted to hear about the years that sucked. For some reason, I wanted her to want to tell me about them.

“I don’t really feel like getting into the mess of it,” she said. “But let’s just say when you’re an Air Force kid, sometimes you move to schools that are fine and sometimes you move to schools that are not fine. Like, not necessarily the school itself is bad, but, like, maybe just a group of people suck, right?”

“Right,” I agreed, glad I didn’t actually have any personal experience with this.

Her voice was quiet, and she looked down at her hands for a minute before her eyes came back to mine. “So my middle school in Texas wasn’t fine. I’d like to say they were all terrible people because it makes me feel better, but the truth is that I didn’t really make friends at that school. I just know there were a few girls who decided they didn’t like me, which made my experience there kind of not great.”

“Bitches,” I said, really feeling that. Really fucking hating whoever made her face look the way it looked right now.

“Whatever, it’s all part of growing up; at least that’s what my dad always told me,” she said with a fake smile and a shrug.

“What’d your mom say?” I asked.

“Oh, my mom called the principal and the mean girls’ mothers and she raged,” Dani said, smiling. “So eventually I stopped telling her, because of coursethat made it worse.”

“Oh shit,” I said.

“Oh shit, indeed.”

“Where’d you go after that? I feel like my mom said it was, like, North Dakota…?”

“Yeah, we moved to Minot, and after that we moved to Germany, and now we’re here.”

“Did you like Germany?” I asked.

“I mean, I loved the country,” she said. “If I’d been an adult who could just freely explore Germany whenever I wanted, it would’ve been great, but as a high school kid living on an American Air Force base that just happened to be in Germany, I didn’t love it. My mom was really unhappy there, because it was when things got bad with my dad, and it just felt like we were sort of isolated.”

“I’m sorry about your parents, by the way,” I said.

“Are you?” she asked with a funny grin. “You never liked my dad.”

“But I love your mom and hate the thought of her being sad,” I said. “Did you know it was coming?”

“Yes and no,” she said. “I knew my parents were fighting more than they ever had—well, fighting with them was just passive aggression and snapping—but I knew my mom was unhappier than I’d ever seen her. Still, though, I just assumed that was who they were together. I didn’t actually envision them coming to an end.”

“I’m sorry for bringing this up—are you okay about it?”

“Yeah,” she said, shrugging. “Mom’s happier now, but I also still feel bad for Dad and miss him. Even if he can be a jerk sometimes. It doesn’t make any sense, right?”

“It does, though,” I said, surprised I’d never considered that that was what it’d feel like in a divorce. “I can’t imagine not seeing my parents every day, even if they were being assholes. At the end of the day, he’s still your dad.”

She just nodded in response, before saying, “By the way, your date conversation is a real downer.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, and as she looked at me with sad brown eyes, the thought that it might be time to confront the past between us suddenly hit me in the gut. Knowing just a fraction of what she’d been going through made me want to understand what really happened back then.

But just as I was about to form the words, something stopped me.

Why did it still feel so raw? After all these years?

“So tell me about your life in the time we’ve been apart,” she said. “Unless you don’t want to talk about it. The accident sounds like it was a nightmare. I’m so sorry—I don’t think I ever said that.”

Here was my chance. Get it all out in the air. She’d opened the door; all I had to do was step through it. But… “Yeah, actually, I don’t really want to talk about that,” I said. “The bottom line is that Big John is a fucking force of nature and overcame it all.”

“Thank God,” she said, shaking her head. “So let’s talk about hockey, then. The last time I saw you, either you weren’t playing hockey yet or you never talked about it during the summer months when I was here. So how did you go from that to this?”

My chest loosened, and I was thankful for the change in topic. “I’ve played hockey since I was four,” I said, “but I sucked until eighth grade. Then I grew like a foot and a half, and I don’t know if my body was always waiting for me to get bigger or something, but all of a sudden I was coordinated. And faster than everybody else.”