On Thin Ice

There's a thing that happens when you step onto freshly resurfaced ice for the first time of the season.

It's not the cold, though the cold hits you like a wall the second you push through that rubber curtain, sharp enough to make your eyes water and your lungs do a little surprised hiccup. It's not the smell, either, that specific mix of freezer burn and old rubber and something metallic that probably has a technical name I've never bothered to learn.

It's the sound,  more like the absence of it.

For about three seconds, before the blades bite in and the whole rink wakes up, it's completely silent. Like the ice is holding its breath. Like it's been waiting all summer for someone to come back and make it mean something again.

I've been coming to Millbrook Ice Complex since I was seven years old, and those three seconds still get me every time.

"Jordan." Nora's voice cut through my moment, warm and a little impatient, the way it always was when she caught me being weird about hockey stuff. "You're blocking the door."

"I'm not blocking it, I'm standing in it."

"Those are the same thing."

I stepped out of the way and let her through, watching her hit the ice like she had never left it. Which, knowing Nora Vasquez, she practically hadn't. While I'd spent July at my grandparents' place in Minnesota doing absolutely nothing productive, she'd been doing goalie camps, skills clinics, and probably also dreaming about five-hole saves in her sleep.

She was already halfway across the rink before I'd taken three strides.

"Show-off!" I called.

She didn't even look back, just lifted one hand in a lazy wave that somehow managed to communicate both 'I heard you' and 'I don't care' at the exact same time. I don't know how she does that, I’ve been studying it for ten years and I still don't know.

Here's the thing about being best friends with someone since second grade. you know them so well that sometimes you forget to actually look at them, like, really look. They just become part of your routine, same as your bedroom ceiling or the view from the school bus window. You stop seeing them and start just... knowing them.

I'd been knowing Nora for a long time which was probably why I didn't notice, at first, that something was different about her today.

The first practice of the season was mostly chaos, that was tradition.

Coach Rimer had us doing line rushes for the first forty minutes while he stood at center ice with his clipboard, squinting at us over his reading glasses like we were a math problem he was pretty sure had no solution. He did this every year. By November he'd have us running like a machine but right now we were more like a machine that someone had left in the rain over the summer and then plugged in anyway and hoped for the best.

"Ellis! You're not at your grandma's anymore, pick it up!"

"It was my grandparents'!" I shouted back, which earned me a second whistle blast that I interpreted as 'I don't care.'

On my line was  me, Danny Cho on right wing, and Marcus Webb at left and we’d had actually done pretty well last season. We'd grown up playing together in the same Saturday morning learn-to-skate program, back when we were all helmets and no coordination, so by now we moved together without really thinking about it. Danny had a shot that could take the paint off a barn door. Marcus was slower but he read plays like a chess player, always two moves ahead. And me? well, Coach said I had the best hockey sense on the team and I chose to believe him even when I had no idea what it meant.

From the other end of the ice, Nora was doing goalie warm-ups with the freshman backup, Tyler-with-a-Y, who was so nervous around her that he kept apologizing every time he scored on her. Which, to be fair to Tyler, wasn't often.

"She looks sharp," Danny said, pulling up beside me during a water break. He nodded toward the net.

"She's always sharp."

"I mean sharper than usual. Like she's got something to prove."

I watched her for a second the way she was tracking the puck even on lazy warm-up shots, her weight shifting three steps ahead of where she needed to be. Danny wasn't wrong, there was an edge to her today.

"She's fine," I said, even though a small part of my brain filed the observation away somewhere. "She just takes first practice seriously."

"You take first practice seriously. She takes first practice like it's the Olympics."

I didn't have a good answer to that, so I drank my water and didn't say anything, which was a strategy that worked approximately sixty percent of the time with Danny.

Today was the other forty percent, he kept looking at me.

"What?" I finally said.

"Nothing." He smiled into his water bottle. "Nothing at all, man."

After practice, we had a thing. Nora and I, I mean. We'd had it since we were twelve, when we first started practicing at the same times because she'd moved up to the girls' competitive league and our schedules lined up. Every first practice of the season, we went to the vending machine between the men's and women's locker rooms, got hot chocolate from the ancient machine that always dispensed about twenty percent too much powder and sixty percent too much water, we sat on the bench under the broken clock that had said 4:47 since approximately forever, and we talked about the season.

It was our thing. We didn't announce it or plan it, it  just happened, the same way sunrise happens.

She was already there when I came out, still in her practice gear except for her skates, hair coming loose from its braid, two sad cups of hot chocolate steaming on the bench beside her. She handed me one without looking up from her phone.

"Thank you," I said.

"It's terrible," she said.

"I know." I sat down and sipped it. It was, in fact, terrible. Watery and too sweet and slightly metallic in a way that made me wonder about the pipes. "God, that's bad."

"Every year."

"Every year," I agreed.

We sat with the badness of the hot chocolate for a moment, the way you sit with an old joke not because it's funny anymore, but because it's yours.

"Good summer?" she asked.

"Okay summer. Grandpa taught me to fish. I was bad at it. How were the camps?"

"Good." Then something crossed her face quick, like a cloud shadow. "Really good, actually."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." She looked down at her cup. "I worked with this goalie coach from Manitoba. She played eleven years in the CWHL. She was..." Nora paused. "She was really something."

"Sounds like it."

"She said I…” Nora stopped and started again. "She said I have a future. Like, a real one, if I commit."

The alcove was quiet. Down the hallway, I could hear the Zamboni humming, resurfacing the ice we'd just wrecked for the next group.

"You've always had a future," I said. "You're the best goalie this program's ever had."

"Jordan." She looked at me then, and there was something in her eyes I didn't fully have a word for. Something more complicated than sadness or joy.

"I mean like a real future future. Scholarship level. She thinks I could…” She stopped again. "She gave me some names of programs. Places that have been asking about me."

I let that land for a second.

Places.

Plural.

"That's incredible," I said, because it was, Nora had worked for this since she was eight years old standing in a net that was three sizes too big for her, and she deserved every good thing that was coming her way. I meant it, one hundred percent.

I just also felt something that I decided, immediately, not to examine too closely.

"Yeah," she said. "It's really good." She said it like she was convincing herself. Or maybe like she was waiting for me to say something else.

I didn't know what else to say. So I lifted my terrible hot chocolate in her direction.

"To the season."

She looked at me for just a second longer than usual. Then she lifted hers.

"To the season."

I thought about it the whole drive home.

Not the scholarship stuff… I mean, yes, that too, but not just that. I thought about the way she'd said 'places,' like she was being careful around the word. Like it was bigger than she wanted it to sound. And I thought about how she'd looked at me after, like she was waiting for me to catch up to something she'd already figured out.

Nora was going somewhere.

I'd always known she was good, but 'good' and 'scholarship level' and 'programs that are asking about you' were different categories, and somewhere between July and September, she had crossed from one into another and I had been in Minnesota being bad at fishing.

My phone buzzed in the cupholder.

[Nora]: okay be honest. how bad was your shot selection today.

I laughed out loud in my empty car.

[Jordan]: criminally bad. don't tell coach

[Nora]: he definitely noticed

[Jordan]: great. love that for me

[Nora]: you'll be fine. you always are

I put my phone down and stared at the road for a second.

‘You always are.’

I'd never really thought about whether that was true. It had just always been the two of us, side by side, the same rink and the same bad hot chocolate and the same broken clock that said 4:47. She'd always been there, and I'd always been there, and the future had always been this vague shared thing, hovering somewhere ahead of us like we'd walk into it together.

But that's not how futures worked, I knew that. I was seventeen, not seven anymore.

I just hadn't thought about it until right now.

[Jordan]: yeah. probably.

I hit send, pulled into my driveway, and sat in the car for a minute after I turned off the engine, listening to the silence.

The season hadn't even really started yet and something told me it was going to be the longest one of my life.