All Chapters of On Thin Ice : Chapter 1 - Chapter 3

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 st

Coach Rimer did not believe in speeches.This was something you figured out fast if you played for him. Other coaches gave you the fire-and-ice thing before a season… big vision stuff, talk about legacy, maybe a quote from someone famous that they'd googled the night before. Coach Rimer walked into the locker room on the first day of real practice, put his clipboard on the bench, looked at us like we were a grocery list he was mildly disappointed in, and said: 'Skates on. Ice in five.'That was it every year and we loved him for it.So when he kept me after practice on Tuesday and said 'Ellis, a minute,' I ran through a quick mental inventory of everything I might have done wrong. Shot selection, yes. My backcheck on the third line rush had been lazy. I'd been late to the defensive zone twice and Coach had definitely seen it because Coach saw everything, which was a gift and also a curse depending on which side of it you were on.He waited until the rest of the team had filtered out.