All Chapters of Puck Around And Fall: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

It happened on a Friday after school, in the least dramatic location imaginable.The bleachers. Empty rink, no practice, the ice freshly resurfaced and gleaming under the overhead lights like nobody had touched it yet and nobody was planning to. I'd stayed late to return a textbook to the athletic office and was cutting through the rink because it was faster, and Finn was sitting in the third row with his elbows on his knees and his gym bag at his feet and the expression of someone who had been sitting there long enough to have a conversation with himself and reach a conclusion he wasn't entirely comfortable with.He looked up when he heard my boots on the rubber mat."Hey," he said."Hey." I slowed. "Practice ended two hours ago.""I know." He looked at the ice. "I've been thinking."I should have kept walking. The textbook was due back and the office closed at five and I had perfectly good reasons to say see you Monday and continue through the exit door and let whatever Finn had bee

I didn't notice it until Ms. Okafor pointed it out.That was the embarrassing part. It was my manuscript. My character. My two-in-the-morning handwriting filling up a notebook I'd carried from San Diego in the front pocket of a duffel bag because it felt too important to pack in a box. And I had been writing Elowen's story for eight months without fully seeing what it was doing.Ms. Okafor saw it in eleven minutes.We were twenty minutes into Thursday's elective, the room in that good focused quiet it reached when everyone was deep in something real. I had read three new pages — Elowen in the new world, navigating a city she didn't choose, finding small things to love about it while missing the old one with the specific ache of someone who knew they weren't going back. She had a friend in the new world who was steady and warm and knew her without being told. She had someone else who was electric and present and made her feel like the city was smaller when he was in it. And underneath

I found out Knox knew through a change in atmospheric pressure.Specifically, the atmospheric pressure of Tuesday morning practice, which I was watching from the bleachers with my thermos and notebook. The team was running a power play drill. Under normal circumstances this looked like controlled chaos with occasional brilliance. Under Tuesday morning circumstances it looked like two of its most important components actively refusing to occupy the same square foot of ice.Knox set up at the blue line. Finn was open on the left wing. Everyone could see Finn was open. The puck went to Torres instead.Dad blew his whistle."Callahan. Henderson. You're a power play unit, not two separate guys who happen to be on the ice at the same time. Run it again."They ran it again. Knox passed to Torres again. Torres looked mildly alarmed, like a person who had unexpectedly become the Switzerland of a conflict he wanted no part of.Dad blew his whistle harder. He looked up at the bleachers. His eyes

The winter formal announcement went up on the main board outside the cafeteria on a Friday morning, and by second period it was the only thing anyone was talking about, which told you everything you needed to know about the social priorities of Evergreen High in late November.The poster was green and white — because of course it was, because everything in this building was green and white, including the mugs in the teachers' lounge which I had seen and which were deeply, committedly on brand — with silver lettering that said EVERGREEN WINTER FORMAL and a date three weeks out and a small cartoon snowflake that someone had drawn freehand and which was charming in the slightly lopsided way that handmade things were charming.I looked at it on my way to AP Lit.I looked at it on my way back from AP Lit.I was still thinking about it when I took my seat in the bleachers for afternoon practice, which I attended with enough regularity now that the team had stopped registering my presence as

The burgundy dress arrived on a Thursday and was exactly right.I knew it the second I put it on — the kind of knowing that bypassed opinion and went straight to fact. It fit the way things fit when you'd accidentally chosen correctly, deep red against my skin, simple enough to be elegant, nice enough to justify the seventeen minutes I'd spent on my hair. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and thought that San Diego Avery, three months ago, buying this dress for a California event in seventy-degree weather would have looked entirely different than Evergreen Avery wearing it now. Steadier, maybe. More at home in her own reflection.I went downstairs. Dad looked up from his playbook, took in the dress, and said, "You look beautiful, kid," in the gruff, slightly overwhelmed way that dads said things they meant completely and couldn't quite figure out how to say larger.I hugged him before he could recover his composure.He patted my back twice and cleared his throat and went back to