Twenty Miles Read Free

gaggles of girls disappear into the blank face of Sam Hall.
    She held her breath as she watched Iz walk slowly up the arena sidewalk, leaning slightly against the weight of her shouldered hockey bag. She’d changed into a different pair of jeans, different T-shirt. ‘What’re you going to wear?’ Sig had asked her on the way out. ‘Dunno,’ Iz grunted as though she didn’t care.
    Chin up,
Sig thought angrily as she squinted at Iz’s hunched back.
Get your goddamn head up.
She couldn’t walk into a murder of girls with her eyes glued to the bloody floor. She’d be eaten alive.
    Her ponytail was crooked.
    She walked through the door.
    W e fell into a swarm around the gate to the ice, watching the Zamboni amble a lazy line down the far boards, erasing the remains of the practice before ours.
    The players’ chatter sawed through the Zamboni’s stretched movements. I stood in their middle and felt the waiting in my legs. The transformation always begins here, in the drum roll off the ice, waiting for a Zamboni, or for the rest of the team or the coaches, summer leaking from your body, muscles rearranging themselves under the weight of equipment into memories of this theatre of winter contained by the boards. How to act.
    After the final lick of the Zamboni’s slow tongue, its last lazy circle, the ice lay smooth, a thin-skinned sheen. Dizzying mirror. The Zamboni inched toward its door and our swarm shifted, tightened, everyone moving toward the gate, lifting their sticks off the floor. Muscles flooding with memory.
    Tykes league – me and all the boys. Chad Trenholm, a notorious parent-clinger, crying his eyes out beside the other team’s net, stick on the ice, wailing, ‘I want my mommy.’ Even the motherless among us could feel his loss there on the ice, small but urgent. It spread among us, contagious as head lice.
    Our coach, Uncle Larry as we all called him, stood on the bench behind us, unmoved, the sloppy game going on around Chad’s inert body.
    His leather mitts formed a fat bracket around his mouth. ‘Keep it off the ice, Chad!’ he called, a voice scrubbed porous by cigarettes and rink air. ‘Off the ice!’
    Our ice grew walls this way, conjured gradually through Uncle Larry’s mantra.
Keep it off the ice, boys. Off the ice, Isabel. Am I speaking Chinese here, or what? I said, Keep it off the ice.
    Even if we did miss our moms, dads, grandparents – if their faces flickered lonely in the stands, an impossible distance away, if our toes were so cold we were convinced they’d fallen off and were rattling around in our skates, none of it was to touch our ice. This was our first training as men.
    I wasn’t a girl then. Not a tomboy either – that word, like some ragged misfit cat, tripping on the tails of others. I was a girl, of course, but not a
girl.
We were the same size, had the same voices, the same disguised faces behind our too-big helmet cages. And we all pretended we were someone else when we were out there. Someone bigger, faster. Someone with hands, as Uncle Larry said, as though the ones we owned were imposters, all the real hands leading disembodied lives out there, magic bleeding from their elusive fingers like the coins Sig used to conjure out of nowhere, silver blooming from the crack between her ring finger and pinky before her arthritis got too bad.
    We played together, so we were the same. That was a long time ago.
    But it can’t all be kept off the ice. Even after the Zamboni has licked away the violence of our skate blades, there is always more. There’s more and more.
    I glided up the ice, right wing, playground squawk of voices behind me, eyes on Pelly’s strides like a speedskater through the middle, but she’d lose the puck, I saw this in her flimsy grip. Voices around me calling for the puck, calling Pelly’s name, along the boards, behind me, voices circling like seagulls, and I should call, I should call, but why didn’t Pelly see me open? Head down, Pelly