The Futures(2)
“Mrs. Ziegler, I’m sorry. Let me…” I hurried to start gathering the cans.
“Well…” She paused, then handed me the bag. “All right. Thank you, dear.”
When I was done, I announced that I was taking out the trash. Elaine and Gary were absorbed in a discussion with Arthur about where to hang a poster. The door creaked on its hinges when I opened it, but they didn’t notice.
The captains had given us the morning off from practice. There was a diner on Broadway that I’d passed before, a place that served breakfast all day. The room was packed and buzzing, new students chattering excitedly with their families, utensils ringing against china while waiters wove through the crowds with plates aloft. I was about to give up when the hostess finally caught my eye and led me to an empty stool at the counter.
After, while I was waiting to pay at the register, a girl walked in. Other heads turned too, taking in her tanned legs, her cutoff shorts, her scoop-neck T-shirt. She had a blond ponytail sticking out from a faded Red Sox cap and a freckled nose. She leaned into the counter and said something inaudible in the din, and even that—the shape of her mouth forming silent words—carried some kind of promise. I tried to edge closer, but it was too crowded. A waiter handed her two cups of coffee. She pushed the door open with her shoulder. I craned my neck but lost sight of her on the sidewalk.
I wandered for a while, only returning to the dorm when I knew Arthur and his parents would be at lunch. I changed and jogged up to the rink for afternoon practice. I was the first to arrive, which was what I’d been hoping for. The burn of the laces against my fingertips as I tightened my skates, the smell of the locker room, the wet reflection left behind by the Zamboni, the sound of the blade carving into the ice, the wind and echo of the empty rink—it was like slipping back into a native tongue. This was the best part. It only took a second, in that first push away from the boards, to feel the transformation. From a bulky heaviness to a lighter kind of motion. The friction of the blade melted the ice just enough, sending me flying forward on threads of invisible water. I was in a different country, a different side of the continent, but in those moments at the rink, home came with me. The ice was a reminder of the world I had left behind just a week earlier: long winters, frozen ponds, snowbanks, pine trees. It had always seemed like a decent enough reward for life in a cold, forbidding land: the gift of speed, as close as a person like me could come to flight.
I grew up in the kind of small town that isn’t easy to get to and isn’t easy to leave. It started as a gold-rush settlement, and while no one got rich from the land, a handful of prospectors liked it enough to stay. It’s in a mountain valley in the interior of British Columbia, surrounded by wilderness, defined mostly by its distance from other places: seven hours to Vancouver, two hours to the border, an hour to the nearest hospital.
In a small town like ours, where there is only one of everything—one school, one grocery store, one restaurant—it’s expected that there is only one of you. People aren’t allowed to change much. I was held back in kindergarten—I’d had some trouble with reading comprehension—and it marked me well into the next decade. I was big for my age, always a year older, and I think people liked me more because of it. It made the picture snap into focus: I was a hockey player; I was a born-and-bred local; I was a hard worker even if I wasn’t the brightest. An image easily understood, one as solid and reliable as the mountains in the distance. I grew up with boys like me, most of us hockey players. We were friends, but I sometimes wondered how alike we really were. The things they loved most, the things that made them whoop and holler with glee—keg parties and bonfires, shooting at cans on a mossy log, drunken joyrides in a souped-up F-150—only gave me a vague, itchy desire for more. I could imitate easily enough, like following an outline through tracing paper, but it never felt like the thing I was meant to be doing. I got good at faking laughter.
Maybe the girls at school sensed this difference. It happened fast: one day puberty arrived, and they all started paying attention to me. From then on, there was always someone waiting at my locker when the last bell rang, twirling her hair, holding her textbooks tight to her chest. I genuinely loved those girls, loved that they banished the loneliness, but it was a generalized feeling; it didn’t matter who was next to me, whose bed or musty basement carpet we were lying on. I had sex for the first time with a girl a year older than I was, eleventh grade to my ninth. After she had coached me through our first short but glorious session, she started telling me her plan. She was going to drop out at the end of the year and move to the Yukon, where she’d work as a chef at a logging camp. The pay was good, and the setting was wild. She propped herself up on one elbow, resting a hand on my bare chest. She hadn’t told anyone, but she was telling me. She kissed me in conclusion. “You’re a good listener, Evan,” she said, then she moved lower beneath the duvet.
A pattern emerged from the filmstrip of tanned faces and soft bodies. All the girls liked to talk dreamy—about the jobs they’d get, what they’d name their kids someday. We became blank screens for each other, desire reflected into a hall of mirrors. It solved a problem for me, but sometimes it left me wondering if that was it—if love was always so easily caught and released. I realized after a while that I gave these girls something very specific. They knew it even before I did, that I would be gone someday. I wouldn’t be there to hold them accountable when their dreams eventually fell short. I wasn’t like everyone else, wasn’t meant to stay in this town.