The bell rings in Beartown School. Classes start. But Benji is standing a hundred feet from the entrance with feet made of cement. He knows who he is in everyone’s eyes now, one hockey game isn’t going to change that. They may accept him on the ice, as long as he’s the best, but he’s always going to have to give them much more than everyone else now. He will always have to be grateful just for being allowed to take part. Because he isn’t one of them. And never will be again.
He knows people are still writing shit about him, saying shit, making jokes. It doesn’t matter who he is, how good he is at a particular sport, how much he fights, how hard he plays. In their eyes he will still only be one thing. A certain type of person will always take everything he ever achieves and boil it down to the same three letters. Like the note on the door of the cabin at the campsite, where the letter “A” was drawn like a target, flanked by the letter “F” and “G,” with a knife stuck through the middle. That’s all he’s allowed to be now.
* * *
He turns around to walk off in the other direction. For the first time in his life he’s scared of school. But there’s a young woman standing a short distance away, waiting. She doesn’t touch him, but her voice still stops him in his tracks.
“Don’t let the bastards see you cry, Benji.”
Benji stops, his eyes wide open. “I can’t bear it . . . how do you do it?”
Maya’s voice is weaker than her words. “You just go in. With your head held high and your back straight, and you look every single bastard in the eye until they look away. We’re not the ones there’s something wrong with, Benji.”
Benji hears himself crack as he asks, “How did you bear it? Back in the spring, after . . . everything . . . how did you cope?”
The look in her eyes is hard, her voice brittle. “I refuse to be a victim. I’m a survivor.”
* * *
She walks toward the school. Benji hesitates for an eternity before following her. She waits for him. Walks by his side. Their steps are slow; perhaps it looks as though they’re moving slowly, but they don’t creep quietly into that corridor. They take it by storm.
43
We’re Everywhere
The days blur together in Beartown this year; perhaps we can’t bear to keep track of either time or our feelings. At some point the autumn comes to an end and winter arrives, but we barely notice. Time merely passes, most of us are preoccupied just trying to get out of bed each morning.
* * *
Kira keeps going to work, but it never really feels like it. She arrives later and later, leaves earlier and earlier, and she knows that her name won’t be mentioned next time there’s talk of promotion. She doesn’t go to the conference she was invited to attend. She doesn’t have the energy to think about the future, she’s just trying to get through the day, fixed permanently in survival mode.
As usual it’s her colleague who tells her a few home truths. One afternoon Kira manages to go to the wrong room for a conference call and walks in on a planning meeting where her colleague is presenting a strategic plan to an important client. Kira stops in the doorway and looks at her colleague’s notes on the board. They’re brilliant, as always, but if Kira had been involved, they would have been even better. She waits outside after the meeting, and when her colleague comes out, Kira says, “That’s my specialty, you know that! I could have helped you with the presentation! Why didn’t you ask me to help?”
Her colleague doesn’t look angry. She’s not trying to hurt Kira. She just replies honestly, “Because you’ve given up, Kira.”
* * *
Deep down inside most of us would like all stories to be simple, because we want real life to be like that, too. But communities are like ice, not water. They don’t suddenly flow in new directions because you ask them to, they change inch by inch, like glaciers. Sometimes they don’t move at all.
No one confronts Benji at school. Who would dare? But every day his phone fills up with text messages from unidentifiable numbers, and every time he opens his locker, people have stuck notes in the gap around the door. All the usual words, the same old threats, he soon gets used to it. He becomes very good at pretending nothing’s going on, and those who wish him ill take this to mean that he has it too easy. That he’s not being punished hard enough, not suffering enough, so they need to think of something else.
William Lyt comes to school one day wearing a T-shirt with a target on the front. It’s so small and discreet that only Benji notices it. The note that was pinned to the door of the cabin that morning when everyone had just found out the truth had the same target on it, drawn as the letter “A” in the word “FAG.” Benji tore the note off at once and destroyed it, it never appeared anywhere online, so he knows that the person who left it there is the only person who knows what it looked like.
William Lyt wants him to know who it was. He wants Benji to remember the knife. Winning a game of hockey isn’t enough.
Benji looks him in the eye. They’re standing a few feet apart in a corridor on an ordinary day in a long winter term, and all the other students are blithely milling past between classes, on their way to the cafeteria. It’s a moment that exists only for the two boys: one from a red team, one from a green, a bull and a bear. Sooner or later one of them will end up crushing the other.
The teams in the league play each other twice per season, one home game, one away game. Beartown Ice Hockey will win the rest of its games up until then, and Hed Hockey will win all of its. The schedule is counting down inexorably to the return fixture, this time in Beartown’s ice rink.
* * *
All sports are fairy tales, that’s why we lose ourselves in them. So of course there’s only one way for this one to end.
* * *
Maya is skipping school, but she has carefully picked a day when she has hardly any classes. Even when she breaks the rules, she does so responsibly. She gets onto the bus and travels for a long time, to a town beyond reasonable commuting distance. Then she goes into a large brick building with a letter in her hand and at the reception asks for a lawyer. When she walks into her mom’s office, her mom knocks her coffee over in surprise.
“Darling! What are you doing here?”
Maya hasn’t been to Kira’s office since she was little, but she used to love going there. Other children would get bored with their parents’ workplaces, but Maya liked seeing her mom concentrating on something. Seeing her passion. It taught the daughter that there are some adults who have jobs they really care about and aren’t only doing for the money. That work can be a blessing.
She looks worried when she puts the letter down on her mom’s desk, worried about making her parent feel abandoned. “It’s from a . . . music school. I applied . . . it was just . . . I just wanted to know if I was good enough. I sent them a video of me playing my own songs and . . .”
The mother looks at her daughter’s letter. Just seeing the letterhead is enough to make her start to sniff. Kira studied hard when she was growing up so that she would be accepted into a highly academic school; she dreamed of studying law even though no one in her family had ever been to university. She wanted rules and frameworks, security and a career ladder. She wanted the same thing for her children: a life where you know what to expect, free from disappointment. But daughters are never the same as their mothers, so Maya has fallen in love with the freest, least regulated subject she can think of: music.
“You got in. Of course you got in.” Kira sniffs, so proud that she can’t even stand up.
Maya sobs, “I can start in January. I know it’s a really long way away, and I’ll have to borrow money, I understand if you don’t want—”