“What?”
“You heard.”
“What sort of party?”
“There’s a party in one of the cabins at the campsite tonight. I heard about it at school. You don’t have to come. But I . . . I just want to go to a party and feel . . . normal. Just for a while.”
“Okay,” Vidar says.
“Okay?” Ana repeats.
He grins. “Are you deaf or something? Okay!”
She laughs. They kiss. It feels perfectly normal. Perfectly normal and perfectly wonderful.
* * *
They go to the party. It feels normal, at least for a while. But then Vidar goes to the toilet, and the guy who comes up to Ana at the bar is from Hed, so he doesn’t know who she is. Perhaps he doesn’t even know who Vidar is.
Ana tries to be pleasant; she turns down the drink the guy offers her and moves the hand he puts on her hip. The guy from Hed proudly shows her the tattoo of a bull on his arm and says he might be playing on the A-team next season. Ana pushes him away when he starts whispering in her ear. She tries to move away. He grabs hold of her arm and laughs. “Come on! Don’t be such a stiff! Live a little!”
He wraps his arms around her waist. He doesn’t even see Vidar walking across the room, he doesn’t see the black look in his eyes, the lowered brow as he pushes through the crowd. Vidar doesn’t notice who he pushes aside or shoves into the tables around him. But Ana sees. She knows how simple it ought to be to get out of the situation, let the guy from Hed know he’s touched the wrong girl, picked an argument with the wrong guy. It would be so easy. But Ana has never done anything the easy way in her life.
So she twists out of the guy’s grasp, leans her upper body back, and head butts him. She hears a crunch when her forehead hits his nose. He falls screaming to the floor. Ana feels blood drip down her face, doesn’t know whose it is.
The guy’s friends are standing a few feet away, they’re as shocked as everyone else, so Ana knows she has only a couple of seconds to act. She sees Vidar storm through the crowd with a murderous look in his eyes, and Ana does the only thing she can do, given that she is who she is and loves someone like him: she takes aim and punches Vidar right in the face.
The room falls silent. Ana hits him again, harder, and Vidar stumbles backward. Then she grabs him by the arm and runs for the door. She drags him into the forest with her and runs until no one at the party will be able to find them.
“WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM?” Vidar shouts when Ana finally stops among the trees.
She feels almost guilty when she sees the way his face is swelling up. But she snaps, “You know what my problem is? Guys! Goddamn guys! You’re my problem!”
“What have I done now, then?”
She’s sobbing with rage now. “You would have killed him! If I hadn’t got you out of there, you’d have beaten him to death and been sent to prison and I—”
She’s gasping with angry, pent-up tears. Vidar stands in front of her, with a split lip and an eye that’s swelling up a bit more with each breath he takes.
“I was just trying to . . . help you . . .”
“What is it with guys? Why do you think we want you to fight over us the whole time? Why do you think you have to do everything violently? What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t know,” he admits.
Ana starts laughing. “I love you.”
“Is that why you hit me?”
“Yes!”
Vidar scratches his ear. “Do you have to love me quite so . . . hard?”
“I don’t want to be on some crappy pedestal!” she snaps.
“A what?”
“I don’t want you to fight for my sake! I don’t want you to do things for my sake! I just want you to believe in me. I don’t want you to take me places, I want you to back me up so I can get there myself!”
“Okay.”
“What do you mean, ‘okay’?”
“Okay . . . I . . . just okay. Okay. I . . . I love you too!”
“You’re so stupid!”
Her hand hurts so badly that she feels like curling up and howling. He leads her over to a snowdrift and makes her stick her hand in it. She screams. He tries to explain. “You shouldn’t hit someone like that, you need—” he begins, but she snaps, “Don’t you dare tell me how to punch you!”
“Okay.”
It’s just possible that there are more normal love stories.
* * *
The next day Vidar comes to Ana’s martial arts training. He doesn’t say anything, just drags six wooden pallets in from the yard and piles them on top of each other to form rough steps. Then he goes and stands on them.
“What’s that?” Ana wonders irritably.
“A pedestal,” Vidar tells her.
“Who for?” she asks.
“Me,” he replies.
She starts to laugh, but he’s serious.
“I’ll stand tall if you stand tall,” he says.
She stops laughing then and kisses him. Normal love stories have never held any appeal for her anyway.
* * *
How it started? We’re never going to stop arguing about that.
* * *
Perhaps it started with that guy from Hed who was trying it on at a party with a girl from Beartown and ended up with a broken nose. Perhaps he bore a grudge.
* * *
Or perhaps it began much earlier, at that first hockey game of the autumn where the Hed supporters chanted terrible things about Benjamin Ovich. Perhaps some people in Beartown were unable to let go of that, especially after Hed won the game.
* * *
Or perhaps it started one morning in early winter, when someone left a bloody bull’s horn outside the doors of the arena in Hed. It wasn’t even real blood, probably just a stupid joke by some drunk teenagers, but not everyone in Hed saw it that way.
One evening not long after that, a guy from Beartown was standing in line at a pizzeria in Hed—his girlfriend was from Hed and was waiting for him at home. Some guys from Hed were standing farther back in the line and started chanting those same words. One of them leaned forward and shouted them straight in his ear. Another yelled that he should “fuck off home” and “leave women from Hed the hell alone!” The guy from Beartown turned around and told them to go to hell, and the guys from Hed knocked the pizzas out of his hands. The staff managed to get between them before there was any serious trouble, but perhaps that was how it started.
Unless it started with all the rumors about the hospital and the factory, when everything became a fight over jobs. Once upon a time, people used to worry that the politicians would try to merge Hed and Beartown to form a single, larger town, but now they worry that there might not even be enough room for two small ones.
Soon after the incident with the bull’s horn outside the arena and the tussle in the pizzeria, Hed Hockey and Beartown Hockey’s nine-year-olds met at a tournament some distance away. The game was evenly matched, the boys were wound up, and when one of the nine-year-olds from Hed started to chant “Queers! Sluts! Rapists!,” a fight broke out among so many of the kids that their parents had to jump onto the ice to help the referee break them up. One father from Hed and another from Beartown tried to separate their sons, and one of the fathers thought the other grabbed his son a bit too hard. The dads started shouting, then jostling each other, and soon it was the kids who were trying to stop the adults fighting rather than the other way around.
Around the same time two older men started to squabble in the waiting room at Hed Hospital, because one thought he was having to wait longer than the other. The second man muttered, “Bloody Beartown bastards, build your own hospital and stop coming here to use up our health service.”
* * *
Perhaps none of this would have mattered if it hadn’t all happened during the same autumn and winter. Perhaps it wouldn’t have escalated if there hadn’t been a natural opportunity for all those people to meet in the same ice rink again before the year was out. But of course there was: another hockey game between Hed and Beartown.
* * *