Their laughter tears holes in Ana’s lungs and her throat tightens. Granted, she could have gone off to look for her best friend, and stands there with her phone in her hand for several minutes without actually calling. But anger gets the better of her. Few disappointments can compare with the way you feel the first time your best friend dumps you for a boy, and there’s no more silent walk than the one that takes you home alone after a party when you’re fifteen years old.
Ana and Maya found each other as children when they saved each other’s lives. One pulled the other out of a hole in the ice, and in return she pulled the other out of her loneliness. They were opposites in many ways, but they both liked dancing badly, singing loud, and going fast on snowmobiles. That goes a long way. Best friends. Sisters before misters. And of all the things they’ve promised each other, the most important: we never desert each other.
The girls in the kitchen are still laughing at Ana. They’re saying something about her clothes and her body, but she’s no longer listening; she’s already heard it all in the school corridors and in comments online. Lyt staggers around a corner and catches sight of her, and Ana mutters: “Fuck off.” Because they all can. The whole lot of them.
As she walks out of the front door, she stops one last time and considers calling Maya. Maybe going upstairs to look for her. But she’s not going to beg and plead for attention. Even in a town that’s covered with snow three-quarters of the year, it’s unbearably cold standing in the shade of someone who’s a bit more popular than you are. Ana puts her phone on silent and drops it in her bag. Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride.
She sees Amat and grabs hold of his shoulder. He’s so drunk he couldn’t even read the top line of an optician’s chart. Ana sighs.
“If you see Maya, tell her I couldn’t be bothered to wait for her to decide if she likes peanuts or not.”
Amat stammers at her in confusion. “Where . . . I mea . . . Wha . . . I mean . . . Who?” Ana rolls her eyes.
“Maya. Tell her I’ve gone.”
“Where . . . Where is she?”
The question makes his brain clearer, his voice more sober. Ana almost feels sorry for him.
“Oh, Amat, don’t you get it? Try looking in Kevin’s bedroom!”
Amat shatters into a thousand invisible pieces, but Ana doesn’t feel like staying, doesn’t want to be in this house when she herself falls apart. She slams the front door behind her and the night cold strokes her cheeks. Her breathing becomes easier immediately; her heartbeat calms. She grew up outside, and being stuck behind windows has always felt like being imprisoned. Social relationships, trying to make friends, be accepted, always starving and sandpapering herself smaller—it makes her feel claustrophobic. She takes the path through the forest in the darkness and feels infinitely safer there than in a house full of people. Nature has never done her any harm.
*
Behind a closed door on the upper floor of the Erdahl family house stays the only secret Maya has ever kept from her best friend: that right up to the last moment, when she could no longer breathe beneath Kevin, she kept telling herself one single thing: “I mustn’t be frightened. Ana will find me. Ana won’t desert me.”
*
Amat will never be able to explain his reasons. Jealousy, maybe. Pride, probably. An inferiority complex, possibly. Infatuation, definitely. There are two juniors sitting guarding the stairs, and when they tell him he can’t go upstairs he roars at them, surprising not just them but himself: “And which fucking line do YOU play in?”
During all those years in little league and the boys’ team, people kept saying his feet were superior, but that wasn’t what took him all the way. It was the way he saw things. His eyes were always faster than everyone else’s, he managed to see more than everyone else, remembered every detail of every attack. The position of the backs, the movements of the goalie, the tiniest shift in the corner of his eye when a teammate put his stick on the ice.
Intimidated, the juniors get out of the way. There are three sections to the staircase. On the upstairs landing there are photographs of the entire Erdahl family, and beside them pictures of Kevin alone. Pictures of him everywhere. In hockey gear when he was five. When he was six. When he was seven. The same smile every year. The same look in his eyes.
They will ask Amat exactly what he heard. Exactly where he was. He will never be able to say if it was a “no” or a “stop,” or just a desperate, muffled scream from behind the palm of a hand that made him react. Maybe none of those. Maybe he opened the door out of sheer instinct. They will ask him if he was drunk. They will glower at him accusingly and say: “But is it not the case that you are, and have been for many years, in love with the girl in question?” The only thing Amat will be able to reply to that is that his way of seeing was superior. Faster than his feet, even.
He pushes the door handle down and stands in the doorway to Kevin’s room and sees the violence and torn clothes. The tears and the fiery red marks left by the boy’s fingers on the girl’s neck. One body taking the other against its will. He sees everything, and afterward he will dream about the most peculiar details: exactly which posters of exactly which NHL players were on the walls. Amat will remember that for the simplest possible reason. He has the same posters on the wall above his own bed.
*
Kevin loses his concentration for two seconds when Amat rushes through the door. That’s twice as much time as Maya needs. She won’t remember it as a reaction but as a fight to the death. A survival instinct. She manages to knee Kevin hard enough to get a tiny gap in which to push his body out of hers. She hits him as hard as she can in the neck, and runs. She doesn’t know how she gets out of the room, who she passes on the way, if she hits or kicks the juniors guarding the stairs. Perhaps everyone at the party is too drunk to notice her, perhaps they only pretend not to see. She tumbles out through the door, and just runs.
The year is halfway into March, but the snow still embraces her feet as she marches along the side of the road in the darkness. Her tears are hot when they leave her eyelids but already frozen by the time they fall from her chin. “You can’t live in this town; you can only survive it,” as her mom says. Never has that been more true than tonight.
Maya tugs her jacket tighter around herself; she’ll never know how she managed to take it with her—her blouse is torn to shreds, the skin on her neck and wrists already black with finger-shaped bruises. She hears Amat’s voice behind her but doesn’t slow down. The boy stumbles a few last breathless steps in the snow before falling to his knees in it. He’s drunk and crushed as he calls her name. In the end she stops, turns with her fists clenched, and stares at him, her tears now caused by equal parts exposure and fury.
“What happened?” Amat whispers.
“What the hell do you think happened?” she replies.
“We need to . . . You need to . . .”
“What? What do I need to do, Amat? What the hell do I need to do?”
“Talk to someone . . . the police . . . anyone, you need to . . .”
“It won’t make any difference, Amat. It won’t make any difference what I say, because no one will believe me anyway.”