“Hang on,” he said, peering at a plastic box. A row of green lights blinked to life. “Got it.” He stood up, dusting his hands on his jeans, then he followed my gaze. “Oh. The router. Setting up the wireless connection. Figured it was the most important thing to start with, right?”
“Yeah. It’s, uh, nice to meet you all.”
Elaine Ziegler kept staring. Maybe she was trying to reconcile it, the polite young man suddenly emerging from the shell of a passed-out lunk. Then she clapped her hands together. “Well, let’s get to work. Gary, you make the bed. Arthur, why don’t you start unpacking those suitcases? And I’m just going to…here we go.”
She shook open a black garbage bag and bent over, reaching for the empty beer cans on the floor, crinkling her nose at the smell. I felt a hot bubble of guilt.
“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.