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.
Not that people didn’t attempt to leave. They’d go for a few years of community college or university, but a small town like ours possesses a strange gravity, and they always came back. A few of my teammates were going to escape by leaving school early to play hockey in the Major Juniors, a path that would lead some of them to the NHL. I might have done the same. But I’d heard about someone from town, a decade ago, who’d played for an American college instead. He was rich and successful and living in New York by that time. He came back occasionally to visit, and I glimpsed him once at the gas station, filling the tank of a shiny high-end rental car. Even in that split second, I saw that he carried himself in a different way, and something within me latched on. I’d known that the world was bigger than Carlton, British Columbia, but I’d never really thought about just how big it was. I was fourteen years old, and I made up my mind. I played in Junior A and kept my college eligibility. Despite my reputation, I was smart, or at least I wanted to be smart, and I studied hard in school. In spare hours I shot tennis balls into the street hockey net, did squats and flipped tires and jogged the dirt roads around our house. On a Saturday morning, I drove two hours to take the SATs at a town on the border. In the fall of senior year, I finally got the call. The one I’d been hoping for. A new door, swinging wide open.
On the afternoon before my flight east, I stood with my parents in the driveway as the sun slipped behind the mountains, casting an early twilight over the yard. My parents owned the town’s grocery store, and they couldn’t afford the vacation time or the cost of the plane tickets. My mom would drive me to Vancouver, where we’d spend the night in an airport motel before my flight the following morning. My dad was staying at home to work. I’d said good-bye to my friends at a party the night before, truck headlights illuminating the clearing in the woods where we always gathered, squat kegs and foamy cups of beer clutched in the semidarkness.
It was quiet during the car ride out of town. “Music?” my mom asked, and I shook my head. The trees along the highway blurred together.
“Evan,” she said after a long silence. “It’s okay to be nervous.” She looked over at me, her face tanned from the summer. A long salt-and-pepper braid fell down her back. Her bare arms were lean from years of carrying boxes from delivery trucks to the loading dock. It was her hands on the steering wheel, their familiar age spots and creases, her thin gold wedding band, that made me understand that I was really leaving.
But I shook my head again. “I’m fine.”
“Well,” she said. “I guess you’re probably pretty excited about it.”