GABBY
“So are you coming tonight or what?” Ryan asked Gabby a couple of Fridays later, the two of them heading downstairs and out the side entrance after eighth period. It was the end of the last full week of classes before the break, everybody rowdier than usual; the lawn inside the big circular drive in front of the building was decorated with a Christmas tree, a light-up menorah, and a giant kinara. “Game’s at the college at seven.”
“I guess?” Gabby frowned. “I honestly don’t think you should play, dude.”
“Oh, really?” Ryan smirked at her as if this was entirely new information, like they hadn’t been having some variation on this exact same argument since the night of the concert. “Well, in that case, let me hang up my skates forever. I’ve been thinking about taking up macramé.”
“Stop,” Gabby said as they crossed the parking lot. She was riding with Michelle and her new boyfriend today, could already see them waiting for her; she knew she only had another few seconds to make her point. “I’m not kidding. Did you ever even tell your mom you got hit again, at least?”
“Gabby . . .” Ryan rolled his eyes. “There’s nothing to tell her about. My head’s fine.” He shrugged, broad shoulders moving inside his jacket. “This is important, okay? This is the time of year when college scouts start sniffing around. It’s not the time to freak out ’cause I bumped my head.”
“I’m not freaking out,” Gabby protested. She hated that phrase, like just because she had anxiety the things she worried about weren’t real. Still, she’d been carrying around a pack full of dread for the last two weeks, the unshakable feeling that something bad was about to happen, and she wasn’t sure how much of it was valid concern over her best friend doing something dangerous and how much of it was some guilty echo of what he’d said outside Shay’s teacher’s house: Why are you interested in me all of a sudden?
Gabby knew she’d been distracted with Shay the last few months, that much was obvious, but she hadn’t realized Ryan had noticed it, too. She worried she hadn’t been there for him. She felt weirdly, naggingly at fault. I’m still here, she wanted to tell him, but that felt ridiculous and corny and embarrassing, so instead she worried incessantly about his brain smashing all over the ice.
In any case, she got the impression that there was no way she was going to win this argument right this instant. “Is Chelsea coming tonight?” she finally asked.
Ryan shook his head. “She went home early today,” he reported. “She’s got a cold.”
Gabby nodded. He’d been hanging out with Chelsea Rosen nonstop the last couple of weeks, which probably would have bothered her a little if she hadn’t been reasonably sure it would burn itself out in a few more days. Ryan would get tired of her, eventually, like he always got tired of the girls he hung out with who weren’t Gabby herself. “That’s because he’s never boned you,” Celia had pointed out helpfully, when Gabby had made the mistake of mentioning it some months ago. “It keeps you interesting to him.”
Gabby shook her head now, both to clear the memory and to keep from wondering, like she always did when she thought about that particular exchange, if Celia might have had a point. “Anyway, yes,” she said, sighing loudly so that Ryan would know she was only agreeing under protest. “I’ll be there.”
GABBY
The rink was at the state university branch twenty minutes south of Colson; Gabby cajoled Shay into driving her down there with promises of milkshakes and cheese fries after the game. “Can I make a spectacle of myself and leave halfway through?” Shay asked, lips twisting wryly. Gabby blew a raspberry against her cheek, making a joke of it though she knew Shay had actually been kind of pissed about the disappearing act she and Ryan had pulled at the recital. Sometimes it was like she didn’t know how to be both Shay’s girlfriend and Ryan’s friend at once.
It was a tight game, which didn’t actually make it much more interesting than normal; Shay loved hockey and knew all the rules, though, which Gabby was surprised to find out. “How come you and Ryan never talk about this?” she asked, reaching for the popcorn. “It’s like, the actual only thing you have in common.”
“Well,” Shay said, in a voice that wasn’t quite as lighthearted as Gabby might have wanted, “also you.”
She slipped out to the bathroom during the second period, but she got turned around and wound up coming in through a different door than she’d left through, which put her weirdly close to the Colson bench. She was trying to figure out if there was a way for her to cut across the bleachers without displacing too many people when the noise of the crowd turned alarmed: Gabby whirled around to look just as one of the Colson players hit the rink with a sickening crunch, helmet slamming into the ice hard nearly enough to crack it.
It only took her a second to realize it was Ryan.
“Jesus Christ,” Gabby yelped, heart like bloody pulp in her mouth as the team clustered around him and the ref skated out to the center of the ice; she shoved right past one of the Colson coaches to try and get a better look.
“He’s all right,” the coach said—Williams, Gabby thought his name was—glancing over at her distractedly. He was the assistant coach, Gabby knew, though he was older than Coach Harkin and had more of a dad air about him, like probably he went home to his wife at night and ate meat loaf and watched back-to-back episodes of NCIS on cable. “Nature of the beast,” he said now as Ryan sat up dazedly. “Everybody gets a bump on the head every once in a while.”
A bump on the—God, that phrasing made Gabby furious. “He’s had three concussions, actually,” she blurted, before she could stop herself. “So it’s a little more than a bump on the head.”
That got the coach’s attention. “Three?” he asked.
Gabby blanched. Her instinct was to backpedal, to say maybe she’d been mistaken. But that was ridiculous. She wasn’t mistaken; she knew for a fact. And this was Ryan’s brain they were talking about. This was his whole entire life.
“Yeah,” she said, looking Williams right in the eyeballs and knowing she was taking a terrifying fucking chance. “Three.”
GABBY
Gabby knew the Colson team would get right on the bus back to school once the game was over, so she had Shay detour in that direction on their way to the diner for milkshakes.
“Seriously?” Shay asked, skepticism written all over her sharp, lovely face. “Can’t you just text him?”