HATE TRICK

ARABELLA

Nobody warns you that a hockey rink in September smells like a gym bag that spent the summer marinating in a public pool.

I found this out at ten to seven on a Friday night, standing in the concourse of Kessler Arena holding a foam finger and a plastic cup of beer that cost nine dollars and tasted like urine.

"Smile," Tessa said. "You look like you're being held hostage or something.”

"I'm at a hockey game."

"Same face."

She was bouncing on her toes beside me in Cash Delaney's practice jersey, which hung off her like a dress because Tessa is five foot nothing and Cash is the size of a refrigerator. Her black bob was clipped back on one side with a tiny gold pin shaped like a lightning bolt. She'd been dating Cash for three weeks, which in Tessa years is basically a marriage, and tonight was her first game as the official girlfriend. That was why I was here. I had been drafted as emotional support, and also because I owed her for August, when she covered my half of the rent and never once brought it up. You don't say no to a person like that. You hold the foam finger.

"Be honest," she said. "Do I look like I'm trying too hard?"

"You're wearing his name on your back."

"That's the point. It's a statement."

"It's a statement that says CASH in block letters."

"Arabella."

"You look great. You look like a girl who's totally normal about a boy."

She grinned and hooked her arm through mine. "I am so not normal about him. Come on, I want to be near the glass."

I should say now, before this goes any further, that I do not do sports. I'm a journalism major, a junior, and I write for the Hollis Courier, where I'm technically on the metro desk, which at a school this size means I write about parking. Last week it was a 900-word piece on the new permit system. A man emailed me to say I'd ruined his life. I framed it. Anyway, my whole relationship with athletics was that I knew the rules of exactly one sport, which was avoiding them.

But Tessa had a program, so I took the program, because I'm a person who reads whatever is put in front of her, cereal boxes, shampoo bottles, the back of a stranger's phone case on the bus. We found our seats, four rows up from the glass near the Wardens' bench, and I flipped it open while Tessa waved at a boy in a jacket who was clearly not Cash and then clearly realized it.

HOLLIS UNIVERSITY WARDENS. 2026 ROSTER.

I ran my finger down the column. Delaney, C., right wing, sophomore. There was Cash, a photo of him grinning like a golden retriever. Reyes was the head coach. Park was listed under athletic training. The captain's name was at the top in bold.

HARLOW, JACE. #17. C. Senior. Duluth, MN.

I read it twice. Then I read it again, slower, like it might rearrange itself.

"Tess."

"Mm."

"Who's Jace Harlow?"

"Oh, the captain. He's like Cash's best friend, they've been on the same line since freshman year. He's kind of a, um." She waved her cup vaguely. "He's not a people person. Cash says he's secretly nice."

"Does Cash say that or does Cash hope that?"

"Both?" She squinted at me. "Why are you being weird?"

"I'm not being weird."

"Your voice went up an octave."

"It's cold in here."

It was, in fairness, very cold in there. It's a rink. But that wasn't the reason my hands had gone numb around the program.

I need to tell you about Duluth.

I was nine. My mom had just taken the job at the hospital and we lived in a duplex off Grand Avenue, and the only place in town with free after-school care was the Lakeside Recreation Center, which had two rinks, a snack bar, and a room with a broken foosball table where all the kids who had nowhere to go got parked. I'd been wearing glasses for about six weeks. They were purple. They were enormous. The optician had said they were "very beautiful” and I had believed him, because I was nine and optimistic and had not yet met people.

One afternoon in October I took a wrong turn on the way to the bathroom and wound up in the little hallway behind the second rink, the one with the pickup games. A bunch of boys, ten, eleven years old, all in mismatched gear, were playing something that involved a lot of screaming. I stood by the boards because the hallway was dark and the ice was bright, and somebody slapped a puck into the glass about six inches from my face and I flinched so hard my glasses flew off.

They landed on the ice. I did what any nine-year-old would do, which is go after them. I pushed through the little gate, I slipped, I crawled, and then I was on my hands and knees in the middle of a game, patting the ice around me like an old crone.

The whole thing stopped. I couldn't see anything. Everything past my own hands was one big smear of white and noise.

Then a voice, close, cold and totally bored: "Move, blind bat. We're playing."

And then they were all laughing. Not like mean laughing, which I might have been able to take, but the bouncing kind that kids do when something's genuinely funny, that goes up and up and doesn't have a bottom. I found my glasses by touch. Cracked. When I got them back on I looked up and saw him standing over me, tall, with snow-wet dark hair stuck to his forehead and a stick propped on his shoulder, looking down at me the way you'd look at a bug on a windowsill.

Somebody yelled his name across the rink. Jace. Jace, come on man.

My mom picked me up at six and asked how my day was. I said fine. I wore the cracked glasses for three weeks because I was too embarrassed to ask for contacts, and I've been telling people for eleven years that I got over it.

I did not get over it.

"Arabella," Tessa said. "You're doing the thing where you stare."

"I'm not staring at anything."

"You're staring at the program like it owes you money."

The lights went down. A voice boomed over the speakers, announcing the Wardens and the crowd stood up in one big roar and the whole building shook. I stood too because everyone did. The team came onto the ice in a line, all of them huge, all of them suddenly small beneath the lights, and I scanned the numbers like a person defusing a bomb.

Seventeen was last out, because captains skate last, I guess. He glided to the center circle with the stick in one hand, helmet on, face a blank dark oval from where I sat. Tall. Broad across the shoulders in a way that a nine-year-old could not have been. He didn't wave at the crowd. He just stopped and stood there, perfectly still, while everyone else was bouncing.

The announcer said his name and the building lost its mind.

I sat down very slowly.

"Oh my God," Tessa whispered. "You're doing the face."

"I don't have a face."

"You do. It's your Danger Face. It's what you did when your landlord tried to charge us for the stairs."

"They were not our stairs."

"Hey." She put her hand on my knee. "Do you know him or something?"

"No."

"Arabella."

"No," I said. "I don't know him. He's a stranger. We've never met."

Which was true, technically. The person who'd called me blind bat was ten years old and wore a yellow jersey with a hole in the elbow. This was a grown man in a Hollis jersey. Same name, same hair probably, same smug little tilt to the head when the puck dropped.

The game started. I'll be honest: I didn't absorb much of it. There was a lot of skating, and a lot of men crashing into the glass, and Tessa screaming "GO BABY" every time Cash touched the puck, and once an old man two rows down yelled something about a "goddamn reffing disgrace" with real tenderness. I watched number seventeen. I couldn't help it. I watched him the way you watch a dog you don't trust.

He was good. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. He moved like the ice was an extension of him, long clean strides with no wasted effort, and when he got the puck the whole rink seemed to tilt toward him. In the second period, he took a pass from Cash on the left side, shifted his weight once, and put it so fast into the top corner that I didn't see it go. The goalie did a little sprawling flop, like a man being shot in a movie.

The arena exploded. Tessa shrieked and grabbed me, nearly knocking my glasses off and we jumped up and down because that's what you do. When I looked back at the ice, Jace was skating away from the celebration. His teammates piled on him, pounding his helmet, and he took it like a man being rained on, patient, a little impatient, unmoved. He tapped his stick against Cash's and that was it.

"He's so intense," Tessa said, wiping a tear from her eye. "Cash says he never even smiles after goals. It freaks the rookies out."

"looks to me like he’s just doing all these for attention. What a freak."

"Are you serious? He's literally so hot. Everyone says so."

"Everyone has bad taste, then."

"Okay," she said carefully, "but you're blushing."

"It's the cold."

"Arabella, you're like fifty percent freckles and fifty percent blush. It's not the cold."

I'd like it entered into the record that I'm plain. I'm not fishing. It's just a fact, and I made peace with it around the eighth grade. I have red hair that's less romantic copper and more traffic cone, skin that gets freckles the second someone says the word sun, and glasses, always glasses, thick black ones now because I got tired of purple. My best feature is my sense of humor and my second best is that I'm good at parallel parking. I've had two boyfriends, one of whom dumped me over text and one of whom I dumped for being boring in a way I could only describe as aggressive. I'm not tragic about it. I just know what I am. You don't get cast as the hot girl when you look like the girl who tells the hot girl her tag is sticking out.

So no, I was not blushing about a boy in a helmet. I was blushing out of fury, which looks the same.

The Wardens won four to two. Cash got an assist and a penalty for something called "slashing," which Tessa explained is when you hit someone with a stick, which is apparently a crime in a sport that is entirely hitting people with sticks. I did not understand and did not ask. We filed out with the crowd, down a concrete tunnel that smelled like popcorn and wet carpet, and Tessa dragged me around the back of the building to a corridor where a man in a Wardens fleece stood guard in front of a heavy door.

"We're with Delaney," Tessa told him, confidently.

He looked at her jersey, then at me. “She's with Delaney," he said, jerking his chin at Tessa. "You?"

"I'm the plus-one."

"Of the girlfriend?"

"I'm a plus-one of a plus-one. It's a whole thing."

He let us stand in the corridor, so that's something.

It was dim back there, I leaned against the wall and took off my glasses to clean them on my sweatshirt, because they'd fogged when we came in from the cold, and everything dissolved into a warm blur. This is a thing I do. It's a nervous habit, a thing to do with my hands. I stood there pressing the lenses into the fabric, thinking Tessa's going to want to go to the afterparty and I'm going to want to die, and somewhere in the middle of that thought, the heavy door swung open and a bunch of guys came out, loud and smelling like shampoo.

Cash was first. I knew it was Cash because the blur that hit Tessa lifted her off the ground and spun her in a circle and she shrieked, "Put me DOWN, you're sweaty," and he said, "I'm not sweaty, I'm clean," and she said, "You're both," and they kissed.

GROSS.

I looked at the floor out of politeness and put my glasses back on.

When I looked up again the other guys had thinned out and one of them hadn't. He was leaning against the doorframe about four feet away, with his bag over one shoulder and his arms folded, dark hair still damp, in a gray hoodie that was a size too small across the chest. He wasn't looking at the couple. He was looking at me.

I'd been prepared for this in the abstract. I'd run a hundred versions of it on the walk over, none of which featured me holding a foam finger.

Up close, he was worse. Taller than I'd figured, with a jaw that looked cut with a ruler and a slight bump in the bridge of his nose. Gray-blue eyes, heavy-lidded. A thin pale scar through his left eyebrow. His mouth was set in a flat line that I felt I'd seen before, on the face of a boy standing over me with a stick on his shoulder.

The look lasted exactly two seconds too long. And then he looked away I'd stopped being interesting.

"Jace!" Cash had finally put Tessa down. "Dude, come here. This is Tess's roommate. Bella. Bella, this is Jace, our captain, the grumpy one, don't take it personal."

"It's Arabella," I said.

"Sorry. Arabella."

"Hey," Jace said.

That was it. He didn't unfold his arms. His voice was lower than I'd expected, rough around the edges like he'd been yelling, which, I guess, he had. There was no spark in his face. He looked at me the way you'd look at a parking meter.

I had a speech prepared. It started with "Do you remember me?" I opened my mouth, found that I couldn't recall a single word of it, and said instead, "Duluth, right?"

His eyes narrowed. "What about it?"

"You're from there. I saw it in the program." I made myself keep going. "I lived there when I was a kid. Lakeside Rec. You ever go there?"

A pause. Behind him, someone laughed in the locker room and a locker banged.

"There's a lot of rinks in Duluth," he said.

"Sure. I just thought, I don't know. You look like somebody I used to know."

"I get that a lot." He said flatly, and shifted his bag on his shoulder. And that was how I knew, absolutely, one hundred percent, that I could stop waiting for the apology I'd been rehearsing since I was nine years old. He didn't remember me. Why would he? A skinny kid with purple glasses on the ice for ten seconds, a throwaway joke from a day he'd forgotten before dinner. I'd carried that afternoon around like a stone in my shoe for over a decade, and the person who dropped it in there had no idea I existed.

I don't know why it hurt more than if he'd been cruel.

"Okay," I said. "Cool. Nice game."

"Thanks."

"You were fine."

One corner of his mouth moved. It was so small that if I hadn't been looking right at him, I'd have missed it. It might have been a smile. It might have been a twitch. "Fine," he repeated.

"Fine. Solid. Seven out of ten."

"Seven."

"I'm a tough grader."

"I can see that."

Neither of us said anything. Cash and Tessa were whispering somewhere to my left. A guy with a duffel squeezed between us and said "excuse me" and Jace didn't move, just kept looking at me with that unreadable, heavy-lidded stare, like he was waiting for me to do something. I had the sudden, ridiculous urge to check my shirt for ketchup.

"Right," he said at last. "I've got to go."

"Cool."

"Cash. Text me the address."

"The what? Oh. Yeah, the party. You coming?" Cash lit up like a Christmas tree.

"No."

"Dude, it's the first game."

"I said no."

And he was gone, walking down the green corridor with his hood up. He didn't look back. I know because I watched the whole way, like an idiot.

"Told you," Cash said, tossing an arm around Tessa. "Grumpy. He's actually a really good guy, though, he just takes a minute to warm up to people."

"Is that what we're calling it?" I said.

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing."

"He's the best captain we've ever had. He drove four hours last year when my grandma got sick. He didn't even tell me he was coming, he just showed up with a casserole."

"A casserole?."

"I know. It's weird. But it was good."

I faked a smile. I could not picture it, a casserole, a kind act, any of it. The man I'd met in the corridor looked like he didn't own a single warm object.

But that's the thing about people who hurt you, I thought. It's never in their nature to be sorry. They can be generous to everyone else.

The afterparty was at the Wardens' house, which was a gutted Victorian two blocks off campus with a flag in the window and a smell of beer soaked so deep into the floorboards that it had become structural. I lasted forty minutes. I know because I checked my phone eleven times. Tessa kept looping back to me with a plastic cup and a worried face, asking if I was okay, and each time I lied and said I was great. Around eleven, a sophomore in a visor tried to teach me a drinking game that involved dice and a lot of shouting, and I excused myself to the bathroom, locked the door, sat on the edge of the tub, and checked my email for the twelfth time.

That was when I saw it.

It had come in at 10:42 p.m., to the Courier's general tips address, which I'm on because nobody else wants the job. Subject line: HOLLIS HOCKEY. The sender was an anonymous account.

Ask your captain what happens in the basement after the first game.

I read it three times. Then I scrolled up and looked at the attachment, a grainy photo that took a second to load. It was dark, a flash going off against concrete. A shape that might have been a naked person on the floor, complete with his junk out, surround by vomit. A few legs standing around. I couldn't make out a face.

Somebody pounded on the door.

"Occupied!" I yelled.

"Bella, hurry up, they're doing shots out of a leather boot!.”

"It's Arabella! And I’m busy here!.”

I continued staring at the screen. In the other room, the music kicked up, and through the wall I could hear someone shout his name, Harlow, Harlow, like a chant, like he'd just walked in.

For a moment I didn't breathe. Then I forced myself to, in and out, slow, the way you do at the dentist.

Sitting there on the cold edge of a stranger's bathtub, I had a very strange thought. It was small, and it was mean, and I'm not proud of it.

I thought: Seven out of ten.

I forwarded the email to my personal account. Then I put my glasses back on, unlocked the door, and went out to find my best friend, who was dancing on a couch.