Page 75 of Fractured Ice

"I was there."

"You were at my family's Fourth of July?"

"My family came every year." He looks at me with mild surprise, like I should know this. "Until I was fifteen."

I did know this. I'd filed it somewhere and not looked at it. The Walkers always came to our July Fourth gathering. Ethan was there, in the periphery, until suddenly he wasn't.

Dylan touches my arm. "You okay?"

"Fine." I put the lollipop in my bag, because Ethan is right, I hate cherry. "What's next?"

The water gun race requires less coordination and more volume of water, which means Dylan comes into his own. He's been narrating the whole fair like a color commentator for a sport nobody asked him to cover, but at the water guns it works, he's loud and funny and the people at adjacent lanes are laughing at his running commentary on the clown targets.

Ethan is just competing.

I'm winning. Solidly, actually. There's something satisfying about it, the focused mechanical repetition of keeping a stream of water on a moving target, and I'm a full marker ahead when I hear Ethan shout from the lane next to me.

"Let's go, Sienna, you've got it⁠—"

I look over.

My stream goes off target.

Ethan's doesn't.

His marker crosses the line by less than an inch and the lights go off as the buzzer sounds. He throws both arms up like he's just won something consequential, full-body, and I stare at my lane and the unmistakable evidence of second place.

"You distracted me," I say.

"I was cheering for you."

"You were cheering while looking at your own target." I do not know why I am even saying that because it is only bringing more attention to the fact that he was cheering ME on while he competed against me.

"Technically he didn't touch your gun," Dylan says, unhelpfully.

"Whose side are you on?"

"I came in third," Dylan says. "I'm on nobody's side."

Ethan collects his prize token. I look at the sky. Above us, the March sun is sitting lower than it was an hour ago, and the afternoon heat has built up in a way that feels personal.

"It's getting warm," I say.

Ethan steers us left at the next junction without breaking stride, toward a path I hadn't registered, lined on both sides by the campus elm trees and noticeably cooler. I realize after a few steps that I'm no longer directly in the sun.

I didn't ask to go this way. I didn't say anything except that I was warm.

I look at the back of Ethan's head and then at the shade and then straight ahead, and I don't say anything about it.

The basketball challenge is obviously Dylan's natural territory, which he makes clear from the first shot, stepping up with the focused looseness of someone who has spent time at a rim and sinking it clean.

Ethan steps up beside him. Also sinks it.

"Basketball is a fine spectator sport," Ethan says, taking another shot. Clean again. "I'll give you that."

"High praise from a hockey player."

"I'm a magnanimous person."