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“That’s the point.”

“That’s not a point, that’s cheating—”

I lunge for it. And my skate goes one way and the rest of me goes the other, and I’m about to fall—

He catches me.

One hand on my elbow. One on my waist through my coat. He stops me, like it’s nothing, like he’s caught a hundred people falling on a hundred frozen lakes, and holds me there at an angle until my feet come back under me.

I’m right up against him. My face is about level with his collarbone. I can smell the cold on him, and the woodsmoke, and under that, the cologne. The same one. Always the same one.

He’s touched me before. My arm in my grandma’s living room to get me out the door. My hair, on his couch, to see my neck. Both times because something was wrong.

Nothing’s wrong now. His hand is flat on my waist because I fell over trying to steal a puck from him. I wait for my body to go still. To go rigid, the way it always has. The way it did in the stairwell, when I thought: as long as he doesn’t touch me, I can handle him. It doesn’t.

He lets go when he thinks I’m steady on my feet, and then he takes his hands back, one and then the other, and steps back with the puck still on his stick.

I look over his shoulder without meaning to. I can feel eyes on me. Emma’s watching us from the fire. And I can see it from where she’s sitting. Rafe Waleska catching the quiet, weird girl from the end of the lunch table on a frozen lake. His hand on her waist. Her laughing right before she fell. My face goes hot, all of it at once.

Rafe sees it.

“What?” he says.

I look down and shake my head. When my eyes come back up, he’s still watching me, with that almost-thing at the corner of his mouth.

He drops the puck in front of my skates and goes backward away from it with his stick across his knees and doesn’t try to take it back.

Lucas skates over, red-faced. “You guys want s’mores?”

Rafe waits for me to answer.

“Canten?” Lucas says.

“Um,” I say, thinking. “Okay.”

The rest of the guys come off the ice, and the fire gets crowded fast. Somebody drags over two more folding chairs. The girls pass the marshmallows around. The guys go into the trees and come back with sticks. Rafe comes back with two and hands me one without saying anything. He sits down on the end of the bench with his skates still on, his elbows on his knees.

And it’s just noise. Good noise. Lucas’s brother fell through the ice up to his ankle last winter and they’re still not letting him forget it. Somebody’s sister got engaged to a guy from Dairy Queen. Somebody’s dad’s truck got stuck in a ditch on the way to midnight Mass last year and the whole hockey team had to push it out in their church clothes. They talk about a guy from their class who goes to Camden now, who apparently already has a girlfriend and a tattoo he regrets. Lucas asks Rafe why he didn’t go to Camden, and Rafe says Woodbury was closer, and somebody says, “Close to what?” and Rafe doesn’t answer.

My marshmallow catches on fire without me noticing. Rafe reaches over, takes my stick, blows it out, and hands it back to me without stopping what he’s saying. He’s telling them Woodbury plays Camden next month, and he can’t wait. He says what he’s going to do to their second-line center in a way that makes three guys groan.

I watch him without making it obvious.

He’s different here. Different from anything I’ve seen. He’s loose. He’s laughing at things. He’s letting people roast him. He’s sitting by a fire with the people he grew up with, and nobody here wants anything from him, and he isn’t holding anything still. I didn’t know he could look like this. I didn’t know there was a place where he did.

Lucas gets a square of chocolate and two graham crackers and sits down in the chair next to mine.

“So, Canten,” he says. “How’s it going?”

I’m not used to people talking to me like this. Like it’s easy. I trip over my words a little, feeling awkward.

“Um. Good.”

I look at him. He was never mean to me in high school. Loud, always. Near Rafe, always. But never mean.

“How—how are you?” I mutter.

“I’m out in Washington now. Seattle.” He squishes his s’more down and inspects it. “Playing hockey and pretending to go to class. You back for the whole break?”