Twenty Miles by Cara Hedley Read Free Book Online Page B

the story, legs revising, improvising, that self-renewing drama unfolding in the white space between thought, the hard-breath moments when your brain forgets itself and the hands take over. Those seconds around the net during scrimmage when we looped a tentative sinew across the ice, the pulsing geometry of the puck as we attached ourselves briefly to our linemates, willing ourselves to connect into different bodies, into moving, breathing shapes. These moments were muscle.
    There was a weight outside these seconds, though. Sabrina was cut. Theresa was cut. The suggestion of a blade hidden somewhere – behind the coaches’ eyes, buried in the bones of our own hands – and how deep this blade might go, where it would hit, how much blood. And whose blood – my own, Kristjan’s, Sig’s? I tried to keep it off the ice.
    Another possibility, a simple solution: I’d get cut, I’d go home. Freed suddenly from Sam Hall, from the thin stall walls dividing me from the Scarlets, from Rez, from books. They’d invited me but they didn’t have to keep me. Cut: rebounding off the grey edges of thecity, down the highway. Home. Jamey was cut. Jana was cut. They took their bags and didn’t come back.
    Stan, the assistant coach, stood outside the dressing-room door and handed the letters to everyone as they left. He held the envelope toward me, stone-faced, but then he winked and I took the envelope and had to force myself not to run, pulse knocking around in my ears. I marched stiffly out to the ice, vaguely registering the weak-ankled circles skated by a Peewee team in orange and red practice pinnies, and sank down against the wall. Tore open the envelope. ‘We’re looking forward to having you onboard.’ Undoubtedly, a contribution of Stan’s; he had a penchant for metaphors involving cars and trains.
You need to fuel up, ladies, get those wheels moving, shift gears, park it in the garage, ten minutes ten miles, running on empty, eh, running out of steam?
An impersonal letter, my name written into a blank following ‘Congratulations,’ but there it was. Another season.
    Boz came through the door holding her own identical envelope. I was still slouched against the wall and she stood in front of me, watching the shaky trajectory of the Peewees. She shook her head and smiled.
    ‘So cute.’ She wore capri jeans and runners and her dark ankles shone a smooth gleam. They looked like they’d be cool to the touch, like stone. She looked down at me and then crouched and grabbed both of my wrists and pulled me to my feet. She smiled and then wrapped her arms tight around my shoulders. I could feel the muscles in her arms as she moved her palm in a slow circle on my back. I understood instantly the currency of Boz’s hugs, the way some of the players fell so easily against her body, in the dressing room, in the hallways of Sam Hall. I felt a blush plunge from my cheeks down my neck.
    ‘Welcome,’ she said. The warmth of her face, one hand still on my shoulder. ‘We’re celebrating tomorrow. Someone will call you.’ And then she walked off toward the parking lot door.
    I was a Scarlet.
    I stood, flattered and shipwrecked, and watched the coach lob pucks into the corner, a surge of kids following it in, their comichunger for that skittish black dot. I walked around the boards toward the door.
    ‘Made the team, eh Isabel?’ Ed called as I walked past his office.
    The door was cracked open wide and Ed sat in the middle of the tiny room on a narrow wooden chair, red paint peeling off it like a bad sunburn. He leaned back, hands folded behind his head, feet up on an orange plastic chair like the ones in the dressing room, those sweatpants riding up around his ankles. A small TV flickered silently on another plastic chair next to a mini fridge. He grinned widely, as though he’d just given me the news himself.
    ‘I did,’ I said and held the envelope up.
    ‘Already knew,’ he said, still grinning. ‘Friends in high places, you