Icebound Hearts

Chapter 2

Pine Ridge won 4–2, which meant that by the second intermission, Cy's Diner had already put up a hand-lettered sign in the window that said WE'RE #1 (PROBABLY) — GO PIONEERS, which was a sign they kept behind the register year-round and just flipped around whenever the situation called for it.

Maya had a thousand and forty photos on the memory card by the time the final horn sounded. She knew this because counting them was easier than thinking about the one she kept coming back to on the little screen — Jake, mid-stride, looking dead at her lens.

She told herself it meant nothing. Cameras did that. People looked toward flashes. It was a documented, boring, scientifically unremarkable fact of photography that human beings are drawn to bright light, and Maya Carter was not about to build a whole thing in her head out of one half-second of a guy checking where a camera flash had come from.

She told herself these three separate times between periods, which was itself probably a sign that she didn't fully believe it.

"You're doing the thing," Frank Delgado said, from his spot a few feet down the boards.

"What thing."

"The thing where you stare at your camera screen like it personally wronged you."

"I'm reviewing my shots, Frank. That's the job."

"Sure." He didn't look convinced, but Frank Delgado had covered enough hockey games in Pine Ridge to know when to let a thing go, and this was one of those times. He went back to his own camera. Maya went back to hers, and to the third period, where Nate Kowalski took a hooking penalty that had half the crowd on its feet screaming about the refs, and Jake scored the game-winner on the ensuing power play off a pass so clean it looked rehearsed.

It wasn't rehearsed. Maya had grown up around this team long enough to know the difference between a play that had been drilled a hundred times in practice and a play that just *worked*, two people reading each other so well it looked like telepathy. Jake had that with Cooper. Had it, sometimes, with the puck itself, the way some athletes just seemed to know where a thing was going to be before it got there.

She got the shot. Stick raised, mouth open mid-shout, the whole bench spilling over the boards behind him. It would be on the front page of the Gazette by Tuesday and on the boosters' banner by the next home game, and nobody looking at it would ever know that the photographer taking it had spent about four minutes over the course of one hockey game specifically not thinking about a half-second of eye contact.

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Her father found her in the lobby afterward, peeling off his coach's jacket, looking at the particular kind of tiredness that only came from a win, the good tired, the tired that meant he'd get to sleep tonight instead of running the game back in his head until two in the morning.

"Delgado says you got the game-winner," he said.

"Delgado talks too much."

"Delgado's been saying that about you since you were fourteen." He said it fondly. Everything about her father, when it came to hockey, came out fond, easy, entirely without the weight he carried everywhere else the mortgage weight, the how's-Nate-going-to-handle-being-a-healthy-scratch weight, the entire-town-is-watching-what-I-do-with-this-team weight. On the ice, or just off it, in this lobby that smelled like popcorn and wet boots, Dean Carter was the lightest version of himself Maya ever got to see.

She loved him best here. She resented, a little, that it took a hockey rink to get him here.

"You heading home?" he asked.

"Frost and Bean, actually. Ellie's closing and I told her I'd help cash out."

"On a Friday night."

"Some of us have jobs, Dad."

"I have a job."

"You have a hobby the town pays you for."

He laughed — a real one, the kind that made the two guys from the boosters' club walking past do a double take, like they weren't used to seeing Coach Carter laugh like that in public and pulled her into a one-armed hug that smelled like cold air and coffee breath and, underneath that, faintly, like Old Spice, the same brand he'd worn her whole life.

"Get home safe," he said. "Love you, kiddo."

"Love you too."

She watched him go, watched half a dozen people stop him on his way to the parking lot to talk about the power play or the second-period penalty kill or Nate Kowalski attitude, and she thought not for the first time, and not without a familiar little twist of guilt that she had spent her entire childhood being Coach Carter's daughter before she had ever gotten the chance to just be Maya.

It wasn't a complaint, exactly. She loved her dad. She loved this town, mostly, in the complicated way you love a thing that raised you and also occasionally made you feel about nine years old at random inconvenient moments. But there was a version of Pine Ridge that only ever asked her one question "how's your dad's team looking this year" and she had started to notice, especially since she'd been at school, how tired she was of answering it.

Professor Reyes had asked her something different, back in September, hunched over Maya's contact sheets in her cluttered little office that smelled like darkroom chemicals and burnt coffee.

What do you want to be looking at, when nobody told you what to shoot?

Maya hadn't had an answer. She still didn't, exactly. But she'd been turning the question over for two months now, the way you turn over a stone in your pocket, and she had a feeling not proof, just a feeling that the answer wasn't going to be found anywhere inside the Pine Ridge Icehouse.

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She was halfway across the lobby, camera bag over one shoulder, digging for her car keys, when she nearly walked straight into Jake Thompson, still in half his gear, pads under one arm, hair damp with sweat and rink-cold.

"Oh...heeey," he said, stepping back with the easy, loosened grace of somebody whose body did what he told it to. "Almost took you out. Sorry."

"You'd have needed a penalty for that."

"Worth it for a game-winner-caliber hit."

"I'll let the refs know your priorities."

He grinned — that grin that had launched, by Maya's count, no fewer than four separate rumors about his personal life since junior year, none of which, as far as she knew, had ever been true. It was a good grin. She'd known it since they were both small enough to be terrified of the Zamboni.

"You get anything good tonight?" he asked, nodding at her camera bag.

"A few things."

"Yeah? Anything for me?"

"Don't flatter yourself, Thompson."

"I'm not flattering myself, I'm asking a professional a professional question."

"You're fishing."

"I'm *asking*," he said, and there it was again, that half-second thing, the thing she'd told herself three separate times didn't mean anything, except now it was happening in real time, in a lobby that smelled like popcorn, with absolutely no camera flash to blame it on.

"I got one where you look like you're about to say something profound," Maya said finally. "Turns out you were just looking at a light. Very anticlimactic."

"Devastating review."

"I'm an artist. I call it like I see it."

"You should show me sometime. The photos."

"Maybe," she said, which was not a no, and she was aware of that even as she said it, and mildly annoyed at herself for it.

"Maya! You coming or what, the espresso machine's making the death noise again!" Ellie's voice, distant, hollering from somewhere near the exit.

"Duty calls," Maya said.

"Guess so." He shifted his pads to his other arm, still not quite moving out of her way, like some part of him hadn't gotten the message that the conversation was supposed to be over. "Night, Carter."

"Night, Thompson."

She walked out into the cold without looking back, which took, if she was honest with herself, a genuinely unreasonable amount of effort for a conversation about nothing at all.