Icebound Hearts

Chapter 3

Frost & Bean occupied the old bank building on Main Street, the kind of place that still had the original marble counter from 1954 and a vault door in the back that the owner, a transplant from Duluth named Priya, had converted into the world's most secure supply closet. It was the only coffee shop in Pine Ridge, which meant it was also the only place in town where you could reliably find every demographic the town had to offer within the same fifteen-foot radius: hockey parents, high schoolers doing homework they'd claim later they hadn't started, retirees arguing about the county commissioners, and, on Friday nights after games, whichever portion of the team hadn't gone straight home.

Ellie Vance was behind the counter when Maya walked in, wrestling with the espresso machine with the specific violence of someone who had lost an argument with it several times already that night.

"It's making the noise again," Ellie said, without looking up. "The dying-raccoon noise."

"That's a very specific noise to have a name for."

"I've had a lot of time to develop the taxonomy." Ellie hit the machine once, experimentally, with the flat of her hand, and the noise stopped. "There. Diplomacy."

"That's assault."

"That's percussive maintenance, there's a difference." Ellie looked up properly then, taking in the camera bag, the cold-pink cheeks, the general aura of someone who'd just spent three hours in a hockey rink. "How was the game?"

"We won."

"I meant how was the game, Carter. I know you won, my phone's been going off with the group chat for twenty minutes. I meant the actual question."

Maya set her camera bag down on the end of the counter, out of splash range, and didn't answer right away, which with someone who had known her since they were both in the same stroller-aged playgroup at the Lutheran church, before either of them had any say in the matter was itself an answer.

Ellie's eyebrows went up. "Oh, no."

"There's no 'oh no.'"

"There is absolutely an 'oh no,' I've known you for nineteen years, I know what your face does." Ellie abandoned the espresso machine entirely and leaned both elbows on the counter, delighted in the specific way she got delighted about anything that wasn't the espresso machine. "Was it Jake."

"Nothing was 'Jake.' We talked in the lobby for ninety seconds about whether I photographed him tonight."

"Did you?"

"Everyone photographs him, Ellie, he's the captain, it's a hockey game."

"That's not what I asked."

Maya untied her scarf, mostly to have something to do with her hands, and did not dignify that with a response, which Ellie correctly interpreted as a yes and chose, mercifully, not to push on any further for the moment. Ellie had a gift for knowing exactly how far to lean into something before backing off, a gift that had made her, over the years, the person Maya told things to first, before her dad, before anyone.

"Register's a disaster, by the way," Ellie said instead, straightening back up. "Priya left before the dinner rush hit and I think there might be actual sorcery involved in tonight's till."

"That's why I'm here."

"That's why you're my favorite person on this earth." Ellie shoved a rag in Maya's direction, general instructions for deal with something, I don't care what, and went back to wrestling the espresso machine, which had apparently decided the diplomacy phase was over.

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They closed up forty minutes later, chairs stacked, till reconciled to within four dollars of where it was supposed to be, which both of them silently agreed was a moral victory. Ellie locked the front door, flipped the sign to CLOSED (the hand-painted one, with a cartoon coffee bean wearing a scarf, which Priya's niece had made in third grade and which Priya refused to ever replace), and the two of them sat on the edge of the marble counter in the dark, the streetlights outside throwing long orange stripes across the floor.

"Okay," Ellie said. "Now tell me the real thing."

"There's no real thing."

"Maya."

Maya looked at the ceiling, at the old pressed-tin tiles Priya had never gotten around to repainting, and thought about how to say a thing she hadn't fully said to herself yet.

"He looked at me," she said finally. "During intros. Through the camera. And it wasn't... it wasn't a normal look."

"Define 'not normal.'"

"I don't know. That's the problem. I've known Jake Thompson since we were seven. I have photographic evidence of him missing both front teeth and crying about a Zamboni. This is not a mysterious person to me."

"But."

"But it felt like something. And I don't know if it's a real something, or if I just..." Maya stopped, frustrated at herself for not having better language for it, which was its own kind of irony, given that language was supposed to be the one skill she didn't rely on for a living. "I don't know if it's real or if I'm just at the exact right kind of restless where I'd read something into anything."

Ellie was quiet for a second, which for Ellie was practically a formal announcement that she was about to say something serious.

"For what it's worth," she said, "Cooper's been saying for like a year that Jake gets weird whenever your name comes up."

"Cooper says a lot of things."

"Cooper also correctly predicted that Mr. Halvorsen and the school librarian were secretly dating four months before anyone else figured it out, so I'd call his track record pretty solid."

"That's not the same category of prediction."

"It's the exact same category of prediction, it's just smaller-town." Ellie bumped her shoulder against Maya's. "I'm just saying. If it's real, it's not exactly coming out of nowhere."

Maya didn't answer that. Outside, a truck rolled slowly down Main Street, exhaust ghosting up into the cold, someone's radio thumping bass through closed windows before the sound faded off toward the highway. Pine Ridge at eleven on a Friday night in October: quiet, familiar, small enough that Maya could have named the truck's owner without looking.

"Can I tell you something and you not make it a whole thing," Maya said.

"No promises, but go ahead."

"I think about leaving. Not... not dramatically. Not tonight. But like, actually leaving. After school. Somewhere nobody knows whose daughter I am."

Ellie didn't laugh, and didn't look surprised either, which told Maya that this particular secret hadn't been as well-kept as she'd thought.

"I know," Ellie said simply.

"You know?"

"Maya. You've had a picture of the Minneapolis skyline as your phone background since sophomore year of high school. I'm your best friend, not blind."

Maya let out a breath that was half laugh, half something more complicated, and looked down at her hands, at the faint chemical smudge of darkroom fixer she hadn't quite scrubbed off from Thursday's lab session.

"Reyes thinks I have a real shot at something," she said. "Not just...not just school stuff. Actual, real, out-in-the-world stuff."

"Then you should go find out."

"It's not that simple."

"It's exactly that simple, you're just scared." Ellie said it gently, the way only someone who'd known you literally your whole life could say a hard true thing without it landing like an accusation. "You've spent your whole life being Coach Carter's kid at the rink.You're allowed to want to be something people don't already have an opinion about."

Maya didn't say anything to that, because there wasn't really anything to say that Ellie hadn't already said better than she could have. She just leaned her head against her best friend's shoulder, in the dark, in the quiet, in the coffee shop that had known both of them their whole lives, and let herself think for the length of exactly one long exhale about a version of her future that didn't have anyone else's name attached to it.

Then Ellie's phone buzzed, group chat exploding again with somebody's play-by-play recap of the game, and the moment passed, and they got up to finish closing, the way you do.