Page 43 of Goaltender Interference

Aiden had the feeling that his answer wouldn’t make a difference either way, so he lied, “Yes, I’d appreciate it.”

“Don’t let Miles walk all over you, yeah? Because if you let him, he will.”

“I—”

“Just think about it.” Jessica had a way of talking, precise and pointedly cheerful, that reminded him a little of Hannah. It was just as terrifying on her, especially when she smiled. “Ten years is a long time to grow up, Aiden. And I’m sure you have. Miles needs to move on, too.”

“What kind of medicine do you practice again?”

“Oh, me? Ortho.” She smiled at him again, all teeth. “Comes in handy when Miles needs a second opinion.”

Miles looked up from his discussion with Matt. “What are you two talking about?”

“Just getting to know Aiden, honey.”

“We’re, um, ready to head out, I think,” Matt said, sounding more hopeful than sure, and Aiden had never been so thankful to leave a room in his life.

Later that morning, in the Contemporary Art gallery of the MMFA, Ellie announced, “My dad says you’re a bad person.”

Ellie was almost six years old, tall for her age, with Coke-bottle glasses, a black eye and a line of stitches parallel to her lower lip. She wore a custom Scouts jersey that said SAFARYAN-ZHANG on the back—the letters barely fit between her tiny shoulders—and it shouldn’t have been as cute as it was.

“He does think that,” Aiden agreed.

“You don’t seem that bad to me.”

“I’ve been on my best behavior today.”

That seemed to please her. She smiled, revealing her missing front teeth. Aiden was reminded, briefly, of some of his former teammates. “I’m on my best behavior, too. Mom said I’m not allowed to fight with Theo.Oranyone else.”

They walked slowly, a little behind the rest of the group. Miles didn’t seem to have noticed that Aiden and Ellie were back there, otherwise occupied talking to Matt and Theo, who was crying because he wasn’t allowed to eat in the gallery.

“Do you get in a lot of fights?”

“Well, yeah,” she said, like it was completely obvious. “I play on a boys’ team. Even with Bee Morin, some of them arejerksabout me being there.”

Aiden thought about his own mites teams, and said, “You know, that’s fair.”

“I won the last one,” Ellie said, with immense satisfaction.

“Is that where—”

“The eye, yeah. But the stitches are ’cause I tried to go down the stairs in a cardboard box and my teeth went through myskin.”

Aiden managed to bite back a startled laugh at the mental image, because he had the distinct impression that Ellie wasn’t the kind of kid who appreciated being laughed at. “Why were you going down the stairs in a cardboard box?”

“I want to be a goalie, so I was working on balance. But itdidn’twork.”

“Yeah, ah, there are maybe some safer ways to do that.”

“You were a goalie,” Ellie said, looking at him sidelong, with the kind of obvious cunning that only small children could manage. “You should tell me some things about being a goalie.”

“You mean to work on balance, right?”

“Yeah,” Ellie said, her arms crossed over her chest like she wasn’t sure if he was making fun of her after all. “What about it?”

They walked past some truly spectacular examples of modern art, the kinds of things that Aiden and Matt would have had private jokes about if they’d been alone. Aiden wasn’t looking at any of it, attention absorbed by his small, intense private audience.

“Well, there are a few you can do without any equipment at all. A simple one is, you can kind of do a half-squat, like this—” he demonstrated, briefly “—with your arms extended like that, and have someone tap and push on various parts of your body without letting them move you at all, and you can do that same exercise, with a lower and more staggered stance, like this—”

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