Page 21 of Finding Her
Dad immediately started rattling off the date and time, while I tried not to choke my water or elbow Claire to get off me. She didn’t let go until the waitress had returned to the kitchen to put in our dessert orders and everyone went back to chatting, though the topic of conversation remained on all my accomplishments, how great of a hockey player I was, and how it wasn’t any surprise I was getting recognized in public. Personally, I just wanted to disappear.
“I need the bathroom,” I choked out after five more minutes. I threw my napkin down on the table and walked off before any of them could even begin to protest.
I stopped in the back hallway that led to the washrooms and emergency exit, far enough around the wall that they wouldn’t be able to see me. I dropped my head in my hands and groaned. How was this my life? I didn’t want to be Hartwell’s star player or be paraded around by my father and my future girlfriend’s family. But I also didn’t do anything to stop it. I didn’t fight back or tell my dad I didn’t want it. I just sat there and let everyone make every decision for me, pretending to be happy about it all.
What would it be like to live as someone completely unknown? The first name that came into my head at the thought was Poppy and it took me a second to realize why. She’d told me, one of those times when she was rambling to fill the silence, that her family moved around constantly so she always felt like the new girl at school. What must it have been like for her to show up as a completely new person every couple of years? To be able to re-invent herself and shed her past every time? Had she always been this happy-go-lucky girl? Or was that just a persona she had brought into Hartwell?
My fingers itched to grab my phone and text her, until I remembered that I didn’t have her number. And then I wondered why I even wanted to text her in the first place. Ofcourse, I didn’t have her number, because I’d had no reason to talk to her outside of school. And, until now, no desire to.
“There you are, baby.” I barely held back my groan as Claire appeared at the end of the hall and started walking toward me. The hallway was darker than the rest of the restaurant, making it hard to see her face except when she walked under the lamps. The green-ish light emanating from each one made her look sickly as she came up and pouted at me, as she so often did. “Were you finding it a little crowded back there?”
I stayed silent for a minute, playing out the possible answers in my head. If I said yes, then she would probably make some comment about how she had to leave and that she was so glad to be back here with me, and then she would probably try to stick her tongue down my throat. If I said no, she would assume that I slunk off so that we could meet over here, and then she would try to stick her tongue down my throat. Essentially, there was no way of this ending without her kissing me, which was the last thing I wanted. I had no interest in kissing her at the best of times, but especially not when we could so easily be caught.
“Nope, just needed the bathroom. There, uh… there was a line. Figured I should wait in the hall.” I nodded sharply as I said it, as if that would make anything I just said seem more plausible. She glanced at the closed bathroom door and then at me, clearly not believing a word I was saying. “And you know what, I think I’ll go check again, because uh…” I didn’t even finish the sentence as I dove for the bathroom door before she could follow me. At least this was the one place she couldn’t come in after me.
I splashed some water on my face and stared at myself in the mirror, not even recognizing my own reflection. I waited a good few minutes before I walked out, trying to look calm and composed as I sat back down. Nobody commented on how long I had been gone.
When the waitress came back with the desserts, she put a fruit cup and coffee in front of me, then winked and said, “On the house for the hockey player.”
And then, to make everything that much more embarrassing, everybody had lifted their glasses and said, “To Levi!”
And I had to sit there, acting like I wanted any of it.
CHAPTER 15
poppy
“Areyou sure we’re allowed to be in here?” I asked Lilah as we made our way through the long hallways of the second athletic building. I’d been here a few times last year to go to the pool, but I’d never been on this end of the building, where the ice rink was.
“Of course we are,” Lilah said. Her blonde ponytail swung as she led the way confidently. I glanced at Saylor, who was walking just behind me, but she just shrugged.
“I don’t know if we’re supposed to be here, but I don’t think we’ll get in trouble either,” she said. “If they don’t want us here, they’ll ask us to leave no big deal.”
I guess she was right. What was the worst that could happen? Lilah had come up with a brilliant plan that to win Bear over, I needed to show him that we have the same interests. So she decided that I should go to his hockey practice and watch him. I found it a little bit bizarre to make him think that I had the same interests as him when really I didn’t understand hockey in the slightest, but she insisted, and as always, what Lilah wanted, she got. It was starting to feel like everything in Lilah’s life was about getting me to win the stupid bet that she had started. I still couldn’t believe that I’d let her egg me on until I agreed to the bet with Claire, when it was the last thing I wanted to do. Butit wasn’t like I could completely blame her, either. I’d had the chance to step away and I didn’t take it, so now I was stuck living with the consequences.
“Lilah, are you sure about this?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t want to make him think that I’m someone I’m not.”
“You’re not making him think you’re someone that you’re not,” Lilah sighed. “You’re just showing him that youcouldbe interested in hockey if that was something he wanted.”
“He doesn’t want a girlfriend at all,” I insisted. My voice echoed through the empty, cavernous hallway, and Lilah glanced back at me, looking very unimpressed.
“Every boy wants a girlfriend,” she said. “And if they don’t, they just don’t realize that they want a girlfriend yet.”
It just seemed rude to assume that. Like she thought he was too stupid to know whether he wanted a girlfriend or that he couldn’t make up his mind on that himself. But maybe she wasn’t wrong about him wanting a girlfriend. Maybe, he did want one and he just hadn’t found the right girl yet. But did that make what we were doing any better? I was still trying to trick him into asking me, full well knowing that I wasn’t interested.
Sure, he was hot, a hockey player, and very eligible—but none of that could account for romantic chemistry, right? Even if I did find myself staring at him sometimes, it wasn’t like it was actual attraction. I was just curious about him. Curious about what he was like. That didn’t mean anything at all.
“What do you think about this, Saylor?” I asked, glancing at her. But her gaze was fixed on something far off in the distance and it seemed like she hadn’t heard me at all.
Lilah pushed open the double doors that led to the bleachers of the ice rink. She pushed it open slowly, her face all scrunched up like she was terrified that if it made a single creak then we would be busted, then waited for Saylor and me to go ahead before closing it silently behind us as well.
She didn’t need to worry so much, though. Nobody could hear us over the hockey practice, with skates slicing through the ice, pucks hitting the boards, and coaches yelling. Still, we stuck to the upper levels of the bleachers, deciding that it was probably best that nobody noticed us until closer to the end of the practice. Of course, Lilah’s hope here was that Bear would notice me watching and like me because of it, but we also didn’t want to be seen too soon if his coaches didn’t want us here. It would be mortifying to get kicked out.
I crossed my arms, trying to keep myself warm as I got used to the cold temperature of the rink. I’d never been into skating so I never really spent much time in ice rinks. I wasn’t used to the unnatural cold of them, especially when we just came from outside, where it still felt like summer. I’d worn a sweater and jeans, but it wasn’t really warm enough for this.
“I never understood the appeal of hockey,” Saylor said. I had to agree with her, although I would never say it out loud. Canadians took hockey very seriously, Hartwell students even more so than the average citizen, and I didn’t want to be torn apart for having the apparently wrong opinion.
“Do you know what’s going on?” I asked her. Her dad was a hockey coach—which I thought was heavily correlated with her hatred of the sport—so she probably had a leg up on us understanding anything that was going on, because I couldn’t make heads or tails of the way they were all maneuvering on the ice.
