Faking It with My Hockey Enemy

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Chapter 7 East of Eden

The elevator in Knox's building had been broken since September. There was a handwritten OUT OF ORDER sign taped to the doors, the letters faded to near nothing, which meant it had been there long enough for the ink to give up. On the second floor landing a bike had rusted itself so completely to the stairwell railing that the chain had disappeared into the metal. Knox walked past both without a glance. Just part of the terrain.

He unlocked the apartment and stepped aside so I could go in first.

Small and clean. A couch with a dark blanket folded over the back. A coffee table with a textbook and a mug on it. Kitchen with one pan on the stove and nothing on the counters. A shelf above the TV with four trophies lined up and one paperback at the end, spine so cracked the title was unreadable from the doorway. No photos on the walls. No rug. No art. The kind of place that hadn't decided yet whether anyone actually lived there.

"Water?" He was already at the kitchen.

"Sure."

He set two glasses on the table and dropped onto the couch, feet up, completely at ease in a way I'd never seen from him in any room that had other people in it.

I looked at the shelf.

The first three trophies were the cheap kind. Small plastic base, gold paint flaking at the edges, the type every kid gets at six and seven years old so nobody goes home empty-handed. Skating, not hockey. The last one was different. Real metal, heavier even from across the room, with a small engraving plate at the base. I could see his name on it without being able to read the year.

The paperback had no readable title from where I sat.

"What's the book," I said.

He glanced at the shelf. "East of Eden."

I looked at him.

"What," he said.

"Nothing. I just didn't picture you reading Steinbeck."

"I've read it four times." He said it the way he said most things, no weight on it. "My mom gave it to me before she moved to Vancouver. Said it was the only book she'd ever read twice. She wanted it to go somewhere it'd get read again."

He drank his water. The TV was off. From somewhere in the building a door closed, then silence.

"She moved when you were in high school?" I said.

"Fourteen."

I sat down at the other end of the couch and looked at the shelf again. Three small trophies close together, then a gap of a few years, then the real one.

"The rink near our building opened at six-thirty Sunday mornings," he said. He was looking at the blank TV screen. "Free until eight. I started going because I needed somewhere to be that wasn't the apartment. My mom was on double shifts most weeks. My sister was seven." He turned his water glass on his knee slowly. "I went every week for almost two years. By myself mostly."

"Mostly," I said.

"Maya came sometimes. She'd sit in the bleachers with whatever book she was in the middle of and stay the whole time without complaining." The corner of his mouth moved. "She's at U of T now. Texts me too much."

The way he said too much.

I picked up my water glass.

"My best friend goes to U of T," I said.

He looked over. "What's her name."

"Jade."

"I'll tell Maya to find her."

"You really don't have to."

"I know." He picked up the TV remote and turned it over in his hand without switching anything on. "But Maya needs people who aren't connected to hockey. It gets small otherwise. Everyone ends up knowing everyone, dating someone's teammate or someone's sister. Jade sounds like she'd be outside all that."

"You don't know anything about Jade."

He set the remote down. "I know she's your closest friend and you're still holding together fine without her being here. People who have solid people in their corner usually turn out solid themselves."

I looked at my water glass.

The building settled. Somewhere below us someone was cooking, garlic and butter, something warm drifting up through the floor. Knox finally turned the TV on, volume low, some game on a channel I didn't recognize.

I sat at the other end of the couch and we watched it. The cooking smell kept coming. The building made its small noises. Pipes. A door somewhere. Outside, a car went past and its headlights moved across the ceiling once.

Knox had his feet up and his coffee on his knee and his eyes on the screen and he wasn't performing any of it.

At some point I stopped watching the game and started watching his face instead, the way the TV light moved across it, the way he looked when nothing was required of him. I'd spent weeks sitting across from Knox Ryder at dinner tables and in corridors and in his truck and I was only just starting to understand that every version of him I'd seen before tonight was the version he'd decided to show.

This was the other one.

"Sunday practice," he said without looking over. "Seven to nine. Sienna's been coming. I need you there first."

"Okay," I said.

We watched the rest of the game. The neighbor's cooking smell settled into the apartment and the building went quiet around us and I didn't move to leave until the final buzzer, and Knox didn't ask me to.

When I stood up to get my jacket he stood too and walked me to the door and leaned in the doorframe while I put my shoes on.

"The study thing," he said. "Tuesday and Thursday. Library or here, doesn't matter. Just be consistent about it. People need to see the routine."

"Okay," I said.

"And text me when you get home."

I looked up at him. "Why."

He looked back at me. "Because Sienna knows where you live and she has a burner number and I'd like to know you got in the door without incident."

I straightened up. "That's very practical."

"I'm a practical person."

"You read East of Eden four times."

The corner of his mouth moved. "Go home, Lila."

I went down the stairs past the rusted bike and the faded OUT OF ORDER sign and out through the building's front door into the cold. I texted him when I got home. He sent back a single thumbs up, which was so deeply Knox that I almost laughed.

I almost laughed, and then I thought about Sienna somewhere with her phone and her plans, and the almost went away.

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