“Don’t sulk, now, Peter, this is your night! Do you remember ten years ago when you said you were going to develop our youth program? When you said that one day we’d have a junior team that could hold their own against the best in the country? We laughed at you then. Everyone laughed at you. And now here we are! This is YOUR night, Peter. YOU made this happen.”
Peter wriggles out of the headlock Tails—drunk and happy—tries to get him in. The other sponsors start loudly comparing scars and capped teeth, trophies from their own hockey-playing days. None of them asks Peter about his. He has no scars, he never lost any teeth, never got into any fights. He has never been a violent man.
One board member, a beer-sodden director of a ventilation company in his sixties, starts bouncing about and slapping Peter on the back as he grins:
“Tails and I met our local councilors! They were here this evening! And off the record I can say that things look pretty damn promising for your new espresso machine!”
Peter sighs and excuses himself, then goes out into the hallway. When he sees David he actually feels relieved, even though the junior coach’s constantly supercilious attitude normally drives him mad, because right now he’s the only sober person in the vicinity.
“David!” he cries.
David carries on without so much as glancing at him. Peter jogs after him.
“David! Where are you going?”
“I’m going to watch the video of the game,” the coach replies mechanically.
Peter laughs.
“Aren’t you going to celebrate?”
“I’ll celebrate when we’ve won the final. That’s why you appointed me. To win that.”
His arrogance is even more pronounced than usual. Peter sighs and stick his hands forlornly in his pockets.
“David . . . come on, now. I know the two of us don’t always see eye to eye on everything, but this is your victory. You’ve earned it.”
David’s eyes narrow, and he nods toward the office full of sponsors and says:
“No, Peter. Like everyone in there keeps saying, this is YOUR night. After all, you’re the star on this team, aren’t you? You always have been.”
Peter stands rooted to the spot with a growing dark cloud in his stomach, unsure if it’s made up mostly of shame or fury. His voice sounds angrier than it should be when he calls after David:
“I only wanted to congratulate you!” David turns around with a bitter little laugh.
“You should congratulate Sune instead. He was the one who predicted that you and I could do this.”
Peter clears his throat.
“I . . . He . . . I couldn’t find him in the stands.”
David holds Peter’s gaze until Peter looks down. David nods sadly.
“He was sitting in his usual place. You know that.”
Peter swears under his breath and turns away. David’s words creep after him:
“I know what we’re doing here, Peter, I’m not some naive little kid. I’ll be getting Sune’s job because the time has come, because I’ve earned it, and I know that makes me a bastard. But don’t forget who’s holding the door open for him. Don’t try to kid yourself that this isn’t your decision.”
Peter spins around, fists clenched.
“Be careful what you say, David!”
David doesn’t back down.
“Or what? You’ll hit me?”
Peter’s chin is trembling. David stands motionless. In the end David snorts derisively. He has a long scar across his chin, and another between his chin and cheek.
“No, I thought not. Because you’re Peter Andersson. You always let others take penalty suspensions for you.”
David doesn’t even slam the door behind him when he goes into his office, he just closes it silently. Peter hates him for that more than anything. Because he’s right.
* * *
Kevin looks completely unmoved when he’s being interviewed by the journalist from the local paper. Other boys his age would go to pieces with nerves, but he’s calm and professional. He looks at the reporter’s face but never in the eye, he fixes his gaze on her forehead or the top of her nose, he’s relaxed but not nonchalant, he’s not unpleasant, but not pleasant either, and he answers all her questions without saying anything at all. When she asks about the game, he mutters that “it’s all about doing a lot of skating, getting the puck in the net, creating chances.” When she asks what he thinks victory in the final would mean for the town and the people here, he repeats like a machine: “We’re taking each game as it comes, concentrating on the hockey.” When she points out that one of the opponents checked by his teammate Benjamin Ovich toward the end of the game was left concussed, Kevin claims without blinking: “I didn’t see that incident.”
He’s seventeen years old and already as media savvy as a politician. The crowd carries him away before the reporter has time to ask anything else.
* * *
Amat finds his mother in the crowd and kisses her on the forehead. She merely whispers, “Go! Go!” with tears in her eyes. He laughs and hugs her and promises not to be late home. She knows he’s not telling the truth. And it makes her so happy.
Zacharias is standing at the far end of the parking lot, in the outermost circle of popularity, while his best friend is in the innermost circle for the first time. The adults get in their cars and drive off, leaving the youngsters to enjoy the biggest night ever, and when the stream of players and girls starts to move off toward the party that almost all of them are going to, it becomes painfully obvious who belongs and who’s going to be left behind.
Zacharias will never ask Amat if he forgot about him or simply didn’t care. But one of them goes, and one stays behind. And nothing will ever be quite the same again.
* * *
Peter bumps into Maya and Ana when he’s on his way to the cafeteria. To his surprise, his daughter throws her arms around his neck, the way she used to every day when he came home back when she was five years old.
“I’m so proud of you, Dad,” she whispers.
Rarely has he let go of her more reluctantly. Once the girls have rushed down the stairs laughing, the entire rink falls silent. A silence only broken by his own breathing, followed by his wife’s voice:
“Is it my turn now, superstar?” Kira calls.
Peter’s face breaks into a melancholic smile and he walks toward her. Gently they take hold of each other’s hands and dance slowly, slowly, in tiny, tiny circles until Kira takes his face in her hands and kisses him so hard that he gets embarrassed. She can still do that to him.
“You don’t look as happy as you should,” she whispers.
“Oh, I am,” he ventures.
“Is it to do with Sune?”
He hides his face against her neck.
“The sponsors want to go public with the news about David taking over after the final. And they want to force Sune to hand in his notice voluntarily. They think it’ll look bad in the media if he gets fired.”
“It’s not your fault, darling. You can’t save everyone. You can’t carry the weight of the whole world.”
He doesn’t answer. She tickles his hair and smiles.
“Did you see your daughter? She going to go back to Ana’s to ‘study.’ ”
“Quite a lot of makeup for solving equations, eh?” Peter mutters.
“The hardest thing about trusting teenagers is the fact that we used to be teenagers ourselves. I can remember when some boy and I were . . .”
“I don’t want to hear this!”
“Don’t be ridiculous, darling, I did have a life before I met you.”
“NO!”
He sweeps her up off the floor and into his arms, and all the air goes out of her. He can still do that to her. They giggle like a couple of kids.
* * *
Through the window of the cafeteria they see Maya and Ana go off down the road with the hockey players and their school friends. The temperature is falling rapidly in the darkness, and snow i
s swirling around the girls’ bodies.
* * *
There’s a storm brewing.
20
The windows of the Erdahl family house are rattling from overstrained loudspeakers, the ground floor fills with bodies at the same rate as if they were being thrown in through a hole in the ceiling. Most of the players are already hopelessly hammered, and the majority of the other guests aren’t far behind. They aren’t novices when it comes to parent-free houses. Everyone is drinking from disposable cups, all the pictures have been removed from the walls, fragile objects moved, the furniture covered in plastic. Two of the juniors take turns guarding the staircase all night to stop anyone going upstairs. Say what you like about Kevin, but just like his coach, he believes in preparation and planning, and doesn’t leave anything to coincidence. The cleaner is coming first thing tomorrow. She gets paid well not to say anything to his parents, and on a night like this one he knows the neighbors will go to bed with earplugs and pretend they weren’t home if anyone asks.
No longer does anyone question the fact that he seems to be the only person not enjoying his own party. In the living room teenagers are drinking and singing as they shed their clothing at an ever-increasing rate, but on the other side of the thick, heavily insulated walls, the garden is almost silent. The sweat is dripping from Kevin’s face as he goes on firing shot after shot after shot at the goal. He can never wind down after a match, but at least he’s not so violent if they’ve won. If they’ve lost, the terrace and little rink end up littered with broken sticks and shattered glass. As usual, Benji is sitting perfectly calm at a cast-iron table, rolling cigarettes nimbly between his fingers to get the tobacco out without breaking the paper. He fills the empty tube with weed, twists the end shut, carefully puts the filter between his teeth, removes it, and replaces it with a thinly rolled piece of cardboard. He has to do it this way because the woman who owns the tobacconist’s in Beartown is the sister of the school’s headmaster, so he can’t buy loads of cigarette papers but not an equivalent quantity of tobacco without questions being asked. Ordering online would be pointless; Benji’s mother checks all the mail that arrives at the house like a sniffer dog. So, even though no one has ever seen Kevin smoke, a few years ago he started to charge an admission fee of two cigarettes from everyone attending his parties, so that Benji has something to roll his joints with. Oddly enough Kevin finds it relaxing, watching his idiotic best friend focus so intently on his drugs.
Kevin grins and says, “I’m going to sell you into child labor in Asia—those agile fingers could stitch footballs faster than any other little kid’s.”
“Do you want me to sew a bigger net for you so you can actually hit the goal every now and then?” Benji wonders, then ducks down like a shot without even looking up to avoid the puck that Kevin fires over his head. It hits the fence behind him, making it sway for several minutes.
“Don’t forget to roll some for the housecleaner,” Kevin reminds him. Benji hasn’t forgotten. This isn’t the first party they’ve hosted.
* * *
Amat walks into the house and can’t help gawking.
“Okay, seriously? Just ONE family lives here?”
Bobo and Lyt laugh and push him toward the kitchen. Lyt is already so drunk that he couldn’t put a magnet on a fridge door. They’re drinking “knockshots.” Amat doesn’t know what’s in them, but they taste of moonshine and throat lozenges, and every time you down one you have to beat your fists on each other’s chests and roar “KNOCKSHOT!” It feels a lot more logical after five or six of them. Most of the kids are doing it.
“You can fuck any girl you like here tonight; they’re all hockey-whores when we win,” Lyt slurs, gesturing toward the throng of bodies inside the house, then, just a moment later, violently grabbing hold of Amat’s top and bellowing:
“Unless Kevin or Benji or I want her. The first line has first pick!”
Amat will later remember Bobo looking as uncomfortable as him when Lyt says this. It’s the first time he’s ever seen Bobo look uncertain about anything. As Lyt lurches away, shouting, “I got an assist tonight! Who wants to fuck?” the other two boys are left forlornly facing each other in the kitchen. They drink more, beat each other’s chests, and yell, “KNOCKSHOTS!” to avoid having to talk, because they’re both convinced you can tell from a man’s voice if he’s a virgin.
* * *
Maya and Ana are among the last to arrive at the house, because Ana insisted on stopping to check her makeup a couple of dozen times during the walk over. Every month she becomes obsessed with a different part of her body, and right now it’s her cheekbones. Not long ago it was her hairline. That time she very solemnly asked Maya to help her find out if it was possible to have plastic surgery to make it lower.
Before they go inside the house Maya stops on the road to admire the view. From the street where the Erdahl family lives you can see right across the lake, all the way to the forest on the other side. It’s more of a wilderness there; the trees grow more densely and even the snow seems to gather in deeper drifts. Beyond it lie open white spaces so vast that you could stand there as a child convinced you were the last person on the planet. Kids in Beartown soon learn that that’s the place to go if you want to get up to no good out of sight of any adults. Maya knows that Ana came close to getting them both killed over there when they were little. When they were twelve she stole a snowmobile and drove Maya around all night. Maya has never admitted it, but she’s never felt more liberated than she did then.
A year later Ana stopped googling how to hot-wire snowmobiles and started googling diets instead. So Maya takes a moment now to mourn the girls who used to play on the other side of the lake before she goes into the party.
* * *
Kevin is standing on the terrace and sees Maya walk into the hall through the big windows. He’s looking right at her, and doesn’t notice Benji watching him, reading his reaction. As Kevin moves quickly toward the terrace door, Benji irritably packs his things in his backpack and follows him. They push their way through the living room without a word, toward different goals. Kevin stops in front of Maya and makes a real effort to stop the pounding of his heart being visible through his shirt, and she does her best not to show how happy she is, or how much she’s enjoying the fact that a whole gaggle of older girls in the kitchen are looking over and hating her.
“Madame,” Kevin smiles theatrically and gives a deep bow.
“Herr von Shitmagnet, how delightful to see you!” she laughs, bowing to him in return.
Kevin opens his mouth but stops himself when he sees Benji disappear through the front door. He looks almost as disappointed as the girls in the kitchen and Ana do.
Out in the street Benji pulls his backpack onto his shoulders, shields his lighter from the wind, and waits for the smoke to curl its way into his lungs. He hears Kevin call but doesn’t turn around.
“Come on, Benji, you freak! Don’t be stupid!”
“I don’t party with little girls, Kev, you know that. What are they? Fifteen?”
Kevin throws his arms out.
“Come off it, it wasn’t even me who invited them!”
Benji turns around and looks his best friend in the eye. It takes almost ten seconds before Kevin starts laughing. Nice try.
“You can’t lie to me, Kev.”
“Stay anyway?” Kevin asks with a grin.
Benji calmly shakes his head. Kevin blinks sadly.
“What are you going to do, then?”
“Have my own party.” Kevin looks at the backpack.
“Don’t smoke so much that you start seeing little pixies with knives and shit in the forest again, okay? I don’t want to have to come looking for you because you’re sitting huddled up in some fucking tree shouting and crying.”
Benji bursts out laughing.
“That happened once. And it wasn’t weed.”
“Do you remember how you phoned me and screamed, ‘I’VE FORGOTTEN HOW TO BLINK’?”
>
“Don’t joke about that. It was seriously fucking nasty.”
Kevin looks like he wants to touch him. He doesn’t.
“And if you’re going to steal a car, don’t do it on this street, okay? Dad would get seriously pissed off.”
Benji nods, but doesn’t make any promises. Then he pulls a joint from his pocket and tucks it gently behind Kevin’s ear.
“For later. With a bit of tobacco, just the way you like it.”
Kevin gives him a quick hug, so fleeting that no one would notice, but still so hard that it speaks volumes. He can never sleep after games, and that’s the only time he smokes. Only best friends know that sort of thing about each other. Only two boys who once lay side by side under the covers, reading comics by flashlight and realizing that the reason they always felt like outsiders was because they were superheroes.
* * *
As Benji walks off into the darkness Kevin watches him go for a long time, feeling envious. He knows the girls fall for him because he’s good at hockey; without it he’d only be an average, mediocre seventeen-year-old. But not Benji. They fall for him for completely different reasons. He’s got something everyone wants, something completely independent of anything he does on the ice. His eyes always let you know that he could leave you any moment if he felt like it, without so much as a backward glance. He isn’t tied to anything, he just doesn’t care. Kevin is terrified of loneliness, but Benji embraces it as a natural state. All through their childhood Kevin has been scared that one day he’ll wake up and discover that the other superhero is gone. That this friendship never meant anything to him.
Benji’s blood is different from other people’s. He disappears into the forest on the road down toward the lake, and Kevin can’t help thinking that Benji is the only truly free individual he knows.
* * *
That’s the last time they see each other in their childhood. That ends tonight.
21
Maya watches Kevin’s every move when he comes back into the house. At first he looks like a kitten that’s been left out in the rain. Abandoned and forgotten, even though she’s never encountered anyone who’s at the center of things as much as him. Then he downs two drinks out in the kitchen and roars, “KNOCKSHOTS!” with Bobo and Amat, and jumps up and down with his arm around Lyt, so hard that the floor vibrates, singing, “WE ARE THE BEARS!”