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“It was bound to happen,” she offers.

“I can’t believe he knows my father!” Thomas says, a high hysterical giggle beginning.

“You were awfully polite,” Linda says.

______

Passing by her aunt on the way to the bathroom, Linda thinks of Thomas. Sitting in the classroom or handing a menu to a customer, Linda thinks of Thomas. Between classes, they exchange notes or turn corners and kiss. He is waiting for her every morning when she walks down her street, and when she gets into the Skylark, she sits as close to Thomas as she can, the ocean of space on the other side now. They shave minutes from the rest of life and are always late.

______

Linda,

Can you meet me after school?

Thomas,

I was reading O’Neill again. There’s this passage: “None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”

Linda,

I like O’Neill, but that’s crap. Of course we can help the things life has done to us. I prefer this passage: “I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself — actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!”

Better, no?

Jesus, this class is boring.

Linda,

I really like the sweater you have on today. You were driving me crazy in fourth period.

Thomas,

Thank you. It’s Eileen’s.

Linda,

What are you doing this weekend? I have to go skiing at Killington. I don’t want to go because it will mean four days away from you. What’s happening to me anyway?

Thomas,

I have to work all weekend. I’ve never been on skis.

Linda,

There’s a hockey game tonight. Will you come?

______

Linda thinks the hockey game is brutal. The rink reeks of sweat and beer. There is slush underfoot. She sits on the bleachers in her peacoat with a sweater underneath, her hands in her pockets, shivering all the same.

The din is deafening. The shouts and calls, the drunken patter, the thwack of the puck, and the blades shushing on the ice echo through the cavernous hockey rink. The imagination provides sound effects for the bits they cannot hear: a stick thrust against the back of a leg; the thud of a hipbone as a player’s skates go out from under him; the crack of a helmet snapping to the ice with the force of a whip. She flinches and then flinches again. The crowd eats it up.

She doesn’t recognize Thomas when he comes out onto the ice. His shoulders and legs are gargantuan in the pads. His teeth are blotted out by the mouth guard. The contours of his head have been erased by the helmet. This is a side of Thomas she has never seen before and couldn’t have imagined: bent forward, stick outstretched, thighs pumping, his movements as fluid as a ballerina’s, as deft as a tap dancer’s. Thomas plays aggressively. She has trouble following the game, doesn’t know the rules. Sometimes she doesn’t even know a goal has been scored until she hears the crowd roar.

That night, inevitably, there is a brawl. This one over an intentional tripping that sends Thomas sprawling, spinning belly down on the ice. He is up in a flash, gathering himself like a spider, digging the tips of his skates into the ice, and then he is all over the player who has done this to him. Linda, who has gone to school with girls and nuns, has never seen a physical fight before, never seen the blows that land, the ricocheting of the limbs, the tugging at the jerseys, the vicious kicks. The fight takes only seconds, but the scene evokes centuries and seems more like gladiatorial combat than anything she has ever witnessed. Thomas shrugs off the referee and heads