stands, cheering him on,” Emily added.
Sarah wagged her finger at me. “And we’ll be there to make sure you actually talk to him and don’t chicken out.”
It would be nice to have my friends with me if I went to the game so I wasn’t stuck sitting by myself. But I could too easily picture them pushing me in front of Corby as he was walking off the ice—or whatever players did once the game was over. “I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
“It’s a great idea,” Sarah insisted.
“If I go, my mom will ask all sorts of questions that I don’t want to answer. She’ll want to know why Edwin dropped me off at the ice rink.” The second she caught on to the fact I was crushing on a boy, she’d want to know everything about him. It wouldn’t matter to her that Corby was living with the Whitneys. She would never approve of him, and she’d spew crap about how beneath us he was. I knew I was getting ahead of myself because I was assuming something would even happen between us if I showed up at his game, but how my mom would react amped up my fears and gave me another excuse not to do it.
“There’s an easy fix for that.” Sarah snapped her fingers together. “One of us will drive, so you won’t need Edwin to give you a ride.”
If I had my driver’s license, then I could have driven myself, but my mom had this weird thing about waiting until I was eighteen to have my own car. I hadn’t bothered to take my test yet since it wouldn’t have done me any good, so I only had my permit. But Sarah and Emily had both gotten cars for their sixteenth birthdays and had given me rides enough times that my mom wouldn’t think anything unusual was going on. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t ask any questions. “She’ll still want to know what we did when I get home tomorrow.”
“For a parent who’s never really around, your mom really does have a sense for exactly the wrong time to stick her nose into your business,” Sarah complained.
Emily circled back to her original suggestion. “Your mom doesn’t need to know what you’re up to this evening if we have a sleepover at my place. We can all have dinner together at my place before we head to the rink, and then we’ll be on our best behavior while you get your flirt on.”
Sarah made me doubt how possible that promise was when she wagged her brows. “Another upside to this plan is that you’ll be free to hang out with him after the game if you want.”
“Of course, I do, but it isn’t up to me,” I reminded them, shaking my head. “We don’t know that he wants to spend time with me.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Emily sing-songed.
“And if he’s too dumb to see what an awesome catch you are, then you’re better off without him,” Sarah muttered with a gleam in her eyes that made her look as though she was ready to kick Corby’s butt if he rejected me. I wasn’t sure I was ready to put myself out there with Corby, but I was going to find out because there was no going back now that they knew everything. At least I would be doing it with my best friends at my side.
6
Corby
The night of my first game as a Cougar had finally arrived, and I was looking forward to proving to everyone that I’d earned the spot on the first line that Coach Clark had given me. I’d kicked ass during the weeks I’d played on the club team and since we’d started practice, but my performance during the actual season was what really mattered. These games were what the scouts would pay attention to. The stats that I racked up over the next months were going to be the deciding factor for the path I would take for the rest of my life. If I played well enough, scholarship offers would pour in and I would have a good chance of being drafted. Then I would have the chance to get a college degree for free and achieve my dream of playing professional hockey. But if this season was fantastic, there was a chance the team who drafted me would sign me right away instead of having me do college hockey first so I