kids are staring vacantly at their phones. A girl and a guy are asleep on an air mattress.
Mel approaches the Ping-Pong table. After sinking a ball, one of the players tells her, “Gordy’s inside.”
Great. So does everyone in West Essex know she and Gordy were hooking up this summer?
“Is that whose house this is?” she answers casually.
Mel makes her way inside, trying to find her teammates. She’s never had to untangle herself from a relationship. But Gordy came into her life at exactly the right time, when Mel was bored and lonely. Or maybe the wrong time for those very same reasons.
Whatever.
Depending on how the calendar weeks fell and if there were snow days that had to be made up, the girls could count on having roughly three weeks where there was zero field hockey between the last day of high school and the beginning of summer leagues.
Most of them went on family vacations during this gap. Coach still expected them to keep up on their fitness. It wasn’t so much about losing your edge, but gaining one over the girls who wouldn’t work as hard as you.
Mel hated to exercise during break. She preferred to go full-blown couch potato, sleeping in, bingeing bad TV, eating garbage, lying on a pool float. Some days she wouldn’t even shower, wouldn’t ever change out of her pj’s. Phoebe could usually guilt Mel into it, and Phoebe was good about finding things they could do that didn’t necessarily feel like exercise—water aerobic exercises for the pool, an hour at the trampoline park—but it still wasn’t something she enjoyed. It was more about having an answer in case Coach happened to text her wanting to know what she got up to that day.
But Phoebe’s knee still had her completely out of commission and Coach had barely spoken to her since her surgery. Not only that, but Coach had neglected to email any of the girls with important dates the way he normally would before school let out, which Mel took as another big sign he didn’t plan to return to West Essex next season. She wasn’t captain; her team might not have a coach. Not to mention, there’d been nothing but radio silence from Truman about Mel potentially playing there. So the prospect of working out alone was extra, extra miserable.
During the first week of break, Mel and her parents headed off to Montreal, and the closest she came to exercise was a daily walk to get poutine. For the second week, she dragged her parents’ treadmill in front of the big-screen television and logged about five miles day in the basement. But even with a movie going it was torture. Once, Mel zoned out and lost her balance. She got a terrible rash from the belt, but if she hadn’t been wearing the emergency clip, she definitely would have broken her leg.
Running around West Essex felt too showy, so Mel drove thirty minutes to the big county park, where they had running paths and hiking trails and a river that kayakers loved.
She saw Gordy in the parking lot.
Though they were in the same grade at West Essex, Mel didn’t know him. He didn’t play any sports, though she remembered him being into skateboarding when they were at the lower school. Sometime during high school, Gordy had shifted into more of an outdoorsy guy. There were echoes of his former interest—like his black Clark Kent glasses, his slip-on checkerboard Vans—but the rest of him looked ripped from the pages of a Patagonia catalog. Fleeces, puffer vests, beanies, a carabiner holding his keys to his belt loop. His Volkswagen GTI also had the earmarks of someone athletic: bike rack mounted to the roof, mud splatters, a bumper sticker from the closest ski mountain.
That day, Gordy had his mountain bike flipped upside down, handlebars and seat on the ground, wheels spinning in the air. He wore a pair of jeans cut into shorts, a pair of black socks pulled up around his calves, and a Marmot T-shirt.
Mel wasn’t going to disturb him. He seemed hard at work on something with his gears. But he said hello to her and so they chatted for a while. When he apologized for holding her up from her run, Mel admitted she actually hated running. Since Gordy couldn’t get his bike working, he offered to show her the Frick trail, one of his favorites.
Along that hike, she remembered how comfortable he looked in the cold when everyone else was shivering