When dawn breaks, the light pours over Beartown in the way Peter’s mother always said about summer: “As if the Lord God Himself were pouring orange juice over the treetops.” Peter is sitting outside the supermarket with his eyes closed, asking himself the same questions, over and over and over again.

The first thing Richard Theo said to him last night was “You don’t like my politics, do you?” Peter replied thoughtfully, “With all due respect, I don’t agree with what you stand for. You’re an opportunist.” Theo nodded and seemed not to take offense: “You’re only an opportunist until you win, then you’re the establishment.” When he saw Peter’s look of distaste, he added, “With all due respect, Peter, politics is about realizing that the world is complicated even though people like you would prefer it to be simple.”

Peter shook his head. “You thrive on discord. Your type of politics creates conflict. Exclusion.” The politician smiled understandingly. “And hockey? What do you think that does to everyone who isn’t on the inside? Do you even remember me from school?” Peter cleared his throat awkwardly and muttered, “You were a few years below me, weren’t you?” Theo shook his head, not angrily, not accusingly, but almost sadly. “We were in the same class, Peter.”

Peter doesn’t know if Theo planned that, to get him off balance, but it worked. When Peter looked down at the ground, shamefaced, the councillor smiled happily and then explained very plainly why he had come to see Peter: “I have certain contacts in London. I know which company is going to buy the factory in Beartown.”

“I didn’t even know it was being sold!” Peter exclaimed, but the politician merely shrugged his shoulders modestly. “It’s my job to know things that no one else knows, Peter. I know a lot of things about you, too. That’s why I’m here.”

* * *

Leo wakes up in an empty house the next morning. His mom has left a note on the kitchen table: “I’m at work, your dad’s at the rink, call if you need to. There’s some extra money on the counter. We love you! Mom x.” Leo isn’t a child anymore. He notices the word “your” as well. Your dad. Not Mom’s other half.

The boy goes into his big sister’s room, closes the door, and curls up on the floor. Maya’s notebooks are under the bed, full of poems and song lyrics, and he reads them through different types of tears. Sometimes hers, sometimes his own. Maya was never like other big sisters who yelled and threw their younger siblings out of their rooms. When Leo was younger, he was allowed to come in here. Maya let him sleep in her bed when he was frightened, when they eavesdropped on their parents in the kitchen and heard them fall apart when they talked about Isak. The floor next to Maya’s bed was always Leo’s safest place. But he’s older now, and Maya is spending the whole summer out in the forest with Ana. Leo used to ask Maya’s advice about everything, so he doesn’t know who to ask now, about what a little brother is supposed to do for his big sister when she gets raped. Or what he can do for his parents when they let go of each other. Or what to do with all the hatred.

At the back of a notepad under Maya’s bed he finds a page entitled “The Matchstick.” He very carefully tears it out and puts it into his pocket. Then he goes down to the beach.

* * *

He keeps scratching himself the whole time, hard and deep. He tugs his sleeves farther down over his hands.

* * *

Those rainy days could have been a chance for emotions in Beartown and Hed to cool off, but William Lyt has sweated his way through them. His coach once said to him that he had never seen anyone play with “such a immense need for validation.” Maybe he meant it as an attempt to get William to talk about his complexes, but William took it as a compliment.

Throughout his childhood, William had fought to become Kevin’s best friend again. He used to be, when they were little, driving pedal cars outside Kevin’s house and playing hockey indoors in William’s basement. Then they started playing hockey, and suddenly Benji appeared. Kevin never stood next to William in team photographs after that. William did what he could to break Benji, teased him about his cheap secondhand clothes and called him “Sledge.” Until Benji whacked him in the face with the sledge, costing William both his front teeth and the respect of the changing room. William’s mother demanded that Benji be punished for the “assault,” but the club did nothing.

When they got older, William tried to outshine Benji by boasting about girls he claimed to have slept with, making himself out to be a better friend at parties than that tree-climbing pothead. He was lying, of course: he was a virgin longer than most of the team. But one day Kevin came into the locker room and shouted, “William! Your girlfriends are waiting for you out here!” Confused, William got up and went out. The corridor was empty, but there was a pack of ten thick white socks on the floor. Kevin was roaring with laughter: “That way your mom won’t have to do the washing every time you ‘sleep’ with one of your ‘girlfriends’!” William never forgot the way the team laughed at him. Especially the way Benji did. William has spent years playing with a desperate need for validation, so now what? Hed Hockey is a fresh start for him, a chance to finally become a leader. He’s never going to let himself be the guy with the socks again.

While it’s been raining this summer he has been weight training nonstop and watching the video online of his red Hed Hockey flags burning. Over and over again. He was hoping to find a tiny clue as to the identity of the cowardly bastard who had posted it, and eventually he thought he had spotted something: the hand holding the lighter in the video was small, a junior school kid’s, and when his sleeve slipped back over his wrist his lower arm looked as though it was covered with scratch marks.

* * *

William calls the biggest guys in his team. They buy cigarettes and set off for the beach.

* * *

The Matchstick

If there is a darkened room and you lock up a child who is terrified of the dark

If they are left there with their blackest fears because life is a bastard

If it was you in that room and you found a single matchstick in your pocket

You would light the match, even if the room smelled of gas

Only a few degrees separate rain from snow

All houses are built up but burn down

You have shown me things I fear more than death

So I am prepared to burn in here if I can do it with you

* * *

When the sun returns to Beartown, the beach once more fills with teenagers pretending not to stare at each other’s bodies. At first everything is cheerful and noisy, but soon a frightened silence creeps along the shoreline. Two youths climb into a tree and hang up new Hed Hockey flags. William Lyt is prowling between the towels, and he stops at every junior school kid and holds out a cigarette. “Have you got a light?”

No one looks him in the eye. He grabs hold of each boy’s arm and looks for scratch marks. It’s possible that Lyt himself doesn’t really know what he’s hoping to find, because who would dare to confess anything to him here? But he wants him to be afraid, if nothing else. So that he doesn’t challenge his team again. With each teenager who shakes his head as he stares down at the sand, William’s heart feels a bit lighter, he feels a bit bigger.

Then he hears a scraping sound. First once, then once again, immediately afterward, and a slight hiss as the flame ignites. A thin voice behind William says, “I’ve got a lighter!”

* * *

Leo’s fingers aren’t trembling. His sleeve slides up. The scars on his arm stand out vividly.

* * *

“What . . . what do you mean, you know a lot of things about me?” Peter managed to say the previous evening. Richard Theo replied in a carefree, almost cheery way, “I know that Beartown Ice Hockey is at most just three months away from bankruptcy, even if your friend Tails sells another of his supermarkets. And I know that your A-team coach, Sune, is ill.”

Peter just gawped at him. At the start of the summer Sune had started to have trouble with his heart: Adri Ovich had found him on the floor of his row house when he had failed to show up at the newly formed girls’ team’s skating class. Adri had called Peter from the hospital, but Sune had asked the pair of them not to tell anyone else. It was just a “little murmur,” and he didn’t want to be “some damn martyr.”

Naturally they kept quiet, but if Peter were honest, that was much for his own selfish reasons as for Sune’s sake: he couldn’t recruit a new coach without sponsors or money, he couldn’t persuade the team’s players to sign new contracts without a coach, and without players there was no way he could attract either sponsors or a new coach.