Benji closes his eyes quickly, opens them slowly. “I don’t want to be a burden to the club.”

“Are you planning to have sex with anyone in the locker room?”

“What the . . . ? What?”

Zackell shrugs. “That’s what people think, isn’t it? That gays have a problem with discipline? If everyone starts having sex with each other in the locker room?”

Benji frowns. “Where the hell have you heard that?”

“Are you planning to have sex with anyone in the locker room or not?”

“Like hell!”

Zackell shrugs again. “So you’re not a burden. Hockey is hockey. People can say what they like about you outside the rink, but in here it doesn’t matter. If you’re good, you’re good. If you score goals, you score goals.”

Benji doesn’t look convinced. “People hate me. You as well. Maybe it’s just too much for them, that you and I are both . . . you know. Maybe they could live with one, but two in the same team, that’s . . . too much for people.”

Zackell sounds taken aback. “What do you mean?”

Benji’s eyebrows twitch. “That you’re . . . gay.”

“I’m not gay,” Zackell replies.

Benji stares at her. “Everyone thinks you are.”

“People think a lot of things. They’re far too obsessed with their emotions.”

Benji just gawps at her for a long time. Then he starts to laugh. He can’t help it. “Seriously, Zackell, you must see that everything would have been a hell of a lot easier for you in this town if you’d just told everyone that you’re not—”

“Like you?”

“Yes.”

Zackell snorts. “I don’t think you have any obligation to tell everyone who you want to have sex with, Benjamin. I don’t think I have, either.”

Benji scrapes the side of his skate against the ice. He thinks for a while before he asks, “Do you ever wish you were a man?”

“Why would I?” Zackell wonders.

Benji looks at the bear on the ice. Tries to find the right words. “So you didn’t have to be a female hockey coach.”

Zackell shakes her head slowly, but for once she doesn’t look entirely unmoved. “My dad probably wished I was a boy sometimes.”

“Why?”

“Because he knew I’d always have to be twice as good as the men to be accepted. The same thing applies to you now. You’ll be judged differently. The people who hate me might let me coach a team, but only if we win. And they’ll let you play, but only if you’re the best. Just being good isn’t enough for you anymore.”

“It’s fucking unfair,” Benji whispers.

“Unfairness is a far more natural state in the world than fairness,” Zackell says.

“Did your dad tell you that?”

“My mom.”

Benji swallows hard. “I don’t know if I can be captain.”

“Okay,” Zackell replies.

* * *

Then she turns and leaves him without any more words. As if any more were needed.

* * *

Benji is left standing alone at the center circle. Eventually he fetches a stack of pucks from the boards, drops them onto the ice one after the other, for possibly the last time. This sport is never happy being just part of you, you have to sacrifice too much, there are too many things you know only if you’ve spent your whole life in here. How much your feet hurt when you skate for the first time after the summer. How unbelievably bad your gloves smell at the end of the season. The sound when you slam into the boards or fire a puck into the glass. How every rink has its own unique echo. How every stride sings when the stands are empty. How it feels to just play. How your heart beats.

* * *

Bang bang bang bang bang.

* * *

The first morning Ana sits next to Vidar, neither of them says anything. Ana is too weighed down by guilt and loss to speak. For the entirety of her childhood she has always gone to school with Maya, and the loneliness is a shock. She’s sleeping a lot, because she’s hoping she might wake up and realize that the mistake of her life was a dream. It never happens.

But the second morning she sits next to Vidar again, and just as the bus is approaching the school she glances at him. He pretends to be busy with his phone, but she sees him looking. He’s the sort who can’t help it.

“What are you playing?” she asks.

“What?” he mumbles, as if he’s only just noticed her.

She’s not that easily fooled. “You heard.”

He starts to laugh; he does that when he’s nervous. He will soon discover that when Ana gets nervous, she makes sarcastic jokes instead. If they spend their whole lives together, they might become the least suitable couple to encounter at a funeral: one who can’t stop making jokes and one who can’t stop giggling.

“Minecraft. I’m playing Minecraft,” he says.

“Are you seven or something?” Ana wonders.

He laughs. “It helps me to not . . . I have trouble with my impulse control. My psychologist says Minecraft is good. I can concentrate better when I just play.”

The bus stops. The students spill out. Ana doesn’t look away from him. “You’re Teemu Rinnius’s little brother, aren’t you? You were the one who was in prison?”

Vidar shrugs. “It was more like a holiday camp.”

“What do you mean, about not being able to concentrate? Have you got some sort of syndrome or something?”

“I don’t know.”

Ana smiles. “You’re just an ordinary nutter, then?”

Vidar laughs. “Some people say I’m a psychopath! You shouldn’t be talking to me!”

Ana looks him carefully up and down. His black hair is draped around his eyes. “You look too kind to be a psychopath,” she says.

He frowns. “Watch out! I might have a knife!”

She giggles. “If you had a knife I wouldn’t be scared of you, even if I was a loaf of bread.”

* * *

Vidar falls head over heels for her, because he’s the type who doesn’t know how to stop himself.

36

“Don’t psychopaths go for walks, then?”

Elisabeth Zackell holds her open tryout early one morning. A handful of players show up, a few juniors who haven’t got anywhere else to play because Beartown didn’t manage to put together a team for them this year and some older players who have been let go by other clubs and are out of a contract. None of them is anywhere near good enough to get onto Zackell’s team, but that doesn’t matter; they’re only there as extras so that the club can say it was an open session. Vidar is the only player of interest, but Zackell has to go and look for him when he doesn’t appear on the ice. She finds him in the equipment storage room.

“Can I help you?” she asks.

“Have you got a saw?” Vidar asks.

“What for?” Zackell wonders.

Vidar holds up his goalie stick. “This is too long!”

During all those nights he was locked in the unit and played with Baloo, Vidar needed to be able to fire the balls and pucks back to the other side of the basement after he’d saved Baloo’s shots. He couldn’t wear skates in the basement, so he sawed the top off his stick to make it the right length. He accidentally sawed off too much and it ended up too short, but he discovered that that meant he could make harder passes and more accurately, too. The only thing you have an excess of when you’re locked up is time, so Vidar started to experiment with different lengths and types of tape on his stick. He ended up taping it without leaving a lump at the end, the way most goalies do, which made his grip better.

Zackell finds him a saw, without understanding what he’s doing. But when Vidar is happy with his stick and goes out onto the ice, he stops a puck and fires it without any effort, sending it from one end of the ice to the other.

“Can you do that again?” Zackell asks.

Vidar nods. Zackell puts him in front of one net and goes and stands by the other one. “Pass to me!” she calls.

So he does. Right across the whole rink, right to the blade of her stick. It might not sound like a big thing if you’re not bothered about hockey, but Zackell knows that most goalies in Beartown’s league couldn’t get a puck to hit water even if they fell out of a boat. “This guy will be our goalie when we haven’t got the puck but an extra player when we have,” she thinks. And she can win that way.

“Get in goal,” she commands.

He obeys. She starts firing puck after puck, and she’s a good shot, but he saves everything. She lets the other players in the open session have a go, but not one of them manages to score. She gets two of them to shoot at the same time, then three, from different angles. Vidar pretty much doesn’t let anything past. His reflexes are remarkable.

Zackell looks around the stands. At the top, over in one corner, sits Peter Andersson. As far away as it’s possible to get on the other side, in the standing area, is Teemu Rinnius. Spider and Woody are standing next to him. Teemu tries to hide how proud he is but fails. Spider and William don’t even try.