Head Up, Toronto

The Foothills Performance Centre has two sheets of ice, a gym with a wall of windows facing the Rockies, and a coffee machine that Tash calls "the only good thing in Alberta." At 6:40 a.m. it smells like Zamboni exhaust and fear.

You're lacing your skates when Iversen walks into the locker room with a whiteboard under her arm.

"Lines," she says, and props it against the wall.

You find your name first, the way you always do. First line, center. Then you read to the left of it, where your winger goes, and your fingers stop on your laces.

RYDER (LW).

Kenna, three stalls down, reads it at the same moment. She's a center. She's been a center since she was six years old in Thunder Bay, everybody knows that story, the girl who took faceoffs against the boys and won. She looks at the board. She looks at you.

"Coach," she says pleasantly. "I think there's a typo."

"There's no typo, Ryder."

"I'm a center."

"Today you're a winger." Iversen caps her marker. "You two want to fight over the puck? Fight over it on the same team. Let's see if anybody survives."

The room laughs. Kenna doesn't. She tugs her laces tight, one sharp yank, and when she stands up she's taller on skates and somehow even more irritating.

"Don't worry," she tells you on the way past. "I'll keep the puck warm for you."

The first twenty minutes are a disaster.

You're a playmaker. You see the ice like a map, you know where the space will be before it opens, and you put the puck there. Your wingers in Toronto know it. They skate to the empty place and the puck arrives.

Kenna Ryder does not skate to the empty place. Kenna Ryder skates wherever she wants, at full speed, like a truck that's lost its brakes and is enjoying it.

Your first pass goes to where she should be and slides into the boards.

"Nice pass, Ava," she calls. "To nobody."

Your second pass she takes, cuts inside instead of out, and loses to Magda, who pokes it away with the bored expression of a woman checking her mail.

"You were supposed to go wide," you say.

"I was supposed to score."

"You didn't."

"Yet," Kenna says, and winks, and skates away backward, and you think very seriously about the legal penalty for hitting a teammate with a water bottle.

Iversen blows the whistle. She never blows the whistle. "Scrimmage. Red against white. Ten minutes. Try to look like you've met a hockey puck."

You're on red. Kenna, it turns out, is on white for the scrimmage, because Iversen is a sadist with a sense of humor.

You win the opening draw clean, back to your defense. The puck comes right back to you through the neutral zone and you've got speed and space, and the lane opens up along the right boards the way it always does. You see Tash's teammate on the far wing. You see the pass.

You don't see Kenna.

She comes out of nowhere, the way she always does, and she hits you with her whole body, clean and square and perfectly legal, and you go into the boards hard enough that the glass rattles above you. The puck goes one way. Your stick goes another. Your lungs go somewhere in British Columbia.

You lie on the ice for a second, staring at the rafters.

A shadow falls over you. Kenna is standing above you with her stick across her knees, breathing hard, her face flushed under the cage. For a second there's something in her eyes that isn't smug at all.

Then she holds out her glove.

"Head up, Toronto," she murmurs, low enough that only you can hear.

You ignore the glove. You get up on your own.

"That's two," you say.

"Two what?"

"Two times you've put me on the ice."

Her smile goes slow and lazy. "You're counting?"

You skate away before you can answer, because the answer is yes, and it's been yes for years, and that's nobody's business.

It happens with three minutes left in practice.

Iversen puts you two back together for a final drill, two-on-one against Magda and the goalie, and you're so tired and so angry that you stop thinking. You win the puck in the corner. Kenna is breaking up the middle. You don't pass to where she should be. You pass to where she is, to the crazy place, a lane that doesn't exist yet.

She's already there.

The puck hits her tape like it was mailed to her. She doesn't stop it, doesn't look, just redirects it back across the crease to you, behind Magda's stick, and you're already moving, and the puck kisses off your blade and goes in top shelf so fast the goalie never moves.

The rink goes quiet.

Not a cheer. Something better. Twenty-two hockey players stop what they're doing and look at the two of you, and somewhere by the bench Tash says, very softly, "Oh, hell."

Kenna glides to a stop beside you. Her shoulder bumps yours. Neither of you says anything. You don't have to.

"Again, Ava," says Iversen from the blue line, and you could swear she's smiling.

Team dinner is in a private room at the back of the hotel restaurant: long tables, too many potatoes, the whole camp sunburned by wind. You sit with Tash and Magda. Kenna sits at the far end with Shay Mulrooney, the redheaded Harriers defender who's her best friend and who keeps glancing at you like you're a puzzle she's halfway through.

The rookies are sitting together, three of them, giddy to be here. The youngest, a speedy little forward named Kiko Takahashi, keeps looking from you to Kenna with stars in her eyes.

"Can I ask something?" Kiko says during dessert, to the whole end of the table.

"No," says Magda.

"Yes," says Tash.

Kiko turns pink. "It's just, everybody on my college team had a theory. About why you two hate each other." She looks at you, then down the table at Kenna, who has gone very still with a spoon halfway to her mouth. "Is it true it started at the All-Star weekend? In Montreal? Three years ago?"

The table goes silent.

Not hockey silent. Worse. Library silent. Somebody's fork stops scraping. You can feel Tash, beside you, physically vibrating with the effort of not saying anything.

You open your mouth. Nothing comes out. Montreal is a hotel stairwell and a green exit sign and a text you've never deleted, and none of that is going to come out of your mouth in front of the rookies.

"Nothing happened in Montreal," you finally say. "We just don't get along."

It sounds about as true as a dive in the playoffs.

Down the table, Kenna sets her spoon down. She picks up her water glass, takes one slow sip, and looks right at you over the rim.

"Ask her," she tells Kiko. "She's the one who forgot."