Chapter One
Dawn
“That could have been you,” my mom said to me. Her voice was a weird mix of regret and spite, which was pretty typical when she talked to me about Toby Cooper. “If you’d played your cards right it could have been you sitting next to him on TV. Your name up there—‘Dawn Daley, girlfriend.’ You put all that time into the boy and then walked away as soon as it was about to pay off? That’s—”
She stopped talking when my dad came into the living room. Either one of them would say anything they felt like to me when it was just the two of us, but they had this weird game of pretending they were loving parents when the other was around. So my mom might tell me I was stupid later, like she had lots of times before, but she wouldn’t do it when my dad could hear.
“They’re dragging this shit out,” my dad muttered, glowering at the TV screen.
It was late June in Ontario, Canada. The sun was still warm even after dinner, and the day had been really hot earlier. I’d written the last exam of my high school life that afternoon, and I’d be working at the beach the next day, trying to stay cool while serving burgers to tourists. It was summertime by any reckoning I could think of, but everyone in Corrigan Falls was still completely obsessed with hockey. Especially this year.
I could almost handle it over the winter months. Let’s face it, if you don’t like curling or snowmobiling, there isn’t a lot else to do in a small town in the dead of an Ontario winter.
But in June? Hockey should have been done with months ago.
From a distance, I got it. Hockey is Corrigan Falls’ claim to fame. Smallest market in the OHL and we still always had a great team. Three Raiders were probably going to get drafted to the NHL in the next couple days, and one of them, Tyler MacDonald, was practically guaranteed to go high in the pickings. Not only the three players, but also their girlfriends, had been excused from final exams so they could all go down and be there in person for the draft. So, yeah, it was a big deal.
But you know what? There were a couple hundred other kids doing something pretty important that day, too. That is, if you considered finishing high school to be important.
Which Corrigan Falls apparently didn’t.
Two more months, I reminded myself as I sat there with my parents. I had my acceptance to McGill University already sorted out and ready, so it was just two months of working my tail off to save as much money as possible and then I’d be gone, off to Montreal to start my new life, free of hockey.
I know, it’s kind of ironic to think of someone moving to Montreal to get away from hockey, but that should make it clear exactly how out-of-control obsessed Corrigan Falls is.
And of course it’s kind of weird for me to be bitching about how obsessed about hockey everyone in Corrigan Falls is, when I was sitting there in front of the TV like everyone else. At least I was at home. There was a big screen set up at the arena, and most of the town was down there, watching en masse. No way was I showing up at that, though, and my parents had stayed home, too. Maybe they were trying to be supportive of me, but more likely they were just embarrassed. They were the parents of the girl who’d dated Toby Cooper all through high school and then broken up with him six months before the draft.
The camera was panning over the young prospects then, and I caught a glimpse of Toby, sitting with Nat, his new girlfriend, right behind Tyler. Toby wasn’t expected to go first round, which meant his turn wouldn’t come until sometime the next day, but of course he’d be there to support his teammate.
“You’re so much prettier than she is,” my mom said. “She’s so fat!”
“She’s not fat! Jesus, Mom, she’s a serious athlete. She’s very fit.”
“You wouldn’t know it from looking at her.”
Which was kind of true. Nat liked to wear baggy clothes—for comfort, not because she was ashamed of her body. “She’s a nice person, Mom. It’s not her fault Toby and I broke up.”
My mom snorted like she couldn’t believe how naive I was, then glanced over at Dad to see if he’d caught her slip from the “supportive mom” role. Lucky for her, he was totally captivated by the TV. Tyler MacDonald was on the screen in a pre-recorded interview, feeding his best sports clichés to an earnest young reporter.
I stood up before I’d even known I was going to do it. If I wanted to know what Tyler had to say about anything, I’d just give him a call and ask him. But I damn well wouldn’t be asking him about hockey. I was done with hockey, and absolutely done with hockey players.
“Where are you going?” my mom asked. “It’s only seventeen minutes until they start picking!”
“Montreal would like to select with their first pick, from the Corrigan Falls Raiders, Tyler MacDonald,” I said, trying to imitate the dry voice of an NHL general manager. “It’s a no brainer. I don’t need to sit around and watch it happen.”
“What about the other two?” my dad asked. He hadn’t spoken Toby’s name out loud since we broke up. I couldn’t be sure if he was trying to be sensitive of my feelings or of his own.
“Neither one of them is going first round.” It’s not like I was psychic or anything, it was just hard to spend as much time as I had around hockey players without soaking up a lot of information. Even after Toby and I had broken up, we’d stayed friends, and no one at school had been talking about anything else for roughly a million years.
“I’m going for a walk,” I told my parents, and they didn’t argue. It was still broad daylight out, and even if it hadn’t been, Corrigan Falls is a safe town. And even if it had been dark, even if it wasn’t a safe town, my parents were far too wrapped up in the damn draft to worry about their failure of a daughter, the girl who almost landed an NHL player.
So I left and started walking. Bad timing on my part, of course, or bad direction choice, or maybe just bad tendency toward being a glutton for punishment, but I was walking by the arena when I heard a huge roar from inside. Montreal had chosen their number one pick.
And I was happy for Tyler. Happy for his girlfriend, Karen, who was a friend of mine and an all-round awesome person. There was absolutely no reason for me to be such a sour bitch about any of this.
Still, I kept walking, heading toward water like I always did when I needed some serenity.
I was jealous, I realized as my feet hit the sand of the beach. I stopped to pull off my shoes, then stayed still a little longer, thinking it all through.
I wasn’t jealous of Nat, Toby’s new girlfriend. I liked Nat, and I’d done a fair bit of matchmaking to get the two of them together. And I sure wasn’t jealous of Tyler’s girlfriend, Karen, or of Claudia, Chris Winslow’s girlfriend. I liked all of them, but I didn’t want to be them. I didn’t want to be standing next to my man as he celebrated a big victory.
No, I wasn’t jealous of the girls; I was jealous of the guys. They were doing what they loved, and succeeding at it, and getting huge love because of it. The beach was deserted on the first Friday night of real summer, when it should have been full of bonfires and partying, because everyone was at the arena cheering for a guy who’d only lived in Corrigan Falls for three years. He was a good guy, sure, but why the hell was that so special?
Because of hockey. Because somehow, for some reason, this town, this province, this country, had decided that hockey mattered more than anything else.
My brain told me it was stupid to care; it was a strange situation, but it wasn’t hurting anyone, was it? But my heart told me it was hurting people. People who didn’t want to live their lives on the sidelines of someone else’s triumphs.
I made it to the water and scuffed my feet through it. Still cool, but not cold.
I was wearing cut-off jean shorts and a Ramones T-shirt I’d washed and worn so many times it was practically see-through. There was hardly any weight to the clothes and absolutely no reason not to swim in them.
No reason not to swim in them, but no reason to keep them on, either.
Maybe this will be my solution, I thought as I lifted the shirt off over my head, then reached around to unhook my bra. Instead of being all crabby and nasty about everyone’s attention being somewhere else, maybe I could take advantage of it. Everyone looking at a big screen down at the arena while Tyler got dressed in his new jersey? Fine. I’d take the opportunity to go skinny-dipping at a public beach.
I dropped my bra and shimmied out of my shorts and underwear. How long had it been since I’d been naked outdoors?
Well, not that long, considering some of the stuff Toby and I had gotten up to the summer before, trying to find some privacy when both sets of parents were at home. But how long had it been since I’d been naked outdoors on this beach, with the buildings of the town so close beside me, the sounds of the arena still audible over the gentle lapping of the waves? I hadn’t been naked in such a public place since never. And I kind of liked it.
Still, the sun was setting and the air was cooling, so I skipped into the water, accepting the initial goose bumps as the price I’d have to pay for my daring. As soon as the water was up to my hips I flopped forward, gasping a little as the cold hit me, and then I was floating.
This is what I need to remember, I told myself. This sense of being apart from the rest of the human world, suspended in the cool embrace of nature. People didn’t care what I was doing? That was fine. That was good. It was the freedom of anonymity, something Tyler and Toby and Chris Winslow wouldn’t know for a long time to come. Something I hadn’t known when I was dating Toby, and something I’d missed quite a lot.
I was nobody special, and that was a gift. Nobody noticed me, so I could do what I wanted.
That was what I told myself as I floated there in the rays of the setting sun, the water lapping up over my ears, far away from everyone else in the world.
Except, I realized when I finally lifted my head out of the water, I wasn’t all that far away at all. There was a stream of people pouring onto the beach, clearly released from the arena and looking for somewhere to celebrate. And my anonymity hadn’t extended to the point of total invisibility. My clothes were back there on the shore by the campfire area, and I was naked in the water. I had no idea if I could stay swimming for however many hours it would take for the partiers to get tired and go home, but I kind of doubted it. I was already a bit cold and a bit tired.
But if I waded out of the water now? Buck naked, displaying myself for the whole town? It wasn’t just the embarrassment of being naked. It was worse than that. People had been watching me for months, trying to figure out how I was taking the breakup, waiting for me to show how devastated I must be. If I went streaking tonight, the night the whole town was celebrating Toby and Tyler and the Raiders? It would seem like a pathetic cry for attention.
Damn it.
I stayed there in the water, treading water and staring toward shore, trying to come up with some way out of this mess. I had nothing, until I noticed someone moving out of the shadows by the lifeguard stand. He walked easily over the sand, right to where my clothes were sitting, and leaned over and scooped them up.
I thought about yelling. As bad as this situation was, it would get a fair bit worse if this clown stole my clothes. But there was something deliberate about the way he was moving. Slow, steady, not like someone trying to steal something.
Instead, he walked along the shore, my clothes still in his hands, down the beach toward the more natural part, where there were boulders and trees almost to the water. I swam along with him, hoping he was a rescuer and not a psycho.
I wished I could recognize him. For all the bitching I do about living in a small town, there are advantages, and one of them is that I know practically everyone, whether I want to or not. I was too far away to get a really good look at this guy—I could tell he was young, tall, with short, dark hair—but I didn’t think I recognized him.
When he got to the boulders, he climbed over to the far side and bent over, dropping my clothes in a neat little pile on the sand. Then he looked out at me, raised a hand as if saying good-bye, and turned and started walking away from the lake.
“Thank you!” I yelled after him, but if he heard me he didn’t show any sign. He just kept walking, and when he was far enough away, I swam into shore and made a mad dash for the cover of the rocks. I got there without any wolf whistles or laughing, so that was a good sign, and pulled my clothes on so fast there wasn’t much chance for anyone to see anything.
Well, there wasn’t much chance for any of the newcomers to see anything. But what about the mystery guy? He’d walked over to my clothes like he knew exactly where they were, like he understood the situation completely. Which strongly suggested he’d been around when the clothes had come off. He’d been there but hadn’t said anything.
And was he being a gentleman when he carried them away for me, or was it a sort of gloating thing? Like, he’d seen me naked and he wanted me to know he’d seen me naked?
I was shivering as I jammed my feet into my shoes and started walking. I wasn’t sure where I was going—not to the party, that was for sure, and not home—not yet. I’d been doing a lot of walking since Toby and I broke up, a lot of avoiding the crowd and spending time on my own. So this night wasn’t all that different from lots of others, except that I was soaking wet. And except for the vague, irritating question in my mind—who was the guy on the beach, and was he a gentleman or a creeper?