Poser by Alison Hughes Page A

work: the guys who’ve been in skates since they were sucking on a soother play in the A league, with the burly coaches who act as if their players are almost semiprofessional.
    The A-league guys all wait by the phone for the NHL to call them up. The parents are, shall we say, very, very involved. I once saw Ethan Malloy’s dad scream so hard that he horked a gob of spit onto the Plexiglas two rows down. I watched that spit trickle down into the boards the whole third period. Not pretty. My mom would say Mr. Malloy has issues.
    Chan and Frey play on the same team, in the D or F league, meaning they can stand up on skates and have parents that don’t mind driving them to early Saturday-morning practices.
    It’s my kind of league. Nobody scores much, but they have fun.
     Chan’s actually really fast, in an out-of-control kind of way. It’s the stopping
     he has trouble with. He generally just skids into the boards and falls, crashing into a
     crumpled heap. Frey plays defense. BIG defense. He doesn’t move much, but he
     doesn’t have to. His skill is being almost impossible to get around.
    I really thought this would be the year I got to play, but you-know-what got in the way.
    â€œHmmm. Hockey, hey?” Mom said, looking over the registration forms. I’d sneakily made sure Macy was out before I showed Mom the forms.
    â€œYeah, I got it all figured out,” I said quickly. “I get Frey to lend me some secondhand equipment. The Frey guys all play hockey. There’s got to be some old gear lying around.”
    I thought I had her, I really did. Then she flipped through the pages of The Calendar That Rules Our Lives.
    Have I mentioned that I hate that calendar? I think I did.
    It’s always booked solid, the dates of modeling shoots in red. I looked over at it. There was a lot of red.
    â€œOh, honey, I’m sorry, but it looks like in the fall you’re booked every Saturday until Christmas,” she said. “I guess that’s the price you pay for being gorgeous! Maybe next year, okay?”
    â€œOkay,” I said, trying to smile back at her.
    Now, when I was younger I would have just shrugged this off as another thing in a long list of things I couldn’t do, like eating donuts, cutting my own hair and using non-whitening toothpaste.
    But I’m twelve now. And I’m getting angry. Slowburn Spin, that’s me. Man on the edge.
    Anyway, I go and watch Chan crash and Frey be immobile when I can. And we play after school sometimes with Frey’s brothers at the park near Frey’s house. It’s just a little field in the summer, with an old climber and two baby swings in one corner. But in the winter, Frey’s dad puts up some two-by-fours and floods the field every night for a week as soon as we get a cold snap.
    It’s like the Frey family’s personal rink. Their two nets stay on the ice, and the boys and their friends do all the shoveling. One of the only rules is, you want to play, you have to shovel. When you finish playing, you just dump all your goalie pads and sticks and helmets in a heap at one end of the rink, knowing that another group of kids will be out playing soon.
    More than once, I’ve strapped on goalie stuff that was frozen solid, like big blocks of ice. The equipment is not exactly state-of-the-art gear: helmets with flapping grills held on by a single, ancient screw, gloves with holes in the leather. No A-league guy would touch it, but hey, I’ll take it.
    Some of my best memories are from that park, playing out there with frozen hands until I couldn’t even see the puck. Then, when it was hopelessly dark, some Frey would shout, “ARE...YOU...READY... FOR...EXTREME HOCKEY?” which is just skating wildly and crashing into each other randomly in the dark. It’s awesome.
    Last year, Nick (Frey’s oldest brother) decided to ask his dad to put in floodlights.
    â€œYeah, and a hot-chocolate