The Understatement of the Year by Sarina Bowen Page A

walking past that couch gave me a sick feeling. I craved him still. And I hated myself for it.
    I brought the video game console up into my bedroom. Only it wasn’t any fun to play without him.
    Then, a few months after Rikker left, hockey season came around again. I tried out for the high school varsity team and made it. Still, every time I laced up my skates, I thought of him. I wondered where he was, and whether he was playing hockey on some team in Vermont.
    In an attempt to flush Rikker out of my head, I started dating girls, and that went well for me. A lot of the other sophomore guys were too shy. They liked girls a lot. But there was too much at stake, so they were afraid to ask them out. Or they acted like morons when they got their big chance.
    But I was fearless. Getting shot down by a girl wasn’t even in the top fifty on the list of things that scared me. So I asked the prettiest girl in my class to the homecoming dance. And that went so well that I asked another one to the movies the following week.
    Dating girls? It was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, as my dad liked to say.
    But I still missed Rikker like crazy. Which was stupid. Because even after I blew my chance to visit him in the hospital he was always just a phone call away. It’s just that I couldn’t afford that phone call. The price was too high. Not only was I afraid to face him after I’d been such a coward in that alley, I was afraid to tell him how I really felt. That it was too fucking dangerous to be friends anymore. Because he made me want things that were sick .
    Five years is a long time. Eventually, hockey stopped reminding me of Rikker. I kept at it, even as the game changed. Varsity hockey — and then college hockey — was a bigger, more physical game than we’d played together in the bantam league. Hockey was the place I went to get out all the anger. Slamming my opponents into the boards? Nobody ever called that “sick.” When I did it right, the crowd stood up and cheered.
    The world is cracked. It really is.
    And now I was cracking, too. Because Rikker had walked back into my life, and he did it by telling the whole frickin’ team that he was gay . It was the single ballsiest thing I’d ever seen a guy do. Rikker’s appearance at Harkness was like my own personal horror film come to life. I was afraid of what he’d reveal about me. I was afraid of what he might say to my face. I was pants-shitting scared, all the time.
    I was afraid for Rikker, too. He didn’t seem to understand the risks. I’d stared hatred in the face, and I was never going to forget the look of its snarl.
    Over the last five years, I built and polished a set of personal deflector shields that I engaged every time I spoke to a really attractive man. I was careful not to stare, and I knew how to affect the kind of body language that conveyed only polite interest.
    But Rikker was hell on my deflector shields. When he was around, nothing worked right. My eyes went where they weren’t supposed to go, and I felt the thrum of expectation just from breathing the same air that he did. Even now, I tried not to keep tabs on him as he crossed the room with Trevi.
    It turns out that trying to ignore somebody is about the most distracting, exhausting thing in the world. Whenever Rikker walked into a room, I felt like I’d been stripped of all my skin.
    “Are you up for one more set of bench press?” Smitty asked me.
    “Sure,” I said automatically. Hell, I was up for ten more sets. Maybe I could finally get tired enough to sleep all the way through the night.
    Yeah. Not likely.

 
     
     
     
     
    — November —

    Pinching : when a defenseman leaves his typical rearward position to push forward into the offensive zone.
     
    — Rikker
    We were on a bus heading to Boston when I got a text from Skippy, my ex-boyfriend. For a couple of minutes, I ignored it. There were rules I’d made for myself with regard to him. The first rule was: Never text Skippy