The factory will make the mistake of calling the whole incident an “accident” in the paper tomorrow, but everyone in Hed will say that’s what it’s called over there. In Hed it is called what it was: “the fatal accident.” Soon there will be muttering around breakfast tables and in staffrooms that if it had been the woman from Beartown, the one who should have been standing at the machine, the one who gave birth to a healthy and happy baby and named him after one of Beartown Hockey’s worst hooligans… then the politicians would have turned the factory upside down in their hunt to find the guilty parties.

  Perhaps it isn’t true. It’s just so easy to agree with.

  * * *

  Hannah and Johnny are still at work today, so Tess picks up her youngest brother Ture from his friend’s house. At first he runs on nonstop about the differences between various superheroes, then he quickly moves on to the philosophical question “why do people think you’re naked if you’re only wearing socks but not naked if you’re wearing underpants, because you have the same amount of fabric on your body?” She’s too distracted by her phone to listen. Tobias and Ted meet up with them along the way and all four siblings start planning dinner. Their dad told Tobias that they could order pizza, which he’ll get told off for by their mother seeing as she’s already told Tess that they can’t, but Tess said that Ted had said that Tobias had said that Dad said that they could, their mother was too tired to argue about second- and third-hand sources, so now it’s going to be pizza. Sometimes it’s good that there are four of you, because you can use each other in diversionary maneuvers.

  “Are you listening, or what?” Tobias wonders, seeing as Tess is writing on her phone but doesn’t appear to be taking notes about his extremely specific order for extra cheese and deep-pan base but no olives and only red peppers and definitely no yellow, and so on and so on.

  “Mmm,” she says, but Ture manages to sneak a look at her screen and exclaims:

  “You’re sending a text! Who are you texting! Why are you sending love hearts?”

  Tobias’s and Ted’s eyes open wide, as if their sister’s lizard-skin had slipped out by mistake from beneath her human disguise.

  “Are YOU sending love hearts? Who the hell to?” Ted says.

  Tess, who isn’t exactly known for sending the most emotional text messages in the family, turns bright red from equal measures of embarrassment and fury.

  “If you want a long life you’ll mind your own business!”

  If Tobias and Ted had dared, they would have tried to snatch the phone from her hand, but even Tobias isn’t that careless with his health. Ture, on the other hand, isn’t old enough to have understood how angry his big sister can get when she actually gets angry. So he clambers up on her back via her legs and manages to catch a glimpse of the screen and blurts out:

  “Bobo! She’s sending love hearts to him, BOBO!”

  Ted manages to stop his little brother from being thrown into some bushes when Tess shrugs him off her, and Tobias jumps out of the way when it looks like she’s about to start kicking out at random. She’s hyperventilating and all three brothers back away with their hands in the air.

  “Sorry, sorry…,” Ture is whispering.

  “We were only joking…,” Tobias and Ted agree.

  Her phone vibrates in her hand. Once, twice, until she looks down and sees what Bobo has written. Even then, despite the fact that she’s so angry she could hide snakes in her brothers’ underwear drawers, she can’t help smiling.

  “Can you keep a secret?” she asks them.

  Of course they can’t. But they promise to try really, really hard. Because somewhere deep beneath all the mischief and misbehavior they love their big sister, and this is the first time they’ve seen her in love.

  58 Shots

  Bobo stops the campervan outside Tess’s family’s house and is so nervous that he manages to blow the horn when he’s trying to turn the engine off.

  “Nice, Bobo, really discreet!” Benji smiles, and Bobo blushes.

  The residential area is unusually quiet for a Sunday. The temperature is too low for anyone to be cutting grass, but no one has pulled out their snowblower yet, most people are indoors preparing for the elk hunt. Even the dogs seem to have taken the day off.

  Ted and Tobias are standing in the small yard next to the house, firing pucks on a practice ramp they built with their dad when they were little. Ted is playing as if he’s in the final of the World Championship, Tobias as if he’s too tired for this shit but can’t just let his younger brother win. Ted doesn’t even notice the campervan, but his big brother saw it in the distance from the corner of his eye. When Benji is the first to get out Tobias stiffens, stops holding the stick as a tool and starts holding it as a weapon.

  “What the hell is he doing here?” he splutters, first angry, then scared.

  He agreed to let his sister invite Bobo but she didn’t mention anyone else, especially not that psycho, Benjamin Ovich. Tobias always stands with the Hed supporters during all the A-team’s games, so he knows all too well who he is, he used to be known only as “Number 16” here in Hed, as if he were a genetic experiment. Everyone in Hed was delighted when he abandoned hockey and moved away two years ago, Tobias included, because they hated him the way hockey supporters can only hate psychopaths they’d have loved to have on their own team. The first thing Tobias thinks now is that this is a trap, that Benji is here to beat him to death, as revenge for the fight in Beartown’s ice rink yesterday.

  Benji is wearing just a T-shirt, he took his white shirt off after the funeral and the only top Bobo had in the car was obviously a green one with a bear on it, so that’s the first thing Tobias sees. He’s only fifteen and Benji is twenty, but Benji recognizes his body language, and how prepared he is for trouble. For a few moments man and boy evaluate each other, and even if Tobias is tall and muscular for his age, he grips his stick in a way that says he knows perfectly well what little chance he has.

  Then Bobo unfolds himself from the driver’s seat and Tess lets out a yelp of delight from the kitchen window in a way Tobias has never heard his sister do before. His grip on the stick relaxes slightly. Then Mumble and Amat get out of the side door of the campervan and only then does Ted look up with eyes radiant with giddy admiration.

  “Toby! Toby! That’s… that’s… do you see? It’s… he’s… Amat! It’s Amat!” he whispers, just loud enough for absolutely everyone to hear how embarrassing he is.

  Tobias breathes out in a long groan toward his brother and feels his heart rate slow down a little, but he doesn’t take his eyes off Benji. Benji just looks amused and lights a cigarette.

  Bobo pulls a large wicker picnic basket out of the back of the ramshackle campervan, then can’t get the door to close. This doesn’t appear to bother him. Tess comes out of the house as if she’s having to force her feet not to leave the ground and fly off with her. They do try their hardest, their very hardest, not to wrap themselves around each other’s necks in front of his friends and her brothers. She invites him into the kitchen and he immediately starts asking thousands of questions, about her and the house and the family. She isn’t used to that, she’s used to boys only wanting one thing, so in the end she asks what he’s got in the basket. He shows her. Pasta and meat and vegetables and stock and cream. She laughs and thinks that she was right after all, boys really do only want one thing.

  * * *

  They want to make dinner.

  * * *

  Of course Amat can see the way Ted is looking at him, like a child who’s caught sight of his idol. Usually Amat hates that, not long ago he’d have gone straight back to the car and demanded to be taken home at once, but he isn’t a superstar anymore. Arrogance is a luxury.

  So instead he asks: “Do you want to play?”

  He’ll persuade himself it was for the thirteen-year-old’s sake, but if he’s honest he just wants to play. Sooner that than talk.

  Ted can’t manage more than a nod, so they play, he and his idol. Mumble silently shows little Ture what to do when he stands on goal, because that’s the good thing about seven-year-olds, they don’t require any dialogue. Ted tries a wrist flick and Amat gently corrects the way he angles his knee and how to put more force into the shot. When he tries a shot himself, Ted, Ture, and Mumble just stand and stare.

  “How do you do that? That’s like a bolt of lightning!” Ted gasps.

  Amat can’t look him in the eye and mutters:

  “It’s just training. Your shot right now is better than mine was at your age.”

  Dear Lord, it’s a miracle that Ted’s chest doesn’t explode at that. He’s spent so many hours on this practice ramp that once a nosy neighbor on the street threatened to report Johnny to Social Services, because she was annoyed by the noise and because she thought the boy’s parents were forcing him to go outside and fire pucks at the wall all one June evening when it was pouring with rain. Hannah had to go around and explain that she WISHED Johnny could force the kid to do something, because then maybe it would force him to come inside and EAT! But Ted’s obsession comes from within. And nothing can be done about that.

  If that neighbor had looked out of her window now perhaps she would have changed her mind, because one day she’ll boast about who her neighbor was. Ted and Amat are laughing loudly as they challenge each other. Amat wins most rounds, but when Ted wins one he races around the yard with his arms in the air and Ture on his back, as if he’s won the whole world. Amat gives Ted a high five when he comes back. Maybe one day the two of them will play in the NHL together.

  In the kitchen Tess and Bobo are giggling and a love story begins. Out here others begin. None of them are such a bad idea.

  * * *

  While the others are firing off shots on the practice area, Benji leans against the campervan and lights his second cigarette in five minutes.

  “Are you going to hit me with that stick, then? Because if you’re not, you might as well put it down, or I won’t stop worrying that you’re going to poke yourself in the eye,” he calls across to Tobias in a tone that isn’t remotely unfriendly.

  The fifteen-year-old realizes he’s still holding the stick like a weapon in his hands and quickly lowers it and looks down apologetically.

  “Sorry. Sorry. There’s just so much trouble with people from Beartown recently. When you got out of the car with that top on I just thought… shit, here we go…”

  “I feel too sick to fight,” Benji confesses.

  “Hungover?” Tobias wonders tentatively, because Benji is sweating even though he’s standing there in just a T-shirt when the temperature is below freezing.

  “I don’t have a problem fighting when I’m hungover. Only when I’m sober,” Benji chuckles. He hasn’t had a drink since he got home to Beartown and is starting to feel the whole of his body cry out in protest.

  As he says this, Tess’s laughter rings out through the kitchen window and Tobias raises his head in surprise like a meerkat emerging from a hole.

  “Is my sister LAUGHING?”

  “Doesn’t she normally do that?” Benji wonders.

  “Only when Ted or I hurt ourselves.”

  When Tess bursts into another fit of giggling Benji smiles:

  “I think maybe Bobo has just told her that he spends a lot of time thinking about how freezers are like time machines. You can choose whether to laugh with him or at him, but you can’t help laughing.”

  “Time machines?” Tobias repeats.

  Benji shakes his head in resignation.

  “Forget it. It’s far too complicated. How old’s your brother?”

  He nods over at Ted.

  “Two years younger. Thirteen,” Tobias replies.

  “THIRTEEN? What do you feed him? Rottweilers? He’s the size of a bloody house!”

  Tobias nods proudly.

  “He’s hot shit at hockey. He’s gonna be better than Amat.”

  “Better than his big brother, then?” Benji teases, and is taken aback when Tobias replies instantly:

  “He already is. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

  Benji taps the ash from his cigarette and almost looks like he wants to pat the boy on the shoulder.

  “You should play for Zackell, our trainer over in Beartown.”

  “Ted should be playing for her, not me.”

  “No, you should be. She likes players who know their own limitations.”

  Tobias realizes this is a compliment, he’s just too much of a Beartown-hater and too much of a fifteen-year-old to be able to accept it.

  “Shame your team’s full of sons of bitches and faggots!” he blurts out from pure instinct, then feels like knocking every last tooth out of his own mouth afterward, assuming Benji doesn’t do it for him.

  But Benji’s expression barely changes as he replies:

  “We aren’t sons of bitches. But you might be right about the rest.”

  “Sorry… I didn’t mean that,” Tobias mumbles awkwardly.

  Two years ago, when everyone in both Beartown and Hed had just found out what Benji was, Tobias was standing among the Hed supporters when the teams met. He remembers what they screamed at Benji. The way they threw dildos onto the ice. It had been so easy for Tobias and all the others to explain it away afterward, that’s just what hockey is like, you look for your opponent’s weakest point, it’s never really personal. Not racist, not sexist, not homophobic. You’re just trying to win. But that explanation feels much thinner now that the man he was screaming at is standing in front of him. The fifteen-year-old feels himself shrinking with shame. Benji, however, just grins and replies:

  “You’re sons of bitches and faggots too. You just don’t know it yet.”

  Tobias laughs in relief, grateful that he still has all his teeth left when he plucks up courage to ask:

  “Is it true that you knocked down four players on the other team once?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Dad. I think you’re the only Beartown player he’s ever liked. But he’d never admit it.”

  Benji lights another cigarette.

  “It was probably only three. And none of them knew how to fight on the ice, so it doesn’t really count.”

  “Can you teach me how to do that? How to fight on the ice?”

  Benji smokes his cigarette, and for a few moments he hates himself for coming back to the forest where this is all he is. Someone capable of violence. Someone to fear.

  “So you think your brother can go as far as Amat? What about you, how far can you go?” he asks, to avoid having to answer Tobias’s question.

  “Not that far. Hed’s A-team, maybe, unless they get promoted, because then there wouldn’t be room for me. And if they don’t, you know, shut down the whole club.”

  “Why wouldn’t you be able get further than that?”

  “Because I’m not like Ted. I’m like you.”

  “Like me?”

  Tobias’s neck flushes from the sudden rush of blood.

  “Not like… gay, I mean, I’m not… like that. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I mean… as a player. I don’t want hockey enough to become as good as it demands. I don’t live for it. Not like Ted.”

  Benji laughs, and the smoke catches in his throat.

  “Is that what you think it was like for me?”

  Tobias nods, still feeling embarrassed, but with total conviction.

  “If it wasn’t, then you’d still be playing. No matter what we yelled at you from the stands. If you’d really loved hockey, nothing would have stopped you.”

  Benji rolls his eyes, stubs his cigarette out, and starts patting his pockets to find more.

  “Bloody hell. Zackell really would have loved you…”

  Tobias tries to take this as a compliment, he really does.

  In the kitchen Bobo is making dinner and asking questions, because his mother taught him that those are the two best ways of courting a girl: “Because girls aren’t used to either of them.” Bobo knows he doesn’t have much else to offer Tess, so he’s hoping it will be enough. It is.

  When Tess’s laughter reaches across the yard again, Tobias stares at Benji’s face for a long time, still slightly wary, then he asks very seriously:

  “Is he okay? That Bobo? I know he’s your friend. But is he… an okay guy?”

  Benji has big sisters too, so he understands the question. So he replies:

  “You could probably find better, but you could definitely find a hell of a lot who are worse. He’s the kindest, most loyal person I know. But seriously? What your sister sees in him, God only knows!”

  Tobias thinks for a long, long time before he looks down and answers:

  “She can probably see that he’s friendly.”

  “Is that good?” Benji asks honestly.

  Breathing through his nose, Tobias pokes around his shoelaces with the stick.