Matteo is standing in the darkness among the trees at the edge of the parking lot at the ice rink. He puts one foot down carefully on a frozen puddle and listens to the crack as the ice breaks. He wonders if the lake has started to freeze yet. When it does, it’s a bigger day than Christmas for the town’s hockey guys. There have been winters when even Matteo is glad when that happens, because then they get so absorbed in their game that they even forget to be bullies for a while. But sadly that never lasts for long.

  Ruth always said: “Just get through these years! Just survive this town! Then you’ll be free. We’ll head out into the world, you and me, okay? Just make yourself invisible at school and stay away from the hockey guys.” But that isn’t so easy when the town is full of them. At around this time of year three years ago, when Matteo was eleven, he was riding his bike down by the lake when he got caught by some of the older boys from school. At first they tricked him into thinking he could join in, it’s always so easy and so cruel, then they persuaded him to go out onto the ice to see if it was strong enough. “Farther out! Farther out!” they yelled, encouraging him at first, but soon threatening instead. “Keep going, or we’ll break your legs when you come back!”

  Eventually Matteo was so far out that when the ice started to creak he knew that if he started running it would be a death sentence, all his weight concentrated on one foot would send him straight down into the cold and darkness and he’d never get back out again. He’s had hundreds of nightmares about that since then: seeing the light but being trapped, his little fists banging against the ice from below, trying in vain to find the hole, slowly drowning. So he did the only thing an eleven-year-old could think of, he lay down on his stomach and tried to spread his weight as evenly as he could. He had planned to crawl back toward land, but didn’t dare. So he just lay there and wept.

  He doesn’t know if the boys on the shore regretted what they’d done then. After all, everything always began as a joke for those bastards, that was the excuse their parents always made afterward. It was a boyish prank. You know what children are like. It was just a bit of fun. Matteo couldn’t hear if they were laughing or screaming because he was crying too hard out there with his lips pressed to the ice. It took a roar for him to react:

  “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”

  Carefully, carefully Matteo raised his trembling chin and looked toward land. Two teenagers his sister’s age had stopped their moped up on the road and were now on their way down the slope. The boys ran off in all directions in horror, one of the teenagers was about to chase after them, fists raised, but the other one stopped him and pointed at Matteo. The ice creaked and Matteo screamed for the first time. The teenagers looked around in desperation for something to use as a rope, and when they couldn’t find anything they took their jackets and tops off and tied them together. The lighter of them snaked out as close to Matteo as he could, tossed the improvised rope to him, and slowly, slowly pulled the child to safety.

  Matteo can hardly remember what they said to him, his teeth were chattering too much, the roaring in his ears was too loud. But they asked where he lived and he managed to point, one of the teenagers rode his bicycle and the other let him ride on the moped. His parents were away doing more of their endless charity work with the church so only Ruth was home. She came rushing out of the house when she saw them and smothered Matteo in hugs before she asked the teenagers what had happened and they told her. Matteo didn’t know that the teenagers were from Hed, or that the red jackets they were wearing came from the hockey team there. One of them held his hand out to Ruth and introduced him-self.

  * * *

  That was how she met her murderers.

  72 Campers

  All the grown-ups go home first. They know that the magic in an ice rink full of laughing youngsters can be lost if another generation gets a little too close, like treasure that turns to ash if you open the chest. Maya, Ana, and Bobo are waiting on their own out in the parking lot for Benji, Amat, Mumble, and Big City to get changed and join them. Sune’s dog is sniffing around their feet, used to thinking of this as its territory since it was a puppy. Since Sune retired it’s actually spent so much time in the rink that it was even allowed to be in the last official A-team photograph. Mumble is playing with it, all animals love him, possibly because they recognize that he can’t make himself understood either, despite wanting to.

  “Do you want a lift home, then?” Bobo asks, but Mumble shakes his head and walks off to the bus stop.

  “Training tomorrow? Early!” Amat calls out.

  Mumble nods silently but with a smile that would have made any words redundant. They go their separate ways. Bobo drives Amat’s bag to the Hollow, then he drives straight home to call Tess. Amat runs. He’ll sleep soundly tonight, and wake up ravenous in the morning.

  “How about you? Do you need a lift?” Benji asks nonchalantly, glancing at Big City.

  “No… no…,” Big City replies evasively.

  “Do you need anything else? I can help out with all sorts of things!” Benji grins with a shameless wink.

  Big City glances at Maya and says, embarrassed:

  “I… I might need somewhere to live. It doesn’t feel like Peter wants to have me living there. I mean, it’s great that he offered, but it doesn’t really feel right. I think he locked my room from the outside last night…”

  His cheeks are red. It could be embarrassing to try to discuss this here with Maya standing right next to him. Fortunately Ana is there to guarantee that it’s embarrassing:

  “He’s just worried Maya’s going to sneak into your room at night and jump on you!”

  “Ana, you are SUCH a…,” Maya hisses, and Ana dances away laughing from her attempts to hit her.

  “Really? Maya Andersson wants to fight? Has your new best friend taught you how to do that, or what? Come on, then! Hit me as hard as you can!” she teases, with the calm confidence of a martial arts fighter, and of course Maya could have spent ten years trying to hit her without ever getting close.

  Big City looks at them, slightly shocked, and Benji looks at him with interest.

  “I’ve got a campervan,” he says.

  “Sorry?” Big City exclaims.

  “A campervan. If you need somewhere to live.”

  “I mean… seriously?”

  “I meeean… seeeeriously?” Benji repeats, mimicking his accent.

  Big City scrapes the sole of his shoe on the snow and pulls the jacket he borrowed from Peter tighter around him.

  “You mean you’ve got a campervan that people… like… go camping in?”

  Benji laughs so hard that he’s shaking.

  “I’m going to take a wild guess and say that you’ve never been camping, then, Big City?”

  “ARE YOU GOING CAMPING? WE’LL COME!” Ana calls out quickly from a few yards away, where she is easily fending off a wildly flailing Maya with one hand as if she were a small child.

  “It’s below freezing,” Big City points out.

  “And?” Ana asks, not understanding.

  “I’ve got weed and beer too,” Benji informs them.

  * * *

  So they go camping.

  * * *

  Benji maneuvers the campervan along barely passable forest tracks, and miraculously manages to drive all the way to the water’s edge without toppling the van, even if he came damn close, and parks it so they can see all the way to Maya and Ana’s island from there. It used to be Kevin and Benji’s, two boys’ most secret place in the universe and their haven each summer, but those summers are long since gone and when Kevin moved away, Benji passed the island on to the girls. They’re women now. Maya rests the tips of her fingers on Benji’s shoulders, very briefly, and whispers:

  “It’s very romantic here, so I’m going to say straight off that if you bring my future husband here and try to sleep with him, I’ll kill you.”

  Benji roars with laughter. He and Ana try to light a fire together until Ana threatens Benji with a big stick for doing it wrong, so then she does it on her own. There are fallen trees here and there, victims of the storm that passed through like a bandit on the run, but the gashes and wounds in the landscape are slowly being covered by snow and forgetfulness now. By spring, nature will have suppressed the impact of the winds that roared through last week, just like the people will. The youngsters sit huddled up in sleeping bags in front of the flames, drinking beer and smoking weed, looking at the stars and drifting into the fog. It’s a good night, one of the very best, the sort you stay awake almost all the way through because you’re clinging to a sense of almost calm in your soul. As if you’ve almost found the answers to almost everything. Tomorrow everything will be gone again, of course, but you know that. That’s why you don’t want to go to sleep. Eventually though Maya starts yawning and struggles to her feet from her folding chair in her sleeping bag and slurs:

  “Bloody hell. It’s been a long time since I’ve been this drunk. I have to see. No I have to SEE. No I have to seeeee… SCREW IT YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!”

  The others laugh so hard their cheeks hurt.

  “Go and SLEEP, you drunk, God, your new best friend down there at music college must be really shit at drinking if you’ve got this little stamina!” Ana giggles.

  “What new best friend?” Benji wonders.

  “The one Maya has abandoned me for!” Ana nods, so drunk that her pupils are in different zip codes.

  “Well, I’m going to sleep with her future husband just for that!” Benji assures her, and he and Ana fail spectacularly to high-five each other.

  Maya promises to tell them both to go to hell properly tomorrow morning when she’s sober and can say the words. She’s asleep before her head hits the pillow inside the campervan. Ana stays outside for a while so she can say that Maya collapsed first, then she tells the boys politely but solemnly to go to hell, and goes in and falls asleep back-to-back with her best friend.

  Benji and Big City stay where they are, Benji looks at him and he looks at the sky.

  “Are you going to do what all the tourists do now and say that you’ve never seen so many stars before?” Benji teases.

  “We have stars where I come from too,” Big City smiles.

  Benji sounds almost insulted:

  “Not as good as ours. Just like the hockey players.”

  That’s a lie, of course, he noticed Big City’s wrist movements and passes today and knows precisely how good he is. Big City looks him in the eye and knows that he knows, so he doesn’t need to say anything, and instead asks thoughtfully:

  “I looked Peter up online, he was the team captain of Beartown twenty years ago, right? They almost won the championship with him?”

  Benji takes some deep drags with his eyes closed.

  “That’s Beartown, right there. Almost the best, almost all the time.”

  Big City rubs his fingers as if he were spinning invisible wedding rings on them.

  “He said something, Peter, when he and Zackell came down to watch me train. I asked why he was there when he doesn’t even work for the club anymore, and he said something like… he wanted to be good. That hockey was his way to make the world better.”

  “He’s special,” Benji says, and the way he says it contains all the best and worst of a person.

  Big City takes a couple of slow drags and replies:

  “It must be pretty damn special to… you know… be part of a team like that. One that shocks everyone. It must be a real brotherhood, you know? The sort that makes everyone better than their best? Like those dynasties in the NHL… they never last… they’re only invincible for a few years before they all get too old and the team gets sold off. I wonder if you actually know how special it is when you’re right in the middle of it?”

  Benji half opens his eyes and looks at him, lit up by nothing but the dancing fire.

  “Is that why you’re here? To become special?”

  Big City smiles sheepishly.

  “Maybe.”

  Benji looks at him for a long time, then the question comes so fast and so disarmingly that it takes Big City by surprise and he chokes on the smoke.

  “How many concussions have you had?”

  “Wh-why… why are you asking that?” Big City coughs.

  Benji shrugs his shoulders calmly.

  “When we played today you were brilliant when I went for the puck, I didn’t stand a chance. But when I went for your body you shied away every time. I played with a guy once, he was brilliant too, but he got like that for a while when we were fourteen and he’d had a concussion. He jumped away from every collision for several months.”

  Big City finishes coughing and puts a couple of branches on the fire, burning himself in the process of course, then mumbles:

  “Was it that Kevin Erdahl?”

  Benji looks surprised, for the first time all evening.

  “How did you know that?”

  It’s Big City’s turn to shrug his shoulders:

  “Dad used to keep an eye on all the best players in the country when we were that age. He pinned a list on my wall. I actually saw you play once, Dad drove four hours to a game just to show me who I was up against. I remember being insanely jealous of Kevin.”

  “He was ridiculously good.”

  “Yes. But that wasn’t why. I was jealous because he had you. Nobody dared touch him.”

  Benji says nothing for several minutes. Then he just repeats:

  “How many concussions?”

  Big City sighs.

  “Six. The first when I was twelve, the most recent one last year. I got cross-checked in the back and flew into the boards. The guy got two minutes, I was out for nine weeks. I spent the first three days doing nothing but throwing up, I couldn’t think, I just wanted to kill myself. I couldn’t even be outside the house because the sun sort of cut into my head, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever experienced, I lost my memory of that whole weekend. I still get migraines. I have ringing in my ears, it never stops. Sometimes it’s just completely dark in here. I saw a guy in a game on TV get a similar blow, and you know what the commentator said? ‘That’s the recipient’s responsibility, he needs to keep his head up!’ ”

  He taps his temple. Benji can see the pain in his eyes and nods.

  “Yes. I read about that NHL player whose personality changed, had all sorts of trouble. Permanent brain damage, but no one knew that until he died and they did an autopsy…”

  Big City closes his eyes.

  “When I got back to the team the coach wanted me to play more on the body, in front of goal, it was all ‘fighting’ this and ‘fighting’ that. He was obsessed with winning the physical game, you know, ‘own the boards’ and all that crap…”

  “ ‘Eat the puck!’ ‘Chew barbed wire!’ ” Benji mimics, because he’s come across that sort of coach a million times.

  “Exactly,” Big City laughs bitterly.

  “What happened then?”

  “I didn’t dare. And he saw that. I no longer fit into his system. So he benched me for not having ‘a hard head,’ and when I got annoyed he went to the club and said I had ‘disciplinary problems.’ ”

  “And did you?”

  “That was probably the only club where I didn’t have disciplinary problems. I was pretty immature for years, a cocky little shit, but I really did like that club… I wanted it to work. But I can’t play the way those coaches want anymore…”

  “And here?”

  Big City breathes slowly through his nose.

  “That Zackell seems… different.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Benji smiles.

  “So maybe she’ll let me play differently?”

  “All I can say about her is that she probably already knows crap about you that you don’t know yourself yet. Sometimes that’s a good thing,” Benji declares.

  “And when it isn’t good?”

  “Most people don’t want to know the truth about themselves.”

  Big City takes a while to digest this. Opens one last beer.

  “I like Peter. I expected him to be a stuck-up asshole like all the other old pros, but he was…”

  “Special?”

  “This whole town is special. Is it the inbreeding or something?” Big City laughs.

  “And the weed,” Benji coughs.

  The pair of them laugh for a long time, alone beneath the stars. One single really good night.

  “How good was he? Peter?” Big City asks after a while.

  Benji answers at once:

  “He was the best. Seriously, though… he was obsessed. The stories about how he used to train are insane. When you’re little you think things like that are a myth, you know, but I’ve seen old recordings and it was like nothing I’ve ever seen. He looked so damn slow, but no one got past him. No one!”

  “As if he could slow down time. I noticed that when Zackell got me to play against him.”

  Benji nods seriously.

  “Everyone thinks it was talent, but it was just practice. And obsession. It was the only thing he had in his life. How good do you think you could have been by now if you’d been like him?”

  “What makes you think I’m not?” Big City smiles.

  “You’ve got a game this weekend and you’re sitting here smoking weed and drinking beer in a campervan in the forest,” Benji points out.

  Big City laughs, both relieved and weighed down.

  “I couldn’t have been as good as Amat, anyway. He’s extreme. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone faster. He can get to the NHL. But me? No. Dad always thought I could be but he doesn’t understand what it takes. You need to have something you’re truly exceptional at, and I’m just… good. Dad could see I was the best in my little bubble, you know, there’s someone like Amat in every little town. And in the NHL? They play one hundred games a year over there… I mean, the sacrifice that takes! Nothing but hockey, all day long, all year round. I don’t think I could handle that. Dad’s crazy, you know, he’d have chopped off his arm for just one season in the NHL. He had the desire but not the talent, and maybe I’ve got the talent but not the desire…”