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others … jerkface.” She looks so proud of herself, I can’t help myself. I burst out laughing. What is this, the playground?
    “ ‘Jerkface’? What are you, twelve?” I’m half laughing, half shouting at her. I see the girl ball her hands up, but I know she won’t do anything. She’d be too afraid to mess up her outfit. I could totally take her.
    A stuffy bellhop—he must be the big cheese, because he’s wearing a crisp black suit—interrupts us and starts ordering us around, snapping his fingers to get tags on our bags and directing us to our rooms.
    When Miss Priss has finally made her exit, I slowly start to calm down. Jeffrey, a skinny, freckled, trembling bellhop who I could probably bench, shuffles closer to me.
    “Your name, miss?”
    “Sloane,” I reply. “Sloane Jacobs.”
    “Okay, Miss Jacobs, I’ll put these tags on your bags and have them sent up to your room,” he says. “You can head through the doors to check in.”
    I wait a few beats just to make sure Miss Priss has had time to clear out and head up to her room—I have no desire to see her again. Then I head into the hotel and across the vast lobby floor. But with each step I feel a pain in my knee, just below the kneecap, zapping up the inside of my leg. By the time I’m at the door I’m practically limping. I know that pain. I’ve felt it after long workouts and particularly rough games, and even sometimes when it rains. It’s left over from a nasty hit I took last season. Great. I’ll have to take my delicious nap wearing my massive knee brace.
    While the woman behind the counter types away in her computer to check me in, I shift my weight to my good leg and look around. An enormous crystal chandelier hangs over my head, and water rushes down the black stone wall behind the desk in some kind of silent water feature. Looks like I’m in for one night of peace and happiness before moving into the dorm at hockey camp and subsequently getting exposed for the big athletic fraud that I am, then slinking back to Philly for a future as a waitress with an anger management problem.
    I know Coach Butler would be pissed if he knew that within an hour of being on Canadian soil, I nearly got into a fistfight with some pretty princess. There would be no hockey camp in my future then. Probably just jail. But maybe that would be better?
    My room is on the fifth floor, and it is tiny. Like, tiny . It’s actually about the size of my room back home, only my bedroom doesn’t have a bathroom inside it . One whole wall is a window looking out onto the city, while the opposite wall makes up the sliding-glass door of a blue-tiled shower. The bedside table is glowing white and oddly shaped, and when I get closer I realize that the cover slides off to reveal the sink.
    Despite the fact that it’s the size and shape of a studio apartment in a tenement slum, the place still looks pretty amazing. Everything is white and blue, and the light shining from hidden fixtures makes it all look like I’m in a spa on a spaceship. The bed takes up most of the space, and just like I expected, it’s crisp, white, and fluffy.
    “Nap!” I cry out loud, then dive into bed, forgetting my knee until even the soft landing of my heaven-sent bed sends a shooting pain up my leg. “Ugh,” I grumble into the comforter. “Find brace, then nap.”
    I roll over onto my back and pull my jeans up over my knee, which is unfortunately swelling like a water balloon and sporting the beginnings of an ugly purple bruise. Forget the knee brace, I need to wrap and ice this thing before it swells too big to get my pants on.
    I gingerly climb out of bed, then hop over to the dresser, where I grab the blue Lucite ice bucket, then limp into the hall. I look left, then right, but I don’t see anything providing any direction toward an ice machine. I choose left, away from the elevators, and hobble down the plush carpet.
    I spot an alcove at the end of the hall and double my pace so I