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sound of it.” Keelor’s hand clapped my shoulder. “You didn’t hear this from me, right? Just sit back and let it happen.” Keelor laughed and leaned against his locker. “You look like you’re in shock, man.” His eyebrows knit together. “Shit, I hope she doesn’t change her mind now. That’d really be a drag.”
    “Yeah.” I didn’t say it so much as breathe it. Yeah. This is exactly what I meant about drifting. Things happen on their own sometimes, without a push from anybody. Answers change and then change again. Maybe this time I’d be on the right side of that. Maybe the perfect summer would start at that party: Dani in her belly-button ring, her long blond hair fanned behind her back, doing what I’d been waiting for. I leaned against the locker next to Keelor’s and beamed at him, feeling like mid-July sun, about sixty-two degrees from numb.

 
    four
    Dani and I started spending some more time together after the party, nothing official—a few solo visits to her place and one trip to the movies. You could say it was partly pleasure and partly obligation. The balance seemed all right with the both of us. She wasn’t the kind of person to start laying down rules as soon as things got sexual. The only thing she had to know was that I wasn’t fooling around with anyone else. Hanging out with her every now and then was a good idea too. I didn’t want her thinking I was abusing our friendship.
    Before you start getting the wrong idea, I better make it clear that we never slept together. Other sexual activities went on, but we never did the deed. Sometimes I wondered if I really wanted to. I was a little worried that the rules would change, close in on me until we were practically engaged. I didn’t want Dani becoming friends with Holland and my mom, picking out clothes for me, and calling me to complain about her summer job. I’d probably have been more excited about the idea of sleeping together if there was a guarantee against that scenario. That went along with my other worry, which was that right afterwards I’d want to do someone else, one of the long-legged girls with windblown hair that came into Sports 2 Go looking for cross-trainers. I hadn’t made up my mind about that, but I didn’t want to go messing it up with Dani if that turned out to be the case. Remaining relatively unattached seemed like the answer to everything.
    “You don’t want the girlfriend,” Nathan said over the phone one night. “You just want the sex.” It sounded like an accusation, but Nathan wasn’t usually judgmental.
    “I don’t know what I want,” I told him. “Maybe I’m not in a hurry to find out.”
    “Oh, please,” Nathan said. “Of course you’re in a hurry. You’re just like Keelor. The two of you are natural predators.”
    Coming from Nathan, that wasn’t a compliment. The three of us were old friends. Emphasis on the word old. They only saw each other in my presence now. I was the glue holding us together, or pretending to anyway. I don’t know why we continued with the charade, unless it was for my sake. I was pretty sentimental about the three of us; we’d celebrated so many wins together and complained about careless plays that cost us, but we weren’t just about hockey. I could count on them and they could count on me.
    Keelor was great during my parents’ split—a constant distraction, never letting me sit around to mope about Dad’s sudden departure. At one point Mom had even asked me to stop spending so much time at Keelor’s because “we need to take a little time to adjust to this as a family.” She’d really pissed me off with that. Why couldn’t she realize that what I was doing was helping me? Her words certainly didn’t help. All they meant was the three of us sitting around realizing we were alone. I spent a lot of time on the phone and IMing Nathan, complaining about those words. He was easier to talk to than Keelor.
    The three of us had our ups and downs, like