The Cocky Hockey Captain

Chapter 14 ● Definitely Boy Trouble

Given that I didn't have my own kitchen to make arepas with, I had to spend a lot of time at the diner. Given that it was the only restaurant in town, it meant I had to see Lena Lee a lot.

I expected shit to get really awkward. I, for one, was feeling awkward as hell about the whole ordeal. It then came as a shock a few days later when I was grabbing a quick dinner in a corner that she slid to a seat in front of me. I looked up like a deer caught in the headlights in the middle of taking a spoonful of tomato soup to my now unresponsive mouth.

"Hi," she said, folding her hands on the table. "How are you?"

I swallowed and when there was no taste in my mouth I realized it was because I hadn't taken the spoon into it. So I did, just to gain some extra time as I savored the soup.

"Hi."

She looked around, to make sure there were no eavesdroppers. Once confirmed that the coast was clear, she leaned closer to me and said, "I just wanted to let you know that your secret is safe with me and that, if you want, we can be friends."

I set the spoon down, looking at the red splotch it made against the napkin. I desperately wanted to say yes. One way or another I hadn't had a lot of girl friends before, even while I was in boarding school in Trinity. I'd been one of them, ridiculously rich and entitled, but I'd never felt like I belonged. Maybe it was the fact that I was latina, or maybe it was the fact that despite my privileges I had gone through trauma the likes of which they'd been fortunate to never experience. It had scarred me. It tainted every relationship I had with everybody. They all knew I was that one girl whose family had ran from their home country because of tragedy.

My brother hadn't had that much trouble being a part of his new environment. He was brighter. He hadn't seen what I'd seen. And he was male and had the overbearing confidence to back it up. He was always surrounded with girls who wanted very specific things out of him, and not many of them had cared enough to peel back the deeper layers of him. The only two girls who were not desperate to jump his bones were one, the girlfriend of his best friend and another girl who was younger than them, my age, but had stayed behind in Trinity. She was on the shy side and I was on the closed off side, and that combination didn't make for a lot of conversations.

So, despite the fact that I knew this couldn't go well, what with one lie on top of another, I found a smile stretching across my face.

"I'd like that," I said.

Lena Lee gave me a wink. "So, you know, if you have boy trouble you can always come to me."

I might have blushed a little at that. I sincerely hoped I didn't have any boy trouble here.

The exchange went to the back of my mind for the next week as we practiced relentlessly for the first game of the season. October had started without any change in temperature. It was still cold as fuck. What it did bring was a new intensity to everybody around me that infected me with a bad case of resting bitch face. Dad had grown impatient with the house restorations, at long last, and he'd taken it as his new role to oversee the repairs in person. I had to avoid Main Street after that in case he saw me hauling hockey equipment up and down. It made my commute to and from school longer. Then there was Coach Martel riding our asses so hard that my body had gone past the limits of pain and found the new utopia where it felt nothing.

And then there were the boys.

They all seemed to have become headless chicken, because it turned out that the first game of the season was against the Eagles of East Pembroke High at their home turf.

I had since learned a few key facts. For example, the rivalry between the Bears and the Eagles went as far back as the '60s, which meant that every goddamn male who was alive in between and around the two towns had contributed one way or another to the bad blood. Another interesting aspect was that East Pembroke was a co-ed school, and my fellow Bears were extremely jealous of that. But then they told me that there were enough Pembroke girls who liked the Bears boys as to have made a fan club, so not all sucked on that front.