Top Ten by Katie Cotugno
Still, his mom had a point: in a lot of ways Ryan owed it to her to take all her years of sacrifices and make sure they were worth it. He’d always known that hockey was an expensive sport to play. His gear mostly came from a place up in Orange that specialized in secondhand athletic equipment, but he knew there were times she’d needed something and hadn’t gotten it because he’d grown out of his skates and they didn’t have the right size at the consignment place. She’d gotten up early and driven him all over creation and never complained about it, because it was an investment.
It was Ryan’s job to make sure she got a return.
“Yeah, definitely,” he said now, hugging her one more time before gently extricating himself, glancing at the pile of envelopes next to the refrigerator before heading down the hallway to his room. “Consider it done.”
GABBY
Gabby got home from school and found her mom sitting in her tiny office off the living room, clicking through the accounting files on her computer. A giant iron horse’s head was propped in a chair beside her.
“That’s for a client, right?” Gabby asked, eyeing it suspiciously. Her mom was an interior designer; she’d worked for a famous lady in Greenwich until Gabby was in fourth grade, when she’d started her own business. Gabby’s dad had always said she should write a book, and this winter she was actually doing it, the desk in the office heaped with even more fabric swatches and mood boards than usual. “Not for us?”
“What, you don’t like it?” Her mom grinned. “I found it at a church sale down in Hartsdale,” she said, swiveling around and offering Gabby the last of the iced tea she’d been drinking. “Isn’t it the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen?”
“It’s kind of threatening,” Gabby agreed.
“It’s heavy as anything, too. I had to have one of the priests help me carry it to my car. Now I have to figure out how to ship it to the client in Wisconsin. I might buy it a seat on a Greyhound bus.” She sat back in her chair, clearly delighted with herself. “How was Shay, hm? She get all her applications in?”
“Uh-huh,” Gabby reported, slurping the last of the tea and chewing on the straw a bit. Shay was applying to colleges: Columbia and the New School and Purchase, plus a couple of conservatory programs Gabby was secretly hoping she didn’t get into because they were so impossibly far away. “She sent the last one yesterday.”
“Good for her. That’ll be you next year,” her mom pointed out. “Can you believe it? Crazy to think about, right?”
Gabby nodded, rattling the ice in the plastic cup. “Yup.” The truth was that college might as well have been parachuting into the Grand Canyon or climbing Mount Everest: something ridiculous and far-fetched that required a lot of special equipment, something for people who were far braver than her. It wasn’t that she didn’t think she could get in. That part would be easy. But the actual going, the moving, the idea of being surrounded by total strangers twenty-four hours a day—it gave Gabby vague waves of nausea to think about it, so mostly she didn’t.
If she’d turned faintly green, her mom didn’t seem to notice. “I ought to start dinner,” she said, getting up and motioning for Gabby to follow her into the kitchen. “Hey, this reminds me,” she said, opening the fridge, “I saw Luann at Stop & Shop on my way back from the church sale. It got me thinking, everything okay with Ryan?”
That got Gabby’s attention. “Yeah,” she said, leaning against the kitchen doorway. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know.” Her mom set a shrink-wrapped package of chicken on the counter. “Just curious. We just haven’t seen a whole lot of him lately, I guess.”
Gabby shrugged. She and Ryan had been hanging out a little less since she’d started dating Shay the previous spring, but that was normal, wasn’t it? All friendships went through stuff like that. “Hockey, I guess,” she said, although hockey had never kept them from seeing each other before. “He’s busy.”
Gabby’s mom nodded, didn’t push. She never questioned Gabby as hard as she questioned Celia and Kristina, and on one hand, Gabby thought it was probably one of the reasons the two of them didn’t fight as much as her mom and sisters did. On the other hand, sometimes she wondered if it was because her mom was afraid of what might possibly happen if she did.
“Dinner in half an hour, yeah?” her mom said, setting a skillet on the stovetop. Gabby nodded, headed up to her room.
RYAN
Ryan was still thinking about the mortgage notice that night at work, scrolling through the admissions requirements for D1 hockey schools in between sprinkling cheese onto chili dogs and dumping handfuls of frozen onion rings into the fryer. Since the previous summer, he’d been working at Walter’s, a hot dog hut on Route 117, where he took orders and ran the grill and brought the trash out at the end of the night. Walter himself had played football in high school and was easygoing about Ryan’s practices and games and stuff, which made it a good gig even if he did wind up smelling faintly of cured pork products all the time.
“Did you know we sell vegan hot dogs now?” Nate asked, coming out of the walk-in looking alarmed, his Walter’s baseball cap slightly askew. Nate was Ryan’s partner in food service; he was a little dweeby in a Marvel Universe kind of way, but Ryan liked him. Nate was good company. Plus, if anyone ever held a gun to his head and demanded he recite the special powers of every single X-Man in alphabetical order, he’d be safe. “There’s, like, a thousand of them in the freezer.”
Ryan shrugged. “Maybe Walter got a deal.”
“Better have been some deal,” Nate said. “We’ll be in our forties before he unloads them all.”
Walter’s was a lot quieter in the winter, when it was too cold for people to sit at the picnic tables on the concrete patio outside, so mostly he and Nate hung around and talked shit and dropped weird stuff in the fryer to see what would happen. Tonight, for instance, they’d had exactly three customers since Ryan had gotten here, so he felt pretty confident cleaning out the milkshake machine—the most dreaded task of any shift at Walter’s—even though it was still twenty minutes to close. He was just setting the jug of sanitizing solution back on the shelf when a station wagon pulled into the parking lot.
“Damn,” Nate said, shaking his head sadly. “Foiled.”
“If they ask for a milkshake I’m telling them it’s broken,” Ryan said immediately. “No way am I cleaning it twice in one night.”
He watched as a girl hopped out of the passenger side of the wagon and trotted across the patio toward the order window. She was wearing jeans and big glasses and a parka with one of those fake fur hoods on it, her dark hair up in a massive bun at the top of her head. “Oh,” Nate said, sliding the window open. “That’s Chelsea. Hey, Chelsea!” he called, waving cheerfully. “How are you?”
“Hey, Nate.” The girl, Chelsea, smiled. She went to their school, Ryan knew, though he didn’t think they’d ever had any classes together. Ryan was not exactly on what one would call an accelerated track. “Are you guys open?”
“Definitely,” Ryan heard himself say, sticking his hand right out through the window to shake hers. “I’m Ryan.”
The girl smirked. “I know who you are, Ryan.”
“Oh.” Ryan blushed. God, he blushed. Ryan never blushed. But something about the way Chelsea was looking at him made him feel like he was wildly out of his depth. “Okay. Well.” He looked back at her for a moment, smiled his most charming smile. All of a sudden his head didn’t hurt at all. “Can I get you a milkshake?”
RYAN
“Do you know Chelsea Rosen?” Ryan asked Gabby the next day, plunking his lunch tray down next to hers in the cafeteria.
“Did you seriously get three pork chops?” Gabby said instead of answering. This was the first year they’d had the same lunch period, and Ryan thought they were both kind of getting used to it: they still only ate with each other about half the time, since she refused to come sit with his friends and sometimes spent the entire period in the library reading
“Chelsea Rosen is in my gym class, but I don’t really know her. I try never to make eye contact with anyone in gym,” Gabby continued now, unwrapping her wheat-bread turkey sandwich. “I think she works at Arcade World.” She raised her eyebrows. “Why?”
Ryan shrugged, tucking that piece of information into his back pocket for later use. “No reason. She came by Walter’s last night. She seemed nice.”
“Sure,” Gabby said, rolling her eyes like she thought nice was probably a euphemism. She was always super dismissive of the other girls in his life, which sometimes felt a little unfair to Ryan. It wasn’t like she wanted to be dating him herself, clearly. But she also never seemed to think particularly highly of girls who did.
In any case, Ryan didn’t take the bait. “You wanna do something tonight?” he asked instead, digging into his mashed potatoes. He didn’t get why everybody always said school lunch was disgusting. “I’ve got a game, but after that? Go bowling?”
“I can’t,” Gabby said. “Shay’s got a cello thing. Her teacher is this super-fancy old guy who lives in a big mansion in Katonah, and every December he has all his best students come for a recital and then a reception.”
Well, that sounded horrible. Still: “You want company?” Ryan heard himself ask. He’d go to some nerdy concert, if that’s what she was doing. After all, it wasn’t exactly like he’d started hanging out with her because of the super-fun activities she was always getting up to. Their entire friendship was built around playing Monopoly. “I’ll tag along.”
“You want to come?” Gabby looked like he’d suggested accompanying her to the gynecologist. “I mean, sure, if you want, but it’s not really your bag.”
That annoyed him a little. “Why?” Ryan asked, popping the top on his Mountain Dew. “Because I’m a moron and you’re erudite?”
“What?” Gabby said quickly, shaking her head. “No, stop. That’s not what I meant. Of course you’re not a moron.”
“I know I’m not,” Ryan said. “I just used erudite in a sentence.” It had been the word of the day on the app he’d downloaded, which sent a push notification to his phone every morning. He wasn’t entirely sure he’d pronounced it correctly. Still, it bugged him, the idea that Gabby thought there were certain things he automatically wouldn’t like or appreciate. He felt like she thought it more now that she was with Shay.
“You did, it’s true.” Gabby was smiling now. “Okay,” she said after a moment, reaching across the table and breaking off half of his chocolate chip cookie. “Yeah, come along. It’ll be fun.”
RYAN
He had a game against Hudson High that afternoon, up at the ice center near the river. Hudson was the only team in their league Ryan actually hated playing, a bunch of dickbags with faces like bulldogs and attitudes to match. They weren’t even that good, but their defensemen were all fucking giants, like the bad guys in an ’80s sports movie about the Cold War. Last time Colson had played them one of their wingers had wound up with a broken collarbone; a couple years ago, one of Hudson’s players hit a ref.
“All right, dudes,” Ryan said to the rest of the guys as they all huddled around the bench before the puck drop. It was his third season on varsity, and he was co-captain now. He’d never thought of himself as much of a leader, but Coach Harkin had the captains take turns talking at the beginning and end of every game, and Ryan always really liked pepping everybody up, telling them all what he thought they were good at and what they needed to focus on to beat a particular team. Sometimes he thought he liked that part more than actually playing. “You ready?”
It was an ugly game from the second the clock started. Colson was behind from the very beginning, their stick handling sloppy, their passes sluggish and slow. Ryan felt like he had lead in his skates. He could hear his dad’s voice in his head, just like he always could when things weren’t going well on the ice, sure as if the guy was sitting in the stands calling his name: The hell kind of hustle is that, kid? Why are you wasting my time?
Ryan shook his head, trying to focus. He knew his plays forward and backward, should have been able to skate through this defensive line in his sleep. But the truth was he was distracted: he kept thinking about that pile of bills next to the fridge in the kitchen, about what might happen if he couldn’t nail down a scholarship come next year. He knew that thinking about it was only going to make things worse for him. But he couldn’t put it out of his mind.
Things got a little better in the second period; Colson managed to tie it up, the puck slipping past Hudson’s goalie and hitting the net with a satisfying whoosh. Ryan was headed back across the center line, stopping briefly to bump his glove against his buddy Remy’s, when one of Hudson’s wingers checked Colson’s center, a scrappy freshman named Jeremy, hard enough to send him sprawling to the ice.
“Shit,” Ryan said, though Remy didn’t even take a moment to swear before he flew at the winger, fists waving, his hockey stick clattering to the ice. Then two Hudson defensemen threw themselves on Remy, and half a second later both teams were piled up in the center of the rink, gloves and sticks and legs and skates in a whirling tangle like a cartoon cyclone. “Shit,” Ryan said again, his own voice echoing inside his helmet, and skated right into the middle of the fray.
RYAN
The house in Katonah was in fact huge, a sprawling Victorian monstrosity with gingerbread scrollwork in the eaves and a wraparound porch and a turret. It smelled like flowers inside, and a little like death. Shay’s recital was being held in the formal living room, which was so big Ryan was fairly sure you could have fit several of his own house inside it. Rows of wooden folding chairs were set up facing a massive stone fireplace. He wondered if he should have worn a tie. His head hurt; he’d caught a skate to the side of the skull during the fight this afternoon, although that didn’t feel like a thing he ought to complain about too much. He’d played it off with Harkin in the locker room; ever since his trip to the hospital last year, he’d felt like the guy was watching him extra closely, and the last thing he needed now was to get benched.
“Hi!” Shay said when she spotted Gabby and him, edging around the clusters of arty-looking parents in their dark overcoats and expensive scarves. She was wearing a white top and a stretchy black skirt, and she looked nerdier than she usually did—she looked, actually, like the kind of person who would take cello lessons for thirteen years—which made Ryan feel less threatened by her than normal. She kissed Gabby hello, nudged Ryan in the elbow. “Thanks for coming, dude.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, trying not to be offended by the blatant surprise in her voice. “Of course.”
The thing he had somehow not anticipated about this recital was that it was, in fact, gigantically dull. The first few performers were little kids screeching their way through vaguely recognizable holiday tunes, but pretty soon they’d moved on to long, tedious classical numbers he’d never heard before. Ryan sighed. He thought about the fight at the ice center this afternoon, how fast the whole thing had unraveled. He thought about Chelsea Rosen’s crooked smile. He glanced over at Gabby, but she was listening raptly, her hands folded primly in her lap like a nun at church.
Ryan shifted his weight, the old wooden floor creaking under his rickety chair. His head was killing him now; it felt like somebody was standing behind him squeezing his temples like an accordion. He felt exhausted, too, and the sleepy-time music combined with how hot and dry it was in here wasn’t helping things any. He stifled a yawn in the sleeve of his coat and Gabby g
Sorry, he mouthed, smiling guiltily. He dug his phone out of his pocket and opened a tic-tac-toe app, then pulled up a new game and nudged Gabby, showing her the screen as a peace offering. She rolled her eyes at him.
“Can you stop?” she whispered. “You’re being an ass.”
That took him by surprise. There was no way he bought for a second that she was actually interested in this stuff—or at least, she hadn’t been back when they were hanging out all the time. Maybe that was different since Shay, too. Still, nobody could even see them. He shoved his phone back into his pocket, rubbing irritably at his aching head.
Gabby frowned at that, looking at him closely. Are you okay? she mouthed.
“Yeah,” Ryan whispered back, “just a headache.”
Gabby’s whole body straightened up, alert. “A headache?”
“It’s nothing,” he whispered; then, before he could think better of it: “There was kind of a dustup at the game today.”
“A dustup?” Gabby’s eyes were wide. The woman in front of them turned around and shot them a dirty look. “Like a fight? Did you get hit?”
“Just a little,” Ryan told her. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Are you serious?” Gabby hissed. “After what happened last year? How can you say it’s not a big deal?”
“Because it’s my head,” he told her, sounding more irritated than he meant to. “So I feel like I’d know, yeah?”
Gabby ignored him. “I don’t even know how you’re still playing,” she whispered. “Do you not remember the doctor telling you getting hit again could be an actual catastrophe? Like, she literally used the word catastrophe. Did you forget that part?”