Top Ten(51)
NUMBER 5
THE BIG ONE
JUNIOR YEAR, WINTER
RYAN
Ryan didn’t have practice on Wednesdays, so he took the bus home after eighth period, joking around with a few of the underclassmen and screwing around on his phone. Gabby had posted a new photo on Instagram that morning, a shot of Shay in the music room at school with her head bent over her cello; Ryan scrolled past it, then went back and clicked the little heart to like, telling himself not to be such a whiny little dick.
His stop was all the way at the end of the route on the far side of Colson, and it was December-dark by the time he climbed the steps to the front of his house, pulling a stack of mail out of the box on his way inside. When he was a kid he used to really like looking at home furnishings catalogs like a weirdo; sometimes, to be honest, he still did. He flipped past the Stop & Shop circular plus a flyer for the car wash near the high school before landing on an envelope from the bank in Colson Village with THIRD NOTICE stamped on the front in incriminating red letters. OVERDUE.
Ryan frowned, stopping in the narrow hallway to peer at it more closely. There was nothing unusual about it, exactly. He was used to bills piling up. His family had never had a lot of money—or even enough money, probably, though it wasn’t like he’d ever gone hungry or anything like that. But the cable had been cut off a few times when he was a kid, plus the electricity once; he could remember his mom making a game out of it, setting up a blanket fort in the living room, telling stories with a flashlight and making popcorn on the stove. He was used to the odd call from a collection agency on the landline, and the way they periodically ate scrambled eggs for dinner a few nights in a row without ever mentioning why. Still, something about this one seemed particularly nasty.
“Give me that,” his mom said, coming up the basement stairs and plucking the envelope out of his hand, wedging it in between a cluster of others like it on the narrow strip of counter between the refrigerator and the stove. “It’s a federal offense to read other people’s mail, they teach you that at school?”
Ryan smiled faintly. “Right between cosines and the Franco-Prussian War,” he assured her, though he couldn’t quite get the joke to land. “Are we okay?” he asked, hovering in the kitchen doorway with his hands jammed in the pockets of his jacket. “Like, money-wise? Is that the mortgage?”
“Of course we’re okay,” his mom said, not quite looking at him as she flitted around the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down again, using the sprayer to rinse the already-clean sink. “I mean, it would be nice if your dad could be bothered to send a check every once in a while, but—” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, lovey. Business has been slow the last couple of months, that’s all. There’s that new grooming place in Colson Village, and—” She broke off again and blew a breath out, a trilling xylophone kind of sound. “I don’t want you to be worrying about that stuff,” she said. “You deserve to be a kid.”
“I know,” Ryan said uneasily, scanning his memory of the last few weeks for signs that things were more dire than usual—the way his mom kept turning the heat down, maybe, or the suspiciously empty fridge. “But we’re a team, right? You can tell me.”
“Of course we’re a team, sweetheart. And I love you for saying that.” His mom dropped the dish towel she was holding and took his face in her two hands, smiling up at him like he’d hung the damn moon. “But all you need to do is go to school and go to practice and have fun with your friends, all right? Let me be the mother.”
“I know,” Ryan said again. “But long-term, and stuff—”
“Long as you lock down that hockey scholarship, we’re golden.” His mom popped up on her toes, planted a smacking kiss on his cheek. “That’s your job, all right? I’ll take care of the rest.”
That caught Ryan by surprise a little, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. After all, it wasn’t like he hadn’t known his mom was counting on him to get a scholarship to college. It wasn’t even like he hadn’t realized that was probably the only way he could go. But it was different to hear it out loud like that, the path toward the rest of his life narrowing so starkly in front of him. It made everything feel abruptly intense.
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.