Top Ten(58)

It was a tight game, which didn’t actually make it much more interesting than normal; Shay loved hockey and knew all the rules, though, which Gabby was surprised to find out. “How come you and Ryan never talk about this?” she asked, reaching for the popcorn. “It’s like, the actual only thing you have in common.”

“Well,” Shay said, in a voice that wasn’t quite as lighthearted as Gabby might have wanted, “also you.”

She slipped out to the bathroom during the second period, but she got turned around and wound up coming in through a different door than she’d left through, which put her weirdly close to the Colson bench. She was trying to figure out if there was a way for her to cut across the bleachers without displacing too many people when the noise of the crowd turned alarmed: Gabby whirled around to look just as one of the Colson players hit the rink with a sickening crunch, helmet slamming into the ice hard nearly enough to crack it.

It only took her a second to realize it was Ryan.

“Jesus Christ,” Gabby yelped, heart like bloody pulp in her mouth as the team clustered around him and the ref skated out to the center of the ice; she shoved right past one of the Colson coaches to try and get a better look.

“He’s all right,” the coach said—Williams, Gabby thought his name was—glancing over at her distractedly. He was the assistant coach, Gabby knew, though he was older than Coach Harkin and had more of a dad air about him, like probably he went home to his wife at night and ate meat loaf and watched back-to-back episodes of NCIS on cable. “Nature of the beast,” he said now as Ryan sat up dazedly. “Everybody gets a bump on the head every once in a while.”

A bump on the—God, that phrasing made Gabby furious. “He’s had three concussions, actually,” she blurted, before she could stop herself. “So it’s a little more than a bump on the head.”

That got the coach’s attention. “Three?” he asked.

Gabby blanched. Her instinct was to backpedal, to say maybe she’d been mistaken. But that was ridiculous. She wasn’t mistaken; she knew for a fact. And this was Ryan’s brain they were talking about. This was his whole entire life.

“Yeah,” she said, looking Williams right in the eyeballs and knowing she was taking a terrifying fucking chance. “Three.”





GABBY


Gabby knew the Colson team would get right on the bus back to school once the game was over, so she had Shay detour in that direction on their way to the diner for milkshakes.

“Seriously?” Shay asked, skepticism written all over her sharp, lovely face. “Can’t you just text him?”

Gabby couldn’t. She left Shay in the car listening to a podcast and posted up near the door to the gym, stamping her feet on the concrete to try and warm them. It was freezing and slightly damp out, that heavy black purple sky that threatened snow.

“Hey,” Ryan said, turning up after what felt like forever and grinning when he saw her, his wet hair icing over a bit in the cold. He smelled like he always did after hockey games, mildewy locker-room showers and Axe body wash, still red-faced and a little sweaty like his body hadn’t gotten the message to cool off yet. “What are you doing here?”

“I think I fucked up,” she blurted out.

Ryan laughed at that. “Why,” he asked, “what’d you do?” Then, looking at her more closely, realizing somehow that she wasn’t screwing around: “Seriously, what’d you do?”

Gabby took a deep breath.





RYAN


“What?” Ryan asked again, staring at her in the glare of the orange safety light affixed to the side of the building. “Really, I just—you did what?”

“I’m sorry,” Gabby said again. “It’s not like I went to him specifically to tattle on you. I just kind of panicked.”

“No,” Ryan said, trying to keep his voice level, “panicking is when you called 911 on me at that party because I scared you, and that was fine. But this—”

“Wait a minute,” Gabby said, frowning, her posture straightening out a bit. “You had a concussion at that party, Ryan. You passed out at that party. And you have a concussion now.”

“You don’t know that,” Ryan snapped. “Are you a doctor?”

“No, actually,” Gabby retorted. “I’m somebody who knows you’ve gotten your head slammed against the ice twice in the last couple of weeks. I’m somebody who knows you couldn’t even focus enough to sit still at Shay’s concert the other night.”

Oh, please. “Shay’s concert was a snooze of fucking epic proportions, Gabby.”