THE GOAL I DIDN'T EARN

Mars

The best goal of my life was a gift. Some part of me knew it before the puck crossed the line.

I just didn't want to know it yet.

"Kessler! Bench!"

Coach Voss slapped the boards so hard the glass shook. Thirty one seconds left in overtime, tied at two, and eighteen thousand people were screaming loud enough to rattle my teeth. I dropped over the boards and landed beside her.

"Talk to me," she said. "What do you see?"

"Number 4 is gassed," I said, gulping air. "She's late on every neutral zone pass. Ridgemont's defense pinches when Whitaker cycles low."

"Then make her late one more time."

"Or she could pass the puck," Sloane said from the end of the bench, not looking at me. "Wild idea, I know."

"I pass," I said. "When someone's open."

"Nobody's ever open when it's you."

"Enough," Voss snapped. "Both of you. Thirty seconds, then a shootout, and I don't trust my heart with a shootout. Kessler, you're on. Sloane, you're on. Try to like each other for half a minute."

A whistle blew. A television timeout, and the whole arena groaned and stretched. Someone shoved a water bottle into my glove. I squeezed it over my face and tasted salt.

"Hey. Mars."

Tess had skated all the way down the ice from her crease. Goalies never leave the crease during a stoppage. She stood at the bench door with her mask pushed up on her forehead, sweat plastering her dark hair to her skin, and she looked at me like I was the only person in the building.

"You're supposed to be guarding a net," I said.

"Look at me for a second."

"I'm looking."

"If you see the net, you take the net." Her voice was low and steady. "You don't wait. You don't check with anyone. You just go."

"That's every night, Tess."

"Not like this." She glanced up toward the stands, just for a second, and then back at me. "Promise me."

"Okay. I promise. What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing." She smiled, and it was the wrong kind of smile, the kind you put on for a camera. "Nothing. Go win a national championship."

"You're weird tonight."

"I'm always weird."

"Fair," I said, and bumped my glove against her pads.

She lowered her mask and skated backward down the ice, and I watched her go until Voss grabbed my shoulder and turned me around.

The faceoff was in Ridgemont's end. I lined up on the left wing with my stick on the ice and my heart pounding in my ears. Fifteen feet away, Kira Lindqvist stood in her crease like a wall somebody had built out of hatred and hockey pads. She hadn't allowed a breakaway goal all season. Not one. Scouts called her The Vault.

"Kessler," she said.

I looked over. Her mask was tilted slightly toward me.

"Lindqvist. Nice night for a hockey game."

"I'm sorry."

I blinked. "For what? You've stopped everything."

She didn't answer. She just turned back to the ice and tapped her stick twice against her pad.

"Weird," I muttered. "Everyone's being weird tonight."

The puck dropped.

Sloane won the draw, which I hated to admit. The puck skittered back to our defense, then around the boards, then forward. Ridgemont's number 4 came at me with her stick raised, and I remembered what I'd told Voss. She was late. She was always late.

I slipped past her like she was standing still.

"Turnover!" someone screamed from the bench.

The puck was on my stick before I finished thinking it. Somewhere ahead of me the neutral zone opened like a door. Nobody between me and the net except one goalie, one girl, one wall.

"Mars! GO!"

That was Tess. I could hear her from the other end of the ice, thin and clear over eighteen thousand voices.

Nine seconds on the clock.

I crossed the blue line. Eight seconds. Seven. My legs were burning and my lungs felt like they were full of broken glass, and I heard a rushing, roaring sound I knew was the crowd and also my own blood.

Six.

Kira came out to cut down the angle. She was good at this. She was always good at this. I dragged the puck to my forehand, then my backhand, waiting for her to commit.

Five.

She dropped her glove.

It was a small thing. Half an inch, maybe less. A hair too wide, a hair too early, the kind of mistake a fourteen year old makes in a practice drill. It left a gap between her glove and her pad, a gap you could barely have fit a fist through.

She doesn't do that, said a small, cold voice in my head. She has never once done that.

4.2.

I shot.

The puck slid through the gap like it had been invited. It hit the back of the net with a soft, wet thump, and the red light on top of the goal exploded to life.

For one second the arena made no sound at all.

Then it came apart.

Eighteen thousand people screamed at once. The air itself seemed to shake. I dropped my stick and threw both arms up and someone crashed into me from behind, then someone else, and then I was on my back on the ice, laughing, crying, my helmet knocked sideways and my mouth full of somebody's hair.

"You did it!" Sloane was yelling. I couldn't tell if she was happy or furious, and I didn't care. "You did it, you psycho!"

"We did it!"

"You did it!"

"Off me, you're crushing my ribs!"

"MARS!"

Tess hit us like a freight train. She'd sprinted the whole length of the ice in full pads, which nobody should be able to do, and she flung herself on top of the pile and grabbed my face with both hands.

"You did it," she said. She was laughing and her eyes were wet. "You absolute maniac. You actually did it."

"Tess, I can't breathe."

"Good. Don't. Listen to me." She pulled me closer until her forehead pressed against mine. Under the noise, so quietly I nearly missed it, she whispered, "Whatever happens tonight, you earned that. Remember I said it."

I frowned. "What do you mean, whatever happens?"

"Just remember."

"Tess, you're scaring me."

"I know. I'm sorry." She kissed my forehead, fast and hard. "Go. Go celebrate. You've got eighteen thousand people waiting."

Coach Voss had reached us by then, bellowing and shoving skaters aside. She grabbed me by the jersey and hauled me to my feet, and her face was wet and red and glowing.

"Kessler!" she yelled. "Do you have any idea what you just did?"

"I think I won us a title?"

"You won us EVERYTHING!" She hugged me so tight my ribs cracked. "I'm so proud of you, kid. I'm so proud I could puke."

"Please don't puke on me."

"No promises."

The whole team piled onto the ice. Someone popped a bottle of something that fizzed. Confetti fell like snow. The arena lights swung across the crowd, and the giant screen overhead flashed my face, my number, my name in letters ten feet tall.

MARIN "MARS" KESSLER. OVERTIME WINNER.

I laughed until my sides hurt.

This is it, I thought. This is the moment. Everything I've bled for since I was five years old. Every dawn practice, every secondhand skate, every night I fell asleep with ice packs on both knees. Dunmore, my mother's tired hands, June's cracked school shoes. It was all in this one goal.

I turned to find Tess, to hug her again, to scream in her face.

She was standing a few feet away with her mask tucked under one arm, and she wasn't smiling anymore.

"Tess?"

She didn't hear me. She was staring up at the stands. I followed her gaze past the confetti and the banners and the sea of screaming faces, up to section 114, where a man in a gray coat sat completely still in a row of people jumping and cheering.

He wasn't clapping. He wasn't smiling. He was looking straight at my best friend.

Tess raised her hand. Slowly, deliberately, she reached out and tapped the crossbar of her goal twice, the way we'd promised each other we would if we ever needed to get out of somewhere fast.

Two taps. Get me out of here.

"Tess," I said again, and this time my voice cracked. "Hey. What's going on?"

But the noise swallowed me, and my best friend didn't look away from the gray coat until he stood up and slowly walked out of the arena.