Summary:

Sometimes, it feels like they’re two planets caught in the same volatile orbit. Shane spends his nights wondering why the girls in the rinkside seats feel like white noise while every single highlight reel of Ilya Rozanov feels like a secret rendezvous. Ilya spends his afternoons wondering if the heavy thrumming in his heart whenever Shane pins him against the boards is hate, or if it’s the only thing that makes him feel human. All Ilya knows is that he would have been there to tell him that a lost game wasn’t the end of the world, and he would have iced the bruises on Shane’s back. Their story is a road movie. It’s a double-feature. Two boys striking out across a field of wildflowers in Ottawa, while desire, like a monster, crawls up out of a lake nearby. All of us are wondering if these two boys will find a way to figure things out. One cuts a lock of his hair with a steak knife in the restroom of a gas station. He knows he’s desperate to subvert expectations. Expectations of being the golden boy, the very best, the pride of his family. The other smothers a cigarette on the ground with the toe of his scuffed-up boot. He presses down on it, hard, and it almost feels like a part of his bruised heart gets smashed into the tile too. One boy, half-destroyed, and the other, half-complete. Both screaming into the space between their faces as they run across a field, watching the sky around them transform from dark night into the coming of dawn. It’s not just the warmth of the glow of sunrise they’re feeling, no. There’s something more there that makes their hearts flutter, something that settles into the pits of their stomachs as Shane grabs onto Ilya’s hand. The world still looks the same to Ilya, but when he squints a little harder, he realizes it burns brighter. It’s shinier, and it’s sunnier. It’s better. OTTAWA, 2005 There is a kind of love between them that Ilya doesn’t quite know how to describe. A love that blazes in innocence, born on a Tuesday afternoon in a downtown community rink. Warm, damp grass grazes Ilya’s palms as he leans back on his hands outside the arena, letting himself bathe in the slow midday heat. It feels like soft kisses across his face. Something he never knew and felt in the biting winters of his childhood in Moscow. It’s nice. Shane braces himself with a wince as he feels the ice beneath his palms etch into his skin like a blade after a particularly hard fall. He feels the glaring floodlights burn holes into his back, right through his jersey. “How do you do it?” “Do what?” Two boys with their shoulders pressed against each other’s as they lean over the boards. Shane with his custom skates that are glossy with crisp red lines running across the middle. He’d leave behind clean lines in the ice as he weaved around the slower skaters. Ilya looks back down at his own skates. They’re rentals, and a jarring industrial blue. Not the shiny finish of Shane’s skates, no. It’s the kind of plastic that makes you scrunch your nose up in disgust. He runs his fingers across the dozens of scratches and scuff marks. He’d leave odd-shaped gashes in the ice after ramming himself into the boards in an effort to slow down. “I wish I could skate like you.” Ilya bumps the toe of his skates against the boards. “Well, if you come here every Tuesday, I can teach you,” Shane says, glancing behind his back. “Oh, really?” Ilya asks, his accent still clipped. “Yeah.” Ilya never returns to the rink. His family moves again, chasing work and a life that he’s never quite entirely sure belongs to him. He clutches a small, crumpled hockey trading card Shane had signed for him as a joke. All he can think about in the car is the distance growing between them as the engine revs, away from the only boy who didn’t care that Ilya was the “weird foreign kid” that nobody wanted to get close to. A sign overhead whizzes past, and Ilya can barely make out the words on it as he clambers to peer through the backseat windows.