Twenty Miles Read Online Free PDF Page A

said. Biologist. Hockey coach. Each answer felt like confessing an exotic, hidden desire, but none of it seemed to surprise her. General first year, she told me, with conviction, and these words had calmed me instantly. And so: Psychology, English, Biology, History. A huge island to roam around until. That was as far as I’d gotten:
until.
    ‘Okay, everyone,’ the woman said. ‘I have the syllabuses here. Dr. Hurlitzer is in Germany still, so just grab one and then you can go. She’ll be back next week. I’m the TA – my name is Morag. Any questions, I can answer them for you. Otherwise, see you next week.’
    That was it. The beginning and end of my first class and the room stirred suddenly with swooping students, flying down to the TA and her papers, then fleeing the room, syllabus in hand, back out into the sun. These moments in the classroom a minor setback to the anarchy of a beer-drenched first day.
    Student traffic swelled into a thick orbit around University Centre, a gravitational pull toward the beer gardens set up behind the building. Moon was out of town, so no tryouts that afternoon. Without the ice time to move toward, the afternoon loomed. Going back to Rez wasn’t an option. In the past couple of days leading to the start of classes, the halls had become crammed. The soundtrack of endlessly colliding schedules: relentless door slamming, muffled beating of shoes on the carpet, voices glancing off each other. A hotel of teenagers freed, completely, from the leashes of their parents’ eyes for the first time. Musk of hormones and hangovers. Students staggering down the halls in pyjamas and bedhead well into the afternoon.
    That morning, at breakfast, I’d watched Gavin as he whirled around carrying a plate of waffles like he was trying to find his bearings. Then, his spine straightening in epiphany, he made a beeline for the ice-cream dispenser and buried the waffles in a messy white heap of vanilla. That plate had filled me with dread. Oozing from the ice-cream machine’s udder: a graphic confirmation of the lawlessness I’d sensed since I arrived.
    I let myself be drawn into the pull around the periphery of University Centre and heard the beer gardens before I saw them: a denser raft of voice mingled with the jangling undertow of music and laughter. A plastic fence was strung around the area, the drinking students corralled. The fence fell into a small maze formation around the entrance like an airport security gate and students were lined up, fumbling in their bags for ID , tilting their faces toward the sun while they waited.
    I walked slowly around the edge of the fence, heading in the direction of Sam Hall because that was the only other place I could think of to go and I wanted to look like I was on my way somewhere. Maybe Pelly would be there, maybe one of the other rookies.
    I heard a long, loud laugh I recognized from the dressing room. The unmistakable, throaty laughter of Boz. I looked in its direction and saw them in the far corner of the beer gardens: Heezer, Hal, Pelly, Toad, Boz, mixed in with a circle of football players, all of them, beer in hand. Toad – knees bent, elbows jutting a competitive angle – chugged a beer against a colossal guy wearing a skull cap, head angled casually back with the plastic cup tilted perpendicular to his face. His other hand fisted on his hip, a cocky gesture toward boredom. Boz and Heezer’s mouths moved with encouragement I couldn’t hear, Hal looking on, arms crossed, a bemused smile. Pelly glanced up nervously at the blond football player next to her. She looked like a toy he could pick up and carry under his arm. When Toad spiked her cup to the ground, Heezer howled with victory and the blond guy picked her up by the waist and flung her over his shoulder, Heezer shrieking and pummelling him on the back with her palms. Toad’s competitor flung his cup on the ground with an exaggerated twitch of his wrist and then turned his back on thecircle