Free The Year We Hid Away by Sarina Bowen

scandal, several schools had begun recruiting me for hockey. But nearly all of them dropped me when the story broke. Only two schools admitted me — Harkness, who was probably just too confident in its 300-year-old history to care about scandal. And Sterling — the college where my father coached. They probably admitted me out of obligation.
    Thank God I wasn’t sitting in New Hampshire with nowhere to go. I planned to stay as far from my father’s trial as I could possibly get.
     
    Normal people lived for the weekends. But I was not a normal person. Friday night loomed, and with it the usual poor set of options for entertaining myself. At times, I’d tagged along with The Katies to parties, but they always left me cold. I hated small talk and warm beer. Apart from deafening music, parties seemed to offer little else.
    This Friday, I thought I’d stay in and watch some reruns on my laptop. But after dinner, as Blond Katie made plans on the phone, she kept eying me. “I’ll ask,” she said before hanging up.
    Then she turned to me, and I readied my excuses on my tongue.
    “Before you say no,” Katie began, “it isn’t a party.”
    She was so on to me. “What, then?”
    “The freshmen football players we’ve been dating have a friend in town,” she said.
    “And you want me to be your third? For what?”
    “A game!” she said. “Harkness versus Brown. Please? It starts in an hour.”
    I looked out of our rapidly darkening window and wondered what Bridger was up to. Working, of course. I hated to admit it, but his unavailability was starting to get to me. There was no chance in hell that the Katies’ football friends would be as interesting as Bridger. They’d probably be several notches down the evolutionary chain. But I was sick of staying home on Friday nights, practicing the guitar and texting Bridger at work.
    “Okay,” I sighed. “But if the guy tries to grab my butt, I’m leaving.”
     
    The Katies’ boyfriends’ visitor had a neck the size of a ham, and introduced himself as Spunky. Surely his parents had given him another name, but whatever it was, I never found out. I caught myself wondering who would give himself a weird new name on purpose.
    And then I realized that’s exactly what I’d done, too.
    We trudged along in the cold and I tried to stay on top of the conversation. But there wasn’t much of one. Anything the girls said caused the football players to grin, and then one of them would declare it “dubious.”
    For example:
    A Katie: “And then the bartender swore that he knew how to make a Flaming Salamander. Even though I’d invented the name of the drink just to stump him!”
    A Football Player : “That is dubious .”
    And so it went, until the moment I realized where we were headed. “Hang on,” I protested, stopping on the street corner. “I thought we were going to a football game?”
    Ponytail Katie spun around and pinned me with her gaze. “They wouldn’t be joining us then, would they? Duh! Tonight is a hockey game. The preseason scrimmage against Brown.”
    Oh, crap . “But… I don’t go to hockey games,” I whined.
    “Scarlet,” she protested, hoping I was not about to bail. “We’re here already.”
    And so we were. Defeated, I followed them into the arena where I’d always expected to compete.
    It made for a much more depressing evening than I’d bargained for, to say the least. And that’s the only reason I drank from Spunky’s flask whenever it was passed my way. It was filled with some kind of fruity schnapps, a flavor so sweet that it made my teeth itch. I thought it was weird that football players would want to get drunk on a sissy thing like schnapps. At least, it seemed weird until I got toasted on it. And then I figured out that’s probably why they’d brought it.
    Tonight I was really not on my game.
    The Katies bought popcorn, and I ate a bunch of it to try to cushion the schnapps. The Harkness men’s team was skating really well,