Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Forty-Two

I picked absently at the tape on my stick’s blade. It wasn’t the same, I thought, looking around the empty locker room, familiar but strange at the same time. No more league, no more Tomcats. No more real games.

It was just a changing room. A girls’ changing room, sure but no different from the boys’, really, the few times I’d seen it. Same lockers, same tiles, same scuffs in the floor and flickering lights, same wooden bench running the length of it.

This had been where Kay had sat me down after my first taste of hockey. This had been where she’d held my chin gently but firmly and put eyeliner on me, where I’d looked across to the smeared, narrow mirror and seen my face for the first time.

I risked a glance, bracing for the reaction like I was poking a tiger.

Huh.

A few months ago the changes I saw in the mirror now would have terrified me beyond all measure. The definition in the arms and legs, the broadness of the delts and traps in the back, changes that by any judgement or measurement that John would have made, all made me bigger, more muscular, more what I would always have classed as masculine in a way that would ruin me for figure skating and lock me into a life I didn’t even want to think about. Roll up the jersey and look closely, really closely, squint slightly in the right light and use your imagination, and you could even see abs. But there had to be something else going on there as well. Because when you put it all together it didn’t add up to a man. It didn’t even add up to the thing I’d always seen in a mirror before, a boy, which was like a man, but lesser.

It was starting to add up to a woman.

John just wasn’t there any more. At some point he’d checked out completely, and the shell of Freya that I’d built to keep him hidden, the shell that had gotten thicker and thicker – physically and mentally – had fully taken over. The cockiness wasn’t entirely an act any more, or the extroversion, or was the way she cared about other people. How had that happened? Where had that come from? If it had been in me all along then why the fuck hadn’t it made an appearance sooner? Or was everyone like this, no real, essential, immutable core, just an assemblage of behaviours and responses that you could change given enough effort and motivation and okay yes maybe a few select chemicals? But then if it was that easy why didn’t everyone do it?

“Hey! Freight train! Stop checking yourself out and get out here!”

Oh yeah. You needed friends, too. That was crucial. Easily the hardest part though.

As I shuffled out onto the ice I was, as usual, blasted senseless with the crowd, the noise, the music from the speakers and the tuneless singing. I slammed gloves with Eilidh, who did her now-traditional I’m watching you punk two finger warning gesture at me. I grinned back. We had basically the same position on the ice but she didn’t have anything to worry about in terms of competition. She’d scored on her first game back while I was still sitting on a big fat goose egg.

But everyone was watching me. The rest of the studs on our team. The crowd, the linesmen and the other team, every pair of eyes in the entire barn was on me, all of them waiting for me to do my pest shit, all for their own reasons.

And one person in particular was watching me, like she always did. I could feel her eyes on me, heavier than a hundred others put together.

I smoothed out the tape on my stick, making sure the pride colours popped.

Not the real league. Not a real game. Not the Tomcats.

But a million times better for it.

***

I shifted uncomfortably in Kay’s computer chair. I’d twiddled with every knob I could find, shifted it up, down and sideways, even found a can of WD-40 under the kitchen sink and oiled up its metal bits, and it still creaked like a bed in a honeymoon suite every time I moved even slightly. I’d just have to try and sit incredibly still for the next half-hour.

Poor chair. I sympathised. Kay worked everything around her hard. Our exercise session this morning had been particularly harsh, which I’d come to recognise as a sign that she was trying to burn off a bad mood through sheer physical activity. I squirmed again in the chair. When she’d lifted the largest kettlebell her vest top had ridden up slightly and the sun had caught a thin strip of skin that had made me want to-

Whatever my brain was doing was suddenly interrupted by the meeting software call noise. I swallowed, cursed as the chair creaked again, and pressed the accept call button. I was on. I was always on.

***

“Welcome to Queering the Boundaries, where we take a slightly bent look at media, culture and news from a queer perspective. I’m your host, JJ, pronouns she or they, and this week I’m here with long-term friend of the show, Arcadia.”

“Bon soir,” said Arcadia.

“I keep telling you we’re never doing this in French,” JJ admonished her.

“Rabat-joie,” Arcadia pouted. This was interesting to watch. I guess I hadn’t realised it before, because I’d been so wrapped up in whatever it was that I was doing, but Arcadia was a bit of a performer. In hindsight that should have been pretty obvious – the band, the singing, the hair, the overdramatic displays of public affection, but for some reason I’d slotted her firmly into the sensible killjoy category. I wondered what she was like when she wasn’t trying to deal with infuriating hockey players. Guess I’d probably never know since that was my entire identity now.

“And for once we have you for an episode where we’re not talking about obscure lo-fi bands from the early 2000s. Why is that?” JJ had a smooth radio voice and a professional microphone setup, I had an old headset I’d dug out of Kay’s dad’s box of electronics. The only reason I was sure it didn’t predate the fall of the Soviet Union was that it had a USB plug. I just hoped I didn’t sound too creepy. Or wet.

“Because, apparently,” Arcadia said with exaggerated exasperation, “the only thing the queer kids care about these days is ice hockey.” Queer kids. This bitch was a year older than I was.

“It’s certainly having a moment,” said JJ.

“Well I wish it would stop. I’m fed up of having to know this stuff. The whole reason I transitioned was so no-one would expect me to care about sport.”

JJ laughed. “And we have a second guest for this hockey-themed episode, Freya Sparrow. Freya, welcome to the podcast. What are your pronouns?”

I hated that question. “Why is it called a podcast?” I asked.

“Uh,” said JJ, suddenly thrown off their game like I’d hooked their skates. “I believe because it’s a broadcast that people used to listen to on iPods,” they explained, recovering.

“What the hell is an iPod?” I prodded, unable to help myself. I knew what an iPod was.

“It’s an MP3… uh, a music player.”

“Like a phone?”

“Well, no, more like a Walkman, but you could download songs onto it from your computer, and people started making spoken-word audio content for it and-”

“Well then, that’s not technically a broadcast, is it?” I interrupted.

“Is she always like this?” said JJ, to Arcadia.

“Yes, yes she is,” said Arcadia with one of her Freya sighs. She shot me a look through the webcam. Knock it the fuck off, it said.

“I can see why people keep hitting her,” said JJ, presumably joking.

“That’s my role,” I said, matter-of-factly.

“Freya, for those of our listeners who don’t follow junior amateur ice hockey-”

“Don’t follow ice hockey?” I leaned into performative incredulity. “What are they, straight?”

“Jesus Christ,” breathed Arcadia, almost too softly for the mic to pick up.

JJ pushed on regardless, obviously realising they were never going to get anywhere if they let me keep derailing them. “Freya is a member of the hockey team from that video I’m sure you’ve all seen where every single player comes out as transgender at an official league meeting. If you haven’t seen it, I’m sure you can find it, but I can’t actually link it in the show notes because it’s the subject of a takedown notice,”

“A bullshit takedown notice,” I said. “It’s our video!”

“It’s my video,” said Arcadia.

“And we thank you for your service,” I said to her, saluting.

“Now we’ll be talking about that incident in just a minute, but first, to give you some idea of who Freya is, we do have some footage from her last game, we’ll splice that in here for those of you watching the video version of this, but it’s – well, let’s not mince words, it’s a fight.”

“A tilly. A tilt. A tussle. A tit-twister,” I glossed.

“And you… well, you look like you’re enjoying yourself?”

I knew the clip they meant. They’d run it past me, to make sure I understood and agreed that it would be shown on the podcast, as part of the interminable email exchanges setting this whole thing up. Partly I’d agreed to come on just so that bit would stop. Consent was exhausting.

The video consisted of me, getting my bucket dinked repeatedly by a broad-shouldered girl with dangly earrings. The whole time I was smirking in a way that made me want to punch my face in.

“Yeah, that’s me in the corner, that’s me in the barn fight, losing to a pigeon,” I said. “It’s not my job to win fights, although I try to get a couple of hits in so I don’t look too bad, but that’s not the main point of what I do.”

“I think this is what a lot of people don’t understand about hockey,” said JJ. “You’re not actually supposed to fight at all, are you?”

“Wellll,” I said. “Yes and no. You’re not supposed to fight for no reason. If someone’s swinging at people randomly that’s just a thug. If you’re defending your teammates or maybe checking a player who’s getting out of line then you’re an enforcer, and that’s more valid.”

“And if you’re a pest?” asked Arcadia, with an emphasis that made me think that she regarded “pest” as a slur that she had p-word privileges for.

“Okay, so there’s a lot of misconceptions about the role of a pest,” I said. “You don’t start fights, you get the other st- girl to start a fight. You skate right up to the line and invite them to step over it. You throw them off their game, get them rattled, ideally get them to take a penalty off it. You make yourself someone else’s problem.”

“And you’re so good at it,” said Arcadia, joking to the audience, dead serious to me.

“Don’t hate the player,” I said.

“Hate the game,” concluded JJ.

“What?” I said. “No? Don’t hate the game. The game’s great. Come see the game. Buy a jersey.”

“But what we’re really here to discuss is that video,” JJ said, heroically wrestling the conversation back on track. “That meeting, can you perhaps give us a little background?”

For the first time since recording started I took a second to think. This bit was important. This was why Arcadia had set this up and why, once she’d explained, I’d agreed to do it. Kay couldn’t have done this, or Hannah, and definitely not Grace. So it had to be me, with the ink still wet on my queer credentials.

“So, I don’t have to remind people watching this what the situation is with queer people and sport in this country, especially trans people, especially trans women,” I began. “One of our players happened to be the target of a very nasty online hate campaign that believed – or perhaps just pretended that they believed, she was trans. Now, obviously it doesn’t matter if she is or not, but it happens that she isn’t, and I’m only mentioning that because it’s important context.” This, too, I’d worked out with Arcadia. She was nodding, as was JJ, which I took as a good sign.

“Bluntly speaking, this hate campaign worked, because the league changed its policy on trans players pretty much overnight. It hadn’t been great before, but there was at least a theoretical acknowledgement that trans girls were girls and could play on a girls’ team, with caveats.” I knew we were taking a risk here. Sure I’d been lucky so far, but coming on a queer podcast, talking explicitly about trans issues? It wasn’t just that I didn’t feel qualified to talk about trans stuff, but pop that to one side, or that it might out me, which I didn’t feel great about, but which, again, pop to the other side, it was that this might retroactively render the haters justified. Sure they’d identified the wrong target, but see, there was one, a man, lying to play girls’ hockey! We were right!

“They used the recent Supreme Court judgement to justify this change, didn’t they?” said JJ, as I realised that I’d gone silent for a few seconds.

“Which,” interjected Arcadia, “as I think you’ve discussed before, is not what that judgement – as bad as it is – actually says.”

“Right,” I said. “But by this point it didn’t matter. The league effectively launched a mid-season ban on any trans players, even though, by their own admission, there weren’t any.” That they knew about, I thought. “And our co-captain, Hannah, staunch cishet ally that she is, just thought, fuck that, no way, and she took a stand,” Okay, that had been a little mean, but I couldn’t help smiling. I had been genuinely proud of her, once I’d gotten over my initial frustration and annoyance and anger and irritation.

“And you all-” JJ started.

“We all came out as trans,” I said, watching Arcadia’s face out of the corner of my eye. Not a twitch. “Pure solidarity.”

“Was it a conscious Spartacus reference or-”

“Oh god no, they had no idea. I tried to show it to the rest of the team but they just asked why I was making them watch a movie about old gay greasy men,” I said, still slightly offended by the disrespect.

“And the whole stunt really wasn’t planned in advance?” This line of questioning had been worked out beforehand in the emails as well. JJ had been concerned it might come across as hostile, which was sweet. I did my best work against a little bit of organised hostility. It was kind of nice though, having a rough outline of a conversation in advance so you could be witty and spontaneous on cue.

“People keep asking this but no,” I confirmed. “It was entirely on the spur of the moment. We genuinely couldn’t plan a picnic in advance.”

“It’s true, they couldn’t,” Arcadia agreed, a little too readily. “I’m honestly amazed they can do up their own shoelaces.”

“Well, I normally get your mum to do mine, after all, she’s down there anyw-”

“So how did you two become friends?” said JJ with a slightly manic grin creeping across their face.

“I wouldn’t say-” I began.

“Not friends exactly-” Arcadia started to say at the same time. We locked eyes across our respective computer screens. There was an awkward silence.

“I would say we’re more like reluctant soldiers on the same side of a war,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Yeah, I’m the smooth-talking nightclub owner, she’s the pragmatic resistance fighter.” That reference wasn’t going to hit. “Or, I’m Han Solo, she’s Obi-wan Kenobi. The old man version, not the hot one.” Arcadia’s mouth was hanging open. I might have gone a little far.

“And the breakaway league,” said JJ. “The shadow league, the asterisk league, whatever we’re calling it… really not planned at all? Because some people are looking at how successful it’s been and are suggesting that there must have been some forethought there.”

“We would have made some very different decisions if we were capable of thinking more than five minutes ahead,” I said, remembering, for no particular reason, Kay’s face illuminated by the late summer sun in a leisure centre car park.

“People are fed up,” said Arcadia. “They see organisation after organisation capitulating to an obvious, well-funded hate campaign, and it makes them angry. They want someone to fight back and they want to support that. If it hadn’t been this it would have been… I don’t know, chess or something.”

“Except chess tournaments aren’t as expensive to put on, are they?” asked JJ. “You don’t need a specialised arena.”

“No, but that arena’s there anyway,” said Arcadia. “Some places run down their rinks in the off-season but that can be almost as expensive as just keeping it up.” I’d tried to look up some of this stuff as well, but numbers made my head spin, so in the end I’d left it to her.

“So the league provides compensation to arena management,” she explained. “Not much, but enough so that they don’t lose money by hosting games. But here’s the thing, if they make a profit on the gate, then they don’t get that money.”

“That seems like a pretty bad deal,” said JJ. “Why would they agree to that?”

“Because they never make a profit on the gate! Girls’ junior amateur ice hockey? Not a huge money-spinner. No-one ever complained because it literally never came up. So getting a little bit of cash to cover operating costs, even if just barely, seemed like a good deal when you’d be spending that money on maintenance anyway.” Arcadia sneered. She might not have cared about the game itself much, but it seemed like she had a passion for investigating the system behind it. “Men’s senior hockey is where the money is, and there’s not even much of that, but you have to host junior games because otherwise where’s the next generation of players going to come from? and then you’ve got to host girls and women’s hockey because otherwise you’re sexist but they don’t do it because it makes money. You do it because it’s expected, and it makes you look good and because it doesn’t cost you much.”

“Everything about girls’ hockey just sort of… flies under the radar,” I added. “No-one really cares that much about it except us players. Unless you do something insane to draw attention to yourself, like, I don’t know, crash half the teams out of the league over the inclusion of trans girls when there are no trans players in the league, then you can get away with almost anything.”

It was still hard to wrap my head around it. Apart from Kay and Fish, no-one in the team had known they were defending me, specifically. They were instinctively ride or die instantly for a hypothetical imaginary trans girl. I hope she knew how lucky she was.

“Right, you mentioned this earlier, but to be clear, there aren’t any trans players in the league at this particular time?”

“No openly trans girls as far as I’m aware,” I said. True on the thinnest of technicalities, but I still avoided looking at Arcadia. “It’s possible there might be some non-binary kids or trans boys playing as girls under the rules but obviously they’re keeping quiet about it if they are, and they wouldn’t be targeted under this ruling anyway, although it would still be pretty intimidating, I imagine..”

“So then why do this? Why – if I can play devil’s advocate for a moment here – split an already niche sport right down the middle for girls who don’t exist?”

“Well, they do exist,” I said before Arcadia could jump in. “They’re just not playing. It’s not as if there were no barriers for them before this all happened.” I sat back, ignoring Kay’s creaking chair and held an imaginary pen as I called up everything I’d prepared and researched. “The criteria for inclusion are tough enough for professional athletes to meet, for sixteen or seventeen year old girls who just want to play amateur hockey they’re effectively insurmountable. You have to have been on hormones for long enough to depress your testosterone to a level far lower than that of most non-transgender girls, and that takes time, years even. You can’t even start hormones until you’re sixteen and that’s also pretty much impossible now outside of private healthcare, which is expensive, even if you’re lucky enough to have understanding parents.”

“So you’re saying,” JJ began.

“I’m saying,” I spat, no longer caring about my wet mic, “we have no idea how many girls could be playing hockey – or any other sport with similar barriers – because we’ve effectively blocked them out well before they get to play even at an amateur level. We’ve put up so many walls we can’t even see what we’re blocking off any more. No-one can.” Damn. At some point – I don’t even know when or where – I’d started to really care about this. The performance had become reality. Put that in the York Notes edition of my life under Themes.

“Look, I’m not an expert on this transgender stuff,” out of the corner of my eye I saw Arcadia turning off her mic and coughing, which I ignored. “I just started learning about the politics of it all a couple of months ago, but you don’t need to know a lot to see the direction things are going. People need to start making stands like this. And it might seem petty, or stupid, or even self-destructive, but we’ve tried accommodating these people, we’ve tried compromise and they’re just getting worse.”

“She’s right,” said Arcadia, surprising me again with the sudden agreement. “What you have to understand is that these people will never be satisfied. We’ve bent over backwards to accommodate hate groups that want trans people – trans women specifically – completely eliminated from public life. If a girl ever did manage to jump through all these hoops they’ve set up they’d find another way to exclude her, or just ban them entirely, which is what ultimately ended up happening in this case anyway. At some point you have to say, this is it, we’re making a stand, no more, even if that means tearing down the existing structure and starting from scratch. Because they will not stop with us. They’ll come for gay kids and queer adults, and women’s rights generally, and you will not be able to say we didn’t warn you.”

“If you’re just tuning in we’re talking about ice hockey,” said JJ, a little flippantly. I guess you had to keep it a little bit light or people wouldn’t watch.

“It’s the vanguard of the revolution,” I said, leaning into it a bit.

“So, if people want to watch you play for real, where can they see the Tomcats?”

“We’re actually not allowed to call ourselves that any more.”

“Right,” said JJ. “Because of the league.”

“Again, they can’t stop us playing, but they can come down hard on any suggestion we’re still part of the league, including using names or branding or anything associated with it. So, for the lawyers, we’re a completely new, unaffiliated team, playing casual games against other unaffiliated teams who just so happen to have also decided to quit the league.”

“Hence the name change.”

“Hence the forced gender transition.” I heroically kept a straight face as I watched Arcadia squirm. “We’ve had our balls whipped off, and have gone from the Tomcats to the Wildcats. And we’re playing this Sunday. I think there should be a ticket link in the description?”

“There is indeed,” said JJ. “And if people want more Arcadia, where can they find you?”

“What if they want less?” I said, almost making JJ choke.

***

“Oh my god,” said Arcadia, when the host had finally left the call. “You really can’t turn it off, can you?”

“I was never like this before,” I said. “In many ways this is your fault.”

She gaped at me. “You are absolutely not blaming HRT for becoming a… a pest.” I grinned. “That’s not a documented effect.”

“I used to be such a nice, well-behaved boy before I met you,” I sighed theatrically. She was right, I couldn’t turn it off.

“I explained it to you. This is delicate, political stuff. I asked you to be on your best behaviour.”

“That was my best behaviour!” Judges’ scores, 9.25, 9.5, 8.75. “I was killing it.”

“I just… not to gatekeep, but you have been queer for all of five minutes.”

“What, like it’s hard?”

Arcadia bit her fist and screamed into it.

“We did okay though, right?” I asked, doubting myself a bit now. “I didn’t fuck up?”

There was a long pause. “No. Ugh, no, you didn’t fuck up. You’re really good at this.” She looked around herself, and for the first time I took in what I could see of her room, which looked small and kind of sparse, but then maybe she’d just picked a neutral wall as a background. Maybe all her obscure band posters were on the other walls. “You’re just not doing anything how I would do it.” She scratched her cheek. “Speaking of which, I do actually have things to do.”

“Wait, Arcadia, before you go?”

Heavy sigh. “Yes?”

“Thank you? For everything? Seriously.”

There was another pause. “You’re welcome. Seriously.”

And there was the awkward silence that sincerity always brought out in me. I could fix that.

“Also, could you explain boofing to me?”

“Goodbye, Freya.”

I leant back on the chair, thankful I no longer had to worry about its creaking or obsess over the sound of my breathing. I spun it two hundred and seventy degrees to the right and smiled. “What did you think?” I asked the only audience that mattered.

***

“You ready for this?” my captain asked. So redundant. I drew myself up to my full height and flipped up my cage so she could see all of my face and winked at her. Just as I was hoping, I was rewarded with a full-face flush that wasn’t even slightly concealed by her own helmet. Making Kay blush felt better than winning a game, which was already the best thing I’d felt in my life.

That it also fired her up for the ice like nothing else was just a bonus. If I didn’t have to actually play I could have made a great cheerleader.

Some of the crowd had already started up with the Rick Astley, and I wondered how had that become our theme song. Oh right. That one was my fault. Just like everything else. Fish skated past me to her crease, muttering something darkly about running music choices past her in the future if she was going to have to hear them every game.

“I’m never gonna give you up,” I yelled after her.

I took one last look around the barn before skating out to my own spot. I was never gonna give up any of this.

Forty Three

The crowd looked good. Mostly our supporters, which was hardly surprising for a home game, but a home game also meant the haters were here in greater numbers as well, and I didn’t mean the other team’s fans.

Arena security was about as good as you could expect, and the volunteer stewards were doing their best as well, but what could you do when someone who looked like any other middle-aged parent there, had a ticket and waited until the game had started before chanting slurs at the ice? I tried to shut all that out and concentrate on my job, but it was hard. This was our barn. This was my ice. I wanted my territory back.

Then Freya winked at me and every coherent thought left my head.

***

KEJ in daylight looked even shabbier than at night, but it didn’t seem to be hurting trade. It wasn’t heaving, but nearly every table was full of students with laptops or phones or tablets not talking to each other. It took me a second to spot Freya because she was behind the bar, wrestling with the espresso machine. Her back was to the door, so she didn’t see me at first, giving me plenty of opportunity to watch her work. Even doing something mundane as pouring coffee, wearing something as ordinary as polyester trousers and a plain polo shirt, she managed to move like a dancer. She spotted me just as she handed over the tray of coffees, and I got to watch a huge grin burst on to her face.

“Kay!” she squealed, putting both hands on the bar and I swear she was about to leap over it when a loud cough from the rainbow-haired girl stopped her and she waved me over instead.

“It’s so good to see you! I don’t have another break this shift but if you ordered a coffee we could chat?” We’d seen each other that morning. I’d seen a lot of her, accidentally, when she came out of the bathroom after her shower. Hadn’t been enough. I was beginning to worry about the way I spent all day with her and then every moment she was away thinking about her. When I’d watched her give that interview to Arcadia’s friend’s podcast it had been all I could do not to creep slowly closer and closer, just so I could put a reassuring hand on her shoulder to tell her how good she was doing and so I could feel her through her clothes.

“Oh, okay, yeah,” I said, heating up a little bit. “I’ll have a-”

“I know what you like,” said Freya with a wink that made me feel like steam was coming out of my collar. I got to watch her again as she whipped up a perfect cappuccino as if she’d been working here for years.

“Can’t do the art in the foam yet,” she said, sliding it over to me, “But Leanne says I can practice with the dregs on my own time, so that’s a perk. Oh,” she said as rainbow hair girl glared at her. “Um. Three pound fifty. Sorry.”

Three-fifty wasn’t that bad for a cappuccino these days, I thought as I tapped my card to pay for the privilege of chatting to the girl I was living with.

Freya leaned back, threw a washcloth over her shoulder and spat in a pint glass before wiping another cloth round the inside. “So, what’s troublin’ ya stranger?” she asked with a weird accent which was probably supposed to be American.

“Sparrow!” yelled the rainbow-haired girl. “I won’t tell you again, stop gobbing in the glasses!”

“Sorry,” said Freya, chastised. “It’s going in the dishwasher anyway. I was just doing a bit.”

“You’re always doing bits, how about you do a bit of work for a change?”

“Yes boss,” she said. Wow. I needed to start taking pointers from her. How to control your pest. And she was such a pest. She’d owned that so thoroughly I couldn’t see it as an insult any more. She was my pest.

“So it’s going well then?” I asked, as Freya started stacking dishes in the machine.

“I mean it’s honest work,” she said, before stopping and thinking. “Except it isn’t, it’s cash in hand under the table work. But I am sweaty and exhausted, which feels honest.”

I know what would get you sweaty and exhausted, I thought, surprising myself. Where had that come from? Freya must be rubbing off on me. I whimpered a little.

“Seriously though, what’s up?” Freya asked in response.

“I’m worried about the game,” I lied.

“What? We’re gonna be great. We’ve literally never been in better shape.” She rolled up a sleeve. “Check out these guns,” she said, kissing a bicep which, admittedly, was no longer as non-existent as it had been a few months ago.

“It’s not our playing I’m worried about,” I said. “And I’m still fairly certain I could toss you over one shoulder,” I added, smiling indulgently.

“Keep making promises and sooner or later you’re going to have to deliver,” she snapped back.

“Sparrow!” snapped rainbow girl, indicating the waiting couple next to me.

“On it boss,” said Freya as she flashed a huge grin at the next customer and asked them what she could get them. You don’t own her smile, I told myself. She’s just being polite. I drank my coffee as moodily as possible given that it was covered in whipped foam and chocolate.

“Are you getting on okay here?” I asked once she was finished with the order. I lowered my voice. “She keeps calling you Sparrow.”

“Yeah, they all do, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be an insult? I think they just think it’s my first name?” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m also pretty sure they think I’m AFAB non-binary.”

“But you’re…” I stopped, trying to arrange the various layers of Freya’s gender into position, like a confusing lasagne. “But you’re not,” I finished, quietly but firmly. Apparently I hadn’t realised how invested I was in that. What was it Hannah had said about me? I put a lot of work into you. Hmm.

“I know,” said Freya. “But I’m beginning to think a big component of my gender might just be fucking with people.”

I thought about that for a while, watching her dance around, the little apron string knot bouncing when she walked, collecting empty plates full of cake crumbs and dirty coffee cups. What it meant to find out what your gender was. Early on, when I’d still been thinking of Freya as someone I’d rescued, I’d felt like I was cleaning up and fixing something that already existed, something damaged and dirty but still basically intact, still basically there, underneath a layer of dirt. I’d been thinking of it as like cleaning a skate blade, like Freya’s shining, bright, razor-sharp edge had been there all along, under the salt rust, and it had just needed polishing to reveal it. But that wasn’t it at all. She’d built that edge herself, it hadn’t been there before, waiting, passive, for someone to come along and buff it out. It needed creating. It was work. Work that was still going on. And I could help, a bit, give her tools, and pointers, but she was the one doing it, had to be the one doing it. We all did, really.

And god, every day she showed me something different didn’t she? Like the way she was chatting with these strangers in a way that would exhaust me within minutes but with a smile across her face the whole time. Every time I thought I’d got the measure of her she blindsided me and surprised me and made me want to tear off my own head and oh fuck I was so in love with her I was going to go insane. Why couldn’t I just say it? How had we slept in the same bed multiple times but I couldn’t bring myself to kiss her or tell her how I felt?

I lifted my head out of my hands to see a piece of notepaper being delicately slid under the saucer of my coffee cup. I looked up to see rainbow hair girl smiling at me.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s how I get my hair all these colours,” she answered. “My number’s on the back if you have any questions.”

I blinked as she walked away, then looked, in baffled confusion, to Freya, whose unreadable expression didn’t help. “What was that?” I asked.

“Nothing I’m going to concern myself with,” she said with a lopsided smile. “Now tell me, why are you worried about the game?”

***

The game was incredible. Sure the crowds had dipped a bit from those first curiosity-seekers after the split, but it was still a bigger audience than we’d ever pulled in the past, more than enough to make the arena management shrug their shoulders, pocket the cash and look the other way when the league made empty threats of legal action. The league may have thrown the barn a few quid to keep the lights on, but this was different. This was commercially viable, sort of, if you didn’t look at the numbers too closely.

And we were giving them a show, as usual. The Tomcats had always been solid, reliable, dependable. The Wildcats were… well, we were wilder. We hadn’t lost a game all season. I mean technically we’d lost every game since the league kicked us out, by default, but no-one was paying attention to those statistics any more. That was all fake. This was the real league now.

In the real world, we were on an unprecedented heater, and playing better than we ever had. Amira had stepped up her game, an intimidating enforcer that didn’t need to touch anyone to clear space around the puck. Tina was a calculating strategist, appearing wherever she was needed to exploit an opening or plug a gap. Fish was a wall, as always. Freya was a menace, roaming the ice, frustrating plays, intercepting passes and just generally making a nuisance of herself. Even Eilidh seemed better than she’d been before she broke her leg, despite the time off the ice. Maybe I was just imagining it.

And then there was Hannah.

“Penalty, Wildcats, hooking. Two minutes,” announced the linesman. Hannah was practically steaming as she skated over to the box, tearing off her helmet almost before she was off the ice. I sent out our penalty kill line and ducked into the bench next to her.

She was staring out on to the ice, but not following the action, just staring straight ahead, jaw rigid. “How’s your mum?” I asked when I was confident the referees weren’t looking. We didn’t have a dedicated box jockey, so as long as I also stared straight ahead we weren’t likely to get in any more trouble.

“Fine,” said Hannah, tersely. Grace had gone back to work and at the same time, disentangled herself from most of the extra duties she’d been doing for the team. She’d said it was because she’d used up all of her leave, but we all knew it was because of the shitshow at the league meeting and everything that had flowed from that. You couldn’t really blame her. She’d tried to manage a normal hockey team and had gotten herself attached to a weird snowballing political disaster.

“Okay,” I said.

Tina said she’d walked in on a blazing row between Hannah and her mum shortly after it happened, Grace showing her daughter yet another of those fucking videos. She didn’t stick around long enough to hear the whole argument, but she hadn’t needed to. You could put it together. Grace angry and baffled as to why Hannah was throwing away the one thing she cared about for a cause that meant nothing to her, Hannah getting more and more stubborn as her mum told her what to do.

And now here she was, doing the right thing – maybe not for the right reasons, but doing it – and being punished for it from all angles. I just wanted to hug her, but every time I did she went all stiff and weird so I stopped doing that.

The one thing you couldn’t say though was that her game was suffering. She’d always been the best player on the team, but now she was a level above all of us. She was finding angles and holes that shouldn’t have existed. Even Freya had stopped trying to score her first goal and was just feeding pucks to Hannah instead, because she always found a way to land a shot on target.

But she was also picking up more penalty minutes than the rest of the team put together.

“I know what you’re gonna say,” she said, still not looking at me. “I’ll settle down.” Of course she knew what I was going to say. She knew me better than anyone.

“Okay,” I said again, watching the opposing goalie get Freya in a headlock.

***

Somehow we got to the end of the first frame without letting them score while we were short-handed. I patted an exhausted Fish on the back as she went past me. “We’re gonna shut them down next period,” I promised her, and she just nodded, lightly touching the back of her helmet. She was missing Arcadia something fierce.

As we skated back to the changing room something caught my eye in the stands. A fan scuffle, by the looks of things. Some people with big trans pride flags were being pushed by a couple of Wildcats fans. All four of them were shouting and several people were filming it on their phones.

“What the hell?” I said out loud. “Why are our guys attacking people with pride flags?”

“They’re not pride flags,” muttered Freya darkly, skating past me, head down.

I looked again. She was right, they weren’t really flags at all. They were more like rigid boards, the kind that you saw in old cartoons with “the end the world is nigh” written on them, and now I was paying attention I could see one of them did have something written on it. It took me a few seconds to read it, and then a few more seconds to realise what it meant. That couldn’t be right, surely, I thought, as the flag’s owner wrenched it back and started complaining about being attacked so loudly even I could hear him. Why would you write that on a trans pride flag?

Oh, I thought, anger rising in my throat as I finally figured it out.

***

“Fucking hell,” said Freya, winding up to throw her helmet against the wall and only thinking better of it when Fish grabbed her wrist. We didn’t have the equipment budget to start breaking things, however justified it might be.

Most of the Wildcats were focused on prepping their gear for the second period, saying nothing. We should have been on a high. We were three nothing up and could probably double that in the second frame if we felt like it.

I didn’t much feel like it.

Hannah had taken off her helmet and was running her head under the shower, with no apparent regard for the water getting everywhere.

“How the hell did they even get in?” asked Freya.

“Turned their stupid signs round,” said Fish, taping up her pads even more tightly as if she could turn her goalie gear into a hazmat suit for keeping out the poison. “Without the slogans they just look like pride flags, that’s the point. You look at them and smile because you think they’re an ally, then you read the words and they get to watch your face twist in disgust as you realise what it says.” She looked at me, and I wondered how much of this stuff she and Arcadia’d had to suffer, for how long, without me knowing anything about it. She shrugged. “They get off on it.”

“That’s sick,” I said. Despite myself I couldn’t help thinking about the kind of person who would do that. What must it be like to be so full of hate?

“Okay,” said Tina, coming back in from the corridor. “I finally got them to agree to kick them out. Should be gone by the start of the second period.”

“Along with the fans fighting them,” said Eilidh, coming in after her. “Which doesn’t seem fair.”

“We’ll have to block them at the gate next time,” said Fish. “Try and find a way to explain it to venue security.”

“Give them a crash course in identifying transphobic arseholes?” said Freya. She put on a posh old-fashioned voice. “Know your enemy. The vile TERF can be identified by their unfashionable haircut and copy of the Guardian.”

Fish looked at her. “Your gear’s all over the place, if you’re gonna keep getting beaten up you need to learn to stop letting them twist you around. Come here, I’ll sort you out.”

“Cheers,” said Freya, and she let Fish drag her into a quiet corner. If anyone had noticed that Freya was always getting changed in the shower or dark alcoves they hadn’t said anything.

I left them to it, because Hannah had stopped soaking her head and had dragged herself back to the bench. She didn’t look as if she’d calmed down. If anything she looked even more worked up.

“Kay,” she said in a tone that made it sound like she was about to explode. “That podcast.”

Everyone went quiet.

“Why was she recording from your room?” asked Hannah quietly.

“H-how do you know it was my room?” I stuttered.

“C’mon Kay. Even if it wasn’t for your battered computer chair or that ratty old poster of Hillary Knight, I could literally hear you lurking off-camera.”

Shit. I’d been so careful. I’d barely breathed the whole time Freya had been speaking.

“Oh, she’s living with her,” said Tina breezily, as if it was the most normal thing in the world..

“What?” said Hannah.

“Yeah?” said Amira. “Kind of obvious?”

“Since when?”

“Since… uh, I guess since she showed up?” Tina looked at me. “Happened pretty quick.”

“It’s not what you think!” I protested. Or what I wanted it to be. “She didn’t have anywhere to go.”

“Why didn’t anyone say say anything?” asked Hannah, gobsmacked.

“None of our business,” shrugged Amira.

“Yeah, as long as Kay wasn’t in trouble. You weren’t, right?”

“No!” I said, far too quickly. Why did everyone think Freya was a threat to me, rather than the other way around?

“There you go then,” said Amira.

“How did I not know about this?” Hannah asked.

“You’re not that observant Hanns, no offence,” said Tina, hand on her hip. “Not like me and Amira. It’d take someone a lot more sneaky than Kay or Freya to fool us.”

“Yeah,” agreed Amira. “No offence, cap, but you’re terrible at keeping secrets.”

I stared off into the middle distance as I felt Hannah’s eyes on me.

***

We were half way through the second period before Hannah picked up another penalty, which I thought showed an admirable amount of restraint. She’d been slammed into the boards and just gone for the other girl without even pausing to drop gloves. By the time we’d managed to pull her off everyone in the stands was on their feet, cheering for another tilly.

Hannah was skating to the box before the linesman had even made the announcement, then let out a scream that echoed around the entire arena and slammed her stick down so hard on the gate that it snapped in two.

Everyone just stopped dead, staring at her. I didn’t even have to think about it, I was at her side, arms around her, I didn’t care if she didn’t like it, she was getting a hug.

“Hannah!” I said, holding her. “Calm down! What is wrong with you?”

“It’s not fair!” she hissed. “I had you for years, and she just shows up and takes you in one night.”

“No-one’s taken me anywhere Hanns,” I said, confused. “I’m still here. You’ve still got me.”

Hannah lifted up her cage and wiped away tears, leaving her mascara smudged over her cheeks. “Kay, you’re a fucking idiot,” she said, and slammed shut the door to the penalty box, falling heavily onto the seat.

I watched her over my shoulder as I skated back to the centre circle, trying to put together pieces in my mind that all felt very big and heavy and important.

Something hit the ice behind me with a sickening crunch. I turned around, all confusing thoughts of Hannah on hold as I took in the sight of a single tin can, half-embedded into the surface of the rink.

“The fuck?” I said out loud.

“Are they throwing beans at us?” said Tina, skating up to me.

“That could have hit someone,” I said to the linesman, which might not have been the most perceptive observation, but it didn’t seem to register at all with her. They were used to fans throwing the odd jersey onto the ice, maybe even a stuffed toy or two, but they seemed at a loss at how to deal with something that seemed designed to actually hurt someone. She bent down and wrenched the can out of the ice with a grunt and then looked around, as if she was expecting someone to come and reclaim it. Terribly sorry, those are my beans.

“The fuck is going on?” asked Amira, skating up to us.

“They’re throwing beans at us,” I explained, scanning the stands for the culprit. It can’t have been one of the sandwich board wearing protestors, they were still by the fire exit, arguing with the useless ushers, and in any case neither of them looked like they’d had the upper body strength to lift their arms above their shoulders, much less wang a tin can over the plexiglass barrier. Someone else must be trying to disrupt the game in a more direct – and more dangerous way.

Our barn wasn’t huge, and the seats weren’t raked that high, which meant that it didn’t take long to spot something was off – people moving through the stands sideways rather than backwards and forwards. Not spectators trying to get a better view, but people who didn’t care about watching the game. There were at least two of them, but I couldn’t get a good look at their faces. I did see what they were wearing though, and something about it made my brain itch with how not right it was.

Plenty of people were still wearing masks, I told myself. Me and mum had worn them longer than most, still did when we got sick, so we didn’t sneeze all over people. This guy didn’t look like the considerate sort. And there was another one, moving the same way, on the opposite side of the rink.

Next break in play, I told myself. I’d point them out to the linesmen, and maybe get Amira’s cousins to see if they could film them, get their faces on video. I didn’t have much confidence the cops would do anything, but it couldn’t hurt to get some footage.

***

I got distracted, of course. First we had to break up their power play, then Hannah was back out on the ice and I got all confused again, trying to work out what was wrong and how to calm her down. Then we had a perfect run of control of the puck and everything was going so smoothly that I forgot all about the crowd and lost myself in the game. Almost like old times. Sometimes, when everything clicks and flows together, you can feel a goal coming, even if you don’t know exactly how you’re going to get there. I could feel one now.

Hannah was in the perfect position to take the pass from me but two of the opposing defenders were going to get to her first and there was no way she was going to slip past both of them, especially in the head down fight first mood she was in.

And then I felt where Freya was. I couldn’t see her, but I knew they’d left her unmarked to take down Hannah and I knew where she was and I knew where she was going. I didn’t have to look as I passed the puck under my own skate while still moving forward to fake out my own marker and distract her for the valuable split second Freya would need. All she would need, I hoped.

Hannah was already tussling with one of the defenders but it was all stickwork, all legal and down on the ice so far and I hissed at her to keep it settled because we didn’t need to take a penalty what we needed right now was to keep them distracted so they didn’t realise that our little pest was the threat and the goalie had seen her because she wasn’t stupid and she’d shut down the angle and Freya had overshot anyway and gone round the back of the net and then the goalie looked up to check the state of play and that was a mistake because Freya had scooped up the puck on the blade of her stick and surely she wasn’t going to try to and of course she was going to try to because she was Freya and she was a pest and she was a glorious idiot and I loved her and she came out on the goalie’s blind side and delivered the puck like she was sliding a pizza off a tray and the buzzer sounded and she had scored her first goal ever with a fucking Michigan.

She was going to be insufferable.

The crowd were on their feet.

Half of them were screaming, the other half were having it explained to them what had just happened by the screaming half. Freya was standing in front of the goal like she couldn’t believe what she’d just done. No celly, no cheering, just blank incomprehension and then a slow grin spreading across her face as she looked at me.

And that’s when everything went insane.

We worked out later that what must have happened is that one of the can-throwers had wound up another shot, but hadn’t put enough height on it to clear the barrier. It bounced back into the crowd, thankfully losing most of its power because it arced back down directly into the seats. Directly down to where Sam and Layla were sitting in the little kid-sized Wildcats jerseys we’d had made specially for them.

Kids scream all the time, especially at hockey games, but also just generally. The noise off a playground carries for miles, but you’d never mistake it for the screams of genuine distress. This one short-circuited my brain and had me dashing across the ice faster than I’d ever skated before.

Freya was the first one into the stands. She didn’t even go to the bench, just launched herself straight up from the blue line, scrambling up the barrier like she was hopping the boards. Hannah was only a few seconds behind her, taking a less dramatic but no less furious route through the tunnel and up into the stands from there.

Then I was in the stands as well. Couldn’t quite work out how I’d got there, but I knew where I was going because the guy I was after was burned into my brain. Black hoodie, black facemask, badly-fitting, too-tight jeans. I shoved aside a guy waving a placard in my face and saw it. Freya on top of a guy twice her size, pounding him like he was punching bag.

He’d obviously been taken by surprise, but this wasn’t a hockey tilly. He was big and he had the kind of muscles you got from angry working out every day. He looked like a Bully XL had made a wish to be a real boy. Freya still didn’t know how to throw a real punch and they were hitting him with all the force of a barrage of water balloons. He was going to get up and he was going to hurt Freya, and I was about a hundred feet away with dozens of panicking fans and an entire row of seats between me and them and my skates clattered against the concrete steps like a mocking upbeat tap dance and I wasn’t going to make it. I looked down to grab the edge of a seat and haul myself over it, maybe if I got there quick enough I could stop the worst of it still.

I looked up again, expecting to see my nightmares confirmed, to see Freya sprawled against the plastic seating, blood running down her face.

Instead I saw a miracle.

Hannah leaping from the top row of seating, wrapping a firm arm around the guy’s neck as he tried to struggle to his feet. Fish coming in from the front with the lumber, jabbing her stick into his stomach and sending him stumbling forward. Murphy putting a firm knee into his back and holding him down with all her weight. Baldwin and Eilidh, chasing his accomplice out the fire exit. My mum, already talking on the phone with the face she wore for the cops. Amira carrying Sam in her arms with Tina and Layla trotting along to either side. Nadeen and Zahra, filming it all.

Right.

We were a team. We were all a team.

***

“Is Sam okay?” I asked, as Tina flopped, exhausted, to the ice.

“Yeah,” she said. “Just a nasty bruise on their shoulder. Ambulance crew are taking a look but they don’t think there’s anything to worry about.” She looked down at her hands and grabbed one with the other. “Could have been much worse if it had hit their head. They’re still pretty shaken up, though. Layla too.”

“Hey, you did so good,” I told her. “I can’t believe how calm you were.”

“I didn’t want to say anything in front of Amira,” she said. “They could have killed them, Kay. How can people be so…” She trailed off, and I hugged her, because what else could you do?

I looked over to the stands, where the cops were still taking statements from some of the spectators. They hadn’t questioned us or the other team yet, I guess because we were still kids, but they hadn’t let us leave. Maybe they were waiting for a chaperone or a translator or something. So we sat on the ice, sprawled around like the aftermath of a war, arsecheeks slowly getting colder but unwilling to put our sweaty outer clothes back on.

“Do you think they’ll be arrested?” asked Freya,

“If not then they’ll wish they had been,” growled Fish. We all knew what she meant. If we saw either of those guys again it was on sight.

“We need to get our story straight as well,” said Hannah, who seemed much calmer, more like her old self, like everything that had been bottled up inside her and that had been exploding all over everyone for the last few months had just drifted away. “Nothing complicated. We went into the stands to protect Sam. That’s it.” She looked at Freya. “No-one’s going to believe you beat up that guy anyway.”

“He tripped,” Freya protested. She looked around at us all being very sceptical. “He did! I was just the first to get to him.”

There was a long silence.

“What do you mean, no-one’s going to believe I beat that guy up?” Freya blurted in delayed indignation. “I’ve been getting hench! Right? Kay?”

She let her helmet fall and flexed one arm, to general indifference. Then she dropped it back to the ice and stared up at me with those big eyes. Her hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat. A bruise was already forming around one of her glittering hazel eyes. She was grinning and her mouth was full of little trails of blood that outlined her teeth. No one in the history of the world had ever looked hotter. I felt my mouth go dry.

“I swear to god, Kay,” said Hannah. “If you don’t kiss this bitch right now, I’m going to do it just to spite you and then I’ll be two to nothing up on you.”

Freya gave a little strangled mrrrt like a startled bird.

“Freya?” I said, no longer caring that the entire team was watching.

“Yeah?”

“I love you so much. I think I’ve loved you since the day we met.”

“I know,” she said without a trace of a smile, still breathing heavily. “So when are you going to do something about it?”

I did something about it.

Epilogue

“Keep your arms out for balance and bring them in to spin faster.”

“I look ridiculous.”

“You look incredible. Just wait til we get you in the sparkly dress.”

“Not a chance. I’m wearing the trousers.”

“We’ll see about that. Now, let’s try a jump. Skate backwards in a circle to build up momentum and then when you’re ready use your toe pick to push off.”

“I’m going to go flying.”

“Yeah you are.”

“Ahh! Ah!”

“There you go! Brilliant! Ten, Ten, Ten!”

“You’re- you’re a very generous scorer.”

“That’s not the only thing I’m generous with.”

“You are such a pest.”

“I’m your pest.”

“Yeah, you are.”

“Yeah, I am. Merry Christmas, Kay.”

“Merry Christmas, Freya.”