He stopped short once Abel loomed in front of him, and he wondered momentarily if in addition to his blackout, he was now hallucinating. He blinked several times, but it was still there: a Zamboni parked half on the sidewalk, half in the street. One of the side doors of the building was hanging off its hinges, diagonally tilted toward the ground as if waiting for gravity to do its worst.

Ah shit, he thought. But at least he knew he’d been here last night. Destruction. How fitting.

TWENTY-FIVE

Frankie

Frankie knew that there were some messes she simply couldn’t clean up. She stood in the middle of the rink, with a 360-degree view of the ice and the stands, with her hands on her hips, and honestly had absolutely no clue how to resolve this. From her vantage point, she could see that the Zamboni had plowed clear through the side of the rink’s wall—where the little door should have been to allow skaters to enter the ice, there was at present just a gaping hole littered with debris and plaster and shards of wood.

Though now, she at least knew what the keys were for. She pulled them from her pocket. Her options were to drive the Zamboni back through the front door and park it in the middle of the rink, as if it had been here all along. Or wipe down the keys (no fingerprints—all those episodes of Law & Order in hotel rooms could finally pay off) and run. Or . . . she chewed the inside of her lip . . . accept accountability and call campus security and offer to write a check for the repairs? No, no. She rewound and went back to the previous ideas.

She heard footsteps echoing off the emptiness of the rink and started to scramble toward the bleachers, the keys dropping into her purse. But the ice was slick against her Doc Martens and there was nothing to grab on to, and she slipped and slid and slipped and slid until she more or less careened into part of the side wall that was still intact. The lump on her head was unhappy with this, despite its recovery at the pool, and she could feel the pulse in her neck bleating, beating, angry.

“I figured,” was all Ezra said, and then he was standing in front of her. “Of course.”

Frankie righted herself. “This wasn’t my fault. This was everyone else’s fault!”

Ezra scoffed as if this were the most preposterous thing he’d heard all day. Which, Frankie knew, could not have been the most preposterous thing from the day, because she was really starting to think that they’d gotten married.

“The three of you—this was your idea!” Frankie yelped. She yanked the keys out from her bag and threw them at him.

Ezra held out his hand and caught them, then narrowed his eyes.

“You remember?”

“You don’t?” Frankie said, her voice still too sharp, and it bounced off the ceiling and back to them. They both quieted and peered around, as if someone else might overhear.