This is what Frankie had ascertained since arriving at the rink from the pool: she remembered that Abel was their next clue after the athletic center, though she couldn’t place what the clue had said. That felt irrelevant anyway, and Frankie was not in the business of worrying about irrelevancy; this was at least part of the reason she was so good at her job: if an artist was set to fade into obscurity or not hitting the way they’d anticipated, she simply let them drift off into the figurative musical sea. It wasn’t kind, she knew, but then you didn’t get to the top of the game in a male-dominated, highly charged industry by being kind. Besides, kindness, she was sure, was overrated.

By the time they’d tripped from the swimming complex through the bone-chilling Western Massachusetts cold to Abel, Ezra and Gregory had been very very drunk. Frankie remembered that too. In some ways, this made being teammates easier. Ezra had never been an emotional drunk; that had been Frankie. Instead, he became quieter, more introverted, so mostly, they slunk down to the rink in silence, a mutually understood pact that saying nothing was better than saying anything, because then, they were really going to get into it. Besides, Gregory was keeping up the conversation for both of them. He and Alec, who was still in top college-athlete form and bigger than all three of them and, therefore, seemed to hold his alcohol the best, belted out a medley of Whitney Houston hits, and it was all Frankie could do not to interject when he got the words wrong.

No one knew exactly what they were looking for when they got there. Probably because no one could remember the clue, which explained why Frankie couldn’t remember it today. Alec swore he had stuffed it in his jacket, but alas, it was gone. Frankie emptied her purse on the bleachers while Ezra and Gregory went through their pockets, but their only hope of staying competitive and/or winning, which Frankie very much still wanted to do, was scouring the rink for something that looked amiss. It was then that Ezra noticed that either due to the spotty cell service on campus or due to his inebriation, he had missed three calls from Mimi.

Alec, who Frankie now realized may have been more drunk than she’d been aware of at the time, had pumped his fist and said, “Dudes! Have you ever driven a Zamboni? Let’s break into the shed!”

And Gregory threw his head back and yelled, “Oh, I wanna dance with somebody!” As if this had anything to do with anything.

And Ezra shrugged, mostly just moving around the bleachers trying to get a signal, his eyes fuzzy, his legs limber, and said: “Cool. A Zamboni.” Then to Frankie, “I just remembered that you can skate.”

Frankie hadn’t known if this meant that she should skate while they took a joyride on the Zamboni or if it meant that he remembered that she’d once took lessons because she’d been too embarrassed to go to the pond near his house. She hadn’t even thought about that pond by his house in a decade, though every time Moonstruck was on cable as a late-night movie and Frankie couldn’t sleep, she did think of Ezra.