He hadn’t been out there on his own long before Cannon joined him, but with a look that suggested he wanted to talk to Chalmers. Chalmers glared at him and concentrated even harder on what he was doing so as to ensure Cannon wouldn’t try talking to him.
“You and Tanya Harvey were a bit of a quiet thing, weren’t you?” Cannon asked nonetheless.
“You correctly put that in the past tense,” Chalmers replied tautly.
“So if I told you that I saw her having lunch with Atkins you wouldn’t be surprised?” Cannon asked.
“What!?” Chalmers snapped, rage exploding through his body more intensely than he had ever recalled it doing before.
“Oh,” Cannon said quietly.
“When?” Chalmers demanded.
“Every day this week we’ve been in school,” Cannon replied.
“Was it just the two of them?” Chalmers demanded.
“And her friend who’s dating LoKey,” Cannon replied. “So he was there too.”
Chalmers looked back at the wall he’d been facing, then looked down at his clenched fists, which he saw were each holding half of the resistance band that had been stretched between them before. A twinge of guilt at having wrecked the band passed through him, but didn’t linger.
“I didn’t mean to kind of just dump that on you,” Cannon said. “Was it recent?”
“Not even a week ago,” Chalmers replied, discarding the broken resistance band and taking up a new one.
“Oh,” Cannon said. “Sorry.”
“It’s no surprise,” Chalmers swore. “We’d been on the rocks practically all season because she doesn’t understand.”
“Understand what?” Cannon asked.
“She thinks I’ve been lying to her,” Chalmers spat. “If it weren’t for the fact that her parents hadn’t known we were an item she would’ve put out a big ‘me too’ post about it to try and ‘protect’ other girls from becoming my ‘victims’.”
“That doesn’t tell me what she didn’t understand,” Cannon said.
“Basically everything,” Chalmers replied. “She didn’t understand anything. She didn’t understand how horrid Coach Leslie is, that I was trying, anything.”
“You mean you’ve stopped trying now?” Cannon asked.
“I don’t have the energy to keep it up,” Chalmers replied. “I barely have the will to get out of bed because it just throws me back into the nightmare instead of getting me out of it.”
“I wish I knew what to do to help,” Cannon said. “But I really don’t know what to do.”
“Join the club,” Chalmers swore.
Cannon sighed, but thankfully said no more, allowing Chalmers to focus on his routine in hopes of being able to fix his mind on hockey, and on his determination to get a goal, and maybe even a couple more goals. Five sounded nice, even if there was no promo in the WHL that would net a lucky fan a million dollars for the feat like there was in the NHL; it would get his goal total into double digits, which was about all he could hope for at this point.
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