Junior year. Winter term. This was the time for me to be studying as hard as I could. Like Robin Sipe, I should have been furiously editing my newspaper columns, making copies for college portfolios. I should have been mining the Sanjay Shah food and clothing drive for personal essay material. I should have been living and breathing debate. Already there had been a tournament at a high school in Boston, and during December I traveled with the team to Exeter, Providence, and White Plains.

But none of those things held my attention. What did? Lucas. Hockey. Boys beating the living crap out of each other in the guise of an organized winter sport. That was all my brain could absorb.

I fell in love with hockey’s can’t-look-away energy. Every game is like a train wreck in slow motion. Except it’s not in slow motion. It’s fast. And it’s brutal. Hockey players strap what are essentially knives to their feet. They carry sticks. They hit the puck so hard it becomes a bullet—it’s a lethal weapon. If not for the helmets, someone on the team would end up dead before the end of every game. Often when there was a break in play, I realized I’d been holding my breath.

But when you’re on the ice, Lucas told me, you can’t afford to feel fear. Keeping your head in the game means not leaving yourself open to attack, not needing your teammates to rescue you—though they always will. Team is everything. It’s us versus them, and whatever you have done to the other guys—even if it involves blood—you don’t stick around to clean up the mess. Stopping, thinking—these make you a target. A liability to the team. Speed—not rules—is what keeps the players from getting killed. Just slip away as quickly as you rushed in.

In hockey, you are looking not at what you are doing but at the puck. Where it can go, how it can get there, who can get open to receive it. You’re always seeking out this tiny black disk, and then there it is, darting off someone’s skate or appearing at the end of a stick. When I started watching games, it looked like the sticks attracted the puck, like they were magnetic and the puck made of metal. It was only after I’d been watching awhile that I could see it was the other way around. I began to understand the pushing and hitting as the backdrop for the real game, which was—and Rosemary laughed her head off when I told her this—like chess. Strategic positioning. Thinking three, five, fifteen steps ahead of where you were. Speed chess.

Or maybe I just saw the game that way because I was always watching Lucas. He believed in passing, which was unusual for a high school player. I thought maybe I was the only one who noticed, but then I heard Coach O’Reilly commenting on it in a huddle, telling the others to look to Dunready setting himself up for the pass, “thinking,” Coach O’Reilly said, “like I tell you, two steps ahead of the other guy.” The coach called Lucas’s playing “real mature.”

But the way Lucas played was more than mature. It was beautiful. Lucas was graceful and sharp; he was fast and he was subtle; he crouched, he swung himself forward, he flew, he stopped on a dime. Just seeing his name on the jersey—and his number, 17—was enough to send shivers down my spine.

Meanwhile, in the month of December, I could have filled a book with the transcripts of conversations I wasn’t having. My mom wasn’t bringing up the subject of Lucas and I wasn’t either. Rose wasn’t mentioning Jason and I didn’t ask her about Dex. Even when I found them outside the gym doors at the top of the parking lot, their heads bowed over the shared headphones on Dex’s Walkman, I said nothing. Even when Dex got drunk and asked me point-blank if he had a chance with Rosemary, I shrugged and walked away. Lucas wasn’t talking either. He didn’t once mention his memories or his dreams. I think he could tell I wasn’t ready.

Here’s what we were talking about: Lucas spent hours explaining hockey rules, hockey moves, hockey tradition. Rosemary’s mom adopted yet another dog, and Rosemary started carrying a lint roller everywhere, using it obsessively and pulling off another masking-tape layer when she saw so much as a single hair on her clothes. Dex got accepted early decision to Boston College, and Rosemary forced him to tell her his SAT scores. Banner news: Dex was actually smart. My mom was put in charge of the annual Christmas tree display at the museum, and I worked the coat check at the opening party. Val got buried under a company merger and we didn’t see her for weeks.

By Christmas, this strange state of talking yet not talking and discussing without asking had started to feel normal. When Rosemary left for Aruba for Christmas break with her family, we said goodbye and exchanged gifts (winter-solstice pedicures, our tradition), pretending the silences weren’t becoming larger than the conversations, that I wasn’t itching all the time to ask her how she could be so cruel to Dex and she wasn’t thinking I had given over too much of myself to Lucas.

Dex’s siblings and their children arrived in town, and Lucas and I brought Tommy and Wendell over to his house to play touch football with Dex’s nieces and nephews. (One of the nephews was the football. Lucas held the giggling two-year-old up in the air and Dex shouted, “No spiking!”)

Then it was the night before I was leaving to go skiing with my mom and Val for winter break. Lucas’s family was trimming their tree, so I went over to join them.

“My dad isn’t going to be here,” Lucas said when I got to the door—the side door by this time, since I was no longer a guest.

“Is he working?”

“He moved out.” Lucas tucked his chin into his chest as he gave his answer. I could see he didn’t want to talk about 1) the separation, or 2) the fact that another of his predictions had come true.

“Are you okay?” I tried. He rolled his eyes. He shrugged.

His mom seemed fine, at least. In fact, she was almost giddy. She had her hair up in a scrunchie. She’d brought home sushi. “Isn’t this what you eat with your mom?” she asked, and then, not waiting for my answer: “Lucas told me.” Tommy and Wendell weren’t talking about the separation, but from the way they scowled at their plates and refused to accept Mrs. Dunready’s assertions that the crab wasn’t raw, I could see that they were mad.

Without asking, Lucas poured out two bowls of Lucky Charms and put them down on the table for the boys.

“Next time, we’ll try tempura,” Mrs. Dunready murmured, turning up the volume when Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” came on the radio and pulling out a box of decorations for the tree. I loved seeing their ornaments: pictures of Lucas as a little boy, pinecones decorated with glitter, colored glass balls that felt brighter than the ones we used at home.

Lucas pulled one US Marine Corps ornament after another out of the box and hung them prominently on the tree. “Must you?” Mrs. Dunready sighed, but she didn’t object any further.

Before I left, I gave Lucas the watch. I didn’t say, “You already know what this is.” And when he said, “I promise I will wear this all my life,” he didn’t make it sound like he already knew he would. He broke our code of silence only once, when he buckled the watch to his wrist, held it away to show it off, and said, “It looks so new.”

His present to me was a locket with pictures we’d taken at the photo booth at an arcade we went to with Dex and Rose. In one side, we were sticking our tongues out. In the other side, he was kissing me on the cheek. Engraved on the back was ALWAYS: 17.

Skiing was something that for the most part I did alone, as my mom had never wanted to learn and Valerie, after teaching me, had given it up in favor of shopping and hitting the spa with my mom. So over Christmas break, I spent time alone with my thoughts, missing Lucas, wondering if he was all right.

Huddled on the chairlift just after a snowstorm, I wondered if it had snowed back home. I wondered if the landscaper who gave Lucas work in the summer had called him to help clear and plow—Lucas had said he might. I imagined Lucas shoveling, stripping down to a flannel shirt and snow pants, making short work of the drifts.

But was Lucas also—at some point in the future—leading a squad of marines into a death trap, snipers hiding in doorways or behind the laundry strung up on rooftops?

Breakfast in the lodge: Valerie’s dark, spiky hair, her red-framed glasses catching the light from the fire already roaring, my mom cozy in fur-trimmed boots, her hair blow-dried, makeup in place. A toasted bagel with jam. Dark coffee for my mom. Raisin bran for Val. Both of them talking crow’s-feet and belly fat and laughing in a way I remembered from when I was little. All of it should have been comforting, but it wasn’t. I felt claustrophobic. I wanted to go home.

Questions about college. There was a choice to be made. There was no wrong answer. Big, small; city, country. Not too close. Not too far. Liberal arts gives you the freedom to make up your mind about a career later. It teaches you to think.

But I didn’t want to think. Especially about college. I just wanted to ski. I wanted to escape my mom’s and Val’s prying gazes and penetrating questions. They could see I wasn’t the same; they didn’t know why, but they knew better than to ask. Even if I’d tried to explain, they wouldn’t have understood. They didn’t know what I knew. They hadn’t heard Lucas crying in his sleep. They had made safe choices. I was the one out in the cold, seeing the future through Lucas’s eyes.

On the last afternoon of skiing, I experienced vertigo for the first time in my life. I was standing at the top of the mountain, poised for the final run of the day, and suddenly, all I could think about was falling. In fact, I felt like I was already falling, my insides dropping out as if I were on a roller coaster. I couldn’t feel my feet. I couldn’t remember how to move my legs. My skis felt about as useful as a pair of cinder blocks. I couldn’t look down.

I was not in a good place to stop moving. It was cold, there was a strong wind, and the icy snow was stinging my cheeks. I let it, squinting at the blue in the ice, the shadows stretching over the trail as snow blew across it in sheets. The sun was sinking lower in the sky.

Lucas, where are you? I thought. I wanted him with me. He knew what it was like to feel your heart pounding in your chest and not understand why. I understood his dream now in a way I hadn’t before. I saw it the way he did, bathed in the cold light of anxiety.

In my fear-addled state, the images from the dream gripped me with a new intensity. It was so visceral it was as if an older Lucas, a terrifyingly real, heavier Lucas, had stepped back in time and taken hold of me. By the throat.

The rooftops, the laundry, knowing about Sanjay’s fire—I understood why it terrified him so much. And I understood that I believed him. The memories were real.

As if I could outrace them, I finally pushed myself forward over the crest of the hill. I skied in a way I had never skied before. I skied like I was being chased by demons. I crouched into a tuck, turning my skis as little as possible, leaning as far forward as I dared. My breath came quickly. Blood pounded in my ears. I could hear the edges of my skis scraping against ice. I knew if I didn’t slow myself down, I would ski into a tree or lose my balance and fall. But I didn’t slow down; I raced faster and faster, clinging to the hope that the hill would end soon.

That night, I had a hard time getting warm. Even when I was tucked safe into the lodge, drinking cocoa with my mom and Valerie and watching sappy movies on pay-per-view—a last-night-of-the-trip tradition dating back to when I was nine—my toes were like ice.

“Look at her,” Valerie said to my mom when they reached a pause in their conversation and glanced over at me. She was half teasing in the way she always did, and I smiled, clenching my jaw to hide my chattering teeth. “She’s growing up. She’s nearly an adult.”

“Yes,” my mom said, and then she giggled, which is something she does only when Valerie is around. Also, they were drinking champagne. “My baby!” she called out, embarrassing me, clearly enjoying it. I gave her the eye roll she was looking for, but I wasn’t really there.

I called Lucas later from the hallway, dragging the phone out of the room so I could have some privacy.

“There’s something I need to know,” I said.

“Okay.”

“Your dream,” I said, letting it sink in that I was breaking a month of silence on the subject. “Every time you have that dream, you see more. Your head hurts more. You remember more. So what’s going to happen when you get to the end of the dream? What happens when your remembering is … complete?”

Lucas said nothing for a minute. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted. Then he sighed. “But I have an idea.”