Kira keeps going to work, but it never really feels like it. She arrives later and later, leaves earlier and earlier, and she knows that her name won’t be mentioned next time there’s talk of promotion. She doesn’t go to the conference she was invited to attend. She doesn’t have the energy to think about the future, she’s just trying to get through the day, fixed permanently in survival mode.

As usual it’s her colleague who tells her a few home truths. One afternoon Kira manages to go to the wrong room for a conference call and walks in on a planning meeting where her colleague is presenting a strategic plan to an important client. Kira stops in the doorway and looks at her colleague’s notes on the board. They’re brilliant, as always, but if Kira had been involved, they would have been even better. She waits outside after the meeting, and when her colleague comes out, Kira says, “That’s my specialty, you know that! I could have helped you with the presentation! Why didn’t you ask me to help?”

Her colleague doesn’t look angry. She’s not trying to hurt Kira. She just replies honestly, “Because you’ve given up, Kira.”

* * *

Deep down inside most of us would like all stories to be simple, because we want real life to be like that, too. But communities are like ice, not water. They don’t suddenly flow in new directions because you ask them to, they change inch by inch, like glaciers. Sometimes they don’t move at all.

No one confronts Benji at school. Who would dare? But every day his phone fills up with text messages from unidentifiable numbers, and every time he opens his locker, people have stuck notes in the gap around the door. All the usual words, the same old threats, he soon gets used to it. He becomes very good at pretending nothing’s going on, and those who wish him ill take this to mean that he has it too easy. That he’s not being punished hard enough, not suffering enough, so they need to think of something else.

William Lyt comes to school one day wearing a T-shirt with a target on the front. It’s so small and discreet that only Benji notices it. The note that was pinned to the door of the cabin that morning when everyone had just found out the truth had the same target on it, drawn as the letter “A” in the word “FAG.” Benji tore the note off at once and destroyed it, it never appeared anywhere online, so he knows that the person who left it there is the only person who knows what it looked like.

William Lyt wants him to know who it was. He wants Benji to remember the knife. Winning a game of hockey isn’t enough.

Benji looks him in the eye. They’re standing a few feet apart in a corridor on an ordinary day in a long winter term, and all the other students are blithely milling past between classes, on their way to the cafeteria. It’s a moment that exists only for the two boys: one from a red team, one from a green, a bull and a bear. Sooner or later one of them will end up crushing the other.

The teams in the league play each other twice per season, one home game, one away game. Beartown Ice Hockey will win the rest of its games up until then, and Hed Hockey will win all of its. The schedule is counting down inexorably to the return fixture, this time in Beartown’s ice rink.

* * *

All sports are fairy tales, that’s why we lose ourselves in them. So of course there’s only one way for this one to end.

* * *

Maya is skipping school, but she has carefully picked a day when she has hardly any classes. Even when she breaks the rules, she does so responsibly. She gets onto the bus and travels for a long time, to a town beyond reasonable commuting distance. Then she goes into a large brick building with a letter in her hand and at the reception asks for a lawyer. When she walks into her mom’s office, her mom knocks her coffee over in surprise.

“Darling! What are you doing here?”

Maya hasn’t been to Kira’s office since she was little, but she used to love going there. Other children would get bored with their parents’ workplaces, but Maya liked seeing her mom concentrating on something. Seeing her passion. It taught the daughter that there are some adults who have jobs they really care about and aren’t only doing for the money. That work can be a blessing.

She looks worried when she puts the letter down on her mom’s desk, worried about making her parent feel abandoned. “It’s from a . . . music school. I applied . . . it was just . . . I just wanted to know if I was good enough. I sent them a video of me playing my own songs and . . .”

The mother looks at her daughter’s letter. Just seeing the letterhead is enough to make her start to sniff. Kira studied hard when she was growing up so that she would be accepted into a highly academic school; she dreamed of studying law even though no one in her family had ever been to university. She wanted rules and frameworks, security and a career ladder. She wanted the same thing for her children: a life where you know what to expect, free from disappointment. But daughters are never the same as their mothers, so Maya has fallen in love with the freest, least regulated subject she can think of: music.

“You got in. Of course you got in.” Kira sniffs, so proud that she can’t even stand up.

Maya sobs, “I can start in January. I know it’s a really long way away, and I’ll have to borrow money, I understand if you don’t want—”

Kira just stares at her. “Don’t want? Of course I . . . darling . . . I’ve never been happier for you!”

They embrace, and Maya says, “I want to do this just for me, Mom. Something just for me. Do you understand?”

* * *

Kira understands. Better than anyone.

* * *

The next day she gets to the office earlier than everyone else. When her colleague arrives at work, she finds Kira sitting in her chair. Her colleague raises her eyebrows, and Kira lowers hers. “Don’t you ever tell me I’ve given up again! All I ever do is not give up!”

* * *

Her colleague grins and whispers, “Shut up and send an invoice!” The two of them hand in their notice that morning. Then in the afternoon they sign a contract for the premises they’ve been dreaming about and set up their own company.

* * *

People in Beartown have never been the sort to demonstrate on the streets. They don’t go on marches, their opinions are conveyed by other means. That can be hard for outsiders to understand, but very little happens by chance in this community. Even if something looks like a coincidence, it usually isn’t.

* * *

Beartown Ice Hockey plays a few home games at the start of the season with the standing area of the rink intact, and Peter can’t help hoping, possibly naively, that his excuse that there’s no one prepared to demolish it has been accepted. But the factory’s new owner eventually sends an unambiguous email: “If the club doesn’t take firm action to get rid of the hooligans known as ‘the Pack,’ we will have no option but to cancel our sponsorship contract.”

So when the crowd arrives for one home game at the start of the winter, there are security guards standing in front of double layers of tape cordoning off the standing area.

* * *

Everyone has to make difficult choices this year. Peter chooses one path, for the survival of the club. So the Pack chooses its response, for its own survival.

* * *

Peter is sitting at the back of the stands, waiting for them to start shouting at him. He’s half expecting someone to rush up and punch him. But no one so much as looks in his direction. The rink is sold out, but there are no banners, no signs. Everyone behaves as if this were just a perfectly normal game.

The things that happen when this town chooses a side are so small that you could miss them even if you were standing right in front of them. The majority of the hockey crowd here are ordinary, decent people who would never condone violence; a lot of them moan about the Pack in the privacy of their own homes, about how “thugs” are giving the club a bad name and scaring off players and investors alike. But choosing sides in a conflict is rarely about who you’re standing alongside and almost always about who you’re standing against. This community may have its own internal arguments, but it always stands united against outsiders.

If a rich company wants to buy the factory and gain power over our jobs, we can’t stop it, but if they think they can buy our club and control our way of life, they’ve picked the wrong town to fight with. The Pack may symbolize violence to a lot of people, but to the neighbors who received help clearing fallen trees in their yards and were then offered a pint in the Bearskin afterward, they symbolize other things, too. To them the Pack is a small group of people who refuse to take any crap, who don’t change to suit the demands of power and money and politics. They have their shortcomings, they make mistakes, but it’s hard for anyone in Beartown not to sympathize with them, especially in times like these.

* * *

It isn’t completely right. But it isn’t completely wrong, either. It just is.

* * *