Chapter 12
On Record
~IRIS~
The rink at six twenty-five in the morning smells of nothing yet.
That is, frankly, the part I love about it.
By noon this ice will be a city, every man on it having added his weather to the room — sweat, leather, hot rubber, the chemical pine of Jimmy’s floor mop — but for now the air is still cathedral-clean, that scorched-mineral bite of freshly Zambonied ice climbing up the back of the throat and laying down a thin metallic chill on the tongue.
The lights overhead hum in the way fluorescents hum in big empty rooms. My breath plumes white.
My new pads slap a familiar percussion against my thighs as I work my way down the rail toward my crease, and the gear smells, properly, of me again: frosted strawberry, cold steel, the faint sugary ghost of a body mist I have not yet committed to giving up.
Five-thirty in the morning has always been the only church I know how to attend.
The cold scrubs the night off you. The ice forgives no shortcuts.
The crease is the most honest piece of real estate in the building, twelve feet of paint that does not care who your father was, what your scholarship paid for, or which house in which sector currently has your name on a piece of paper.
You stop the puck or you do not. There is something about that bone-simple yes-or-no that, on the worst days of my entire life, has been the single thing I have been able to trust.
Underneath it, indelibly, the burnt-orange-and-espresso whisper of a crimson hoodie I almost wore to practice and was talked out of by my own better judgment at six-oh-three.
Almost.
I made the right call. Probably.
The team is on the ice in two halves, as I am beginning to understand is the unspoken architecture of this entire program.
Sector one is grouped near the far boards, blue practice pinnies, the dark fortress shape of Brennan at the center of it with one of his lieutenants on each shoulder.
Sector two is closer to my end, white pinnies, looser arrangement, less performance in their posture.
The gap between the two groups is, as ever, the kind of gap you could lose a body in.
At center ice, the three coaches are in conference.
Coach Declan in the middle, in a fresh black jacket that does not, to my private gratification, look like the one I emptied my breakfast onto seventy-eight minutes ago.
To his left, Coach Whitlock — the tall, lean one with the clipboard, the one I have been collecting micro-expressions on since yesterday morning.
To his right, Coach Marek, the stockier of the pair, who has not let go of his travel mug all morning and seems to use the coffee as a kind of prop, a thing to look at when he does not want to look at me.
The three of them are speaking too quietly to hear, but the body language is loud enough on its own.
Coach Declan is delivering. The other two are receiving and visibly disliking what they have been handed.
I drop into my crease. I tap the pipes with my stick the way I have tapped the pipes of every crease I have ever stood in since I was nine years old. I bend down to check the strap on my right pad as though the strap is, at this exact moment, the most fascinating object in the building.
Do not look at the kitchen. Do not look at the kitchen. Do not.
I look at the kitchen.
Coach Declan’s eyes, across the cold length of the rink, flick to mine for less than half a second.
Then back to his colleagues.
Professional and clean. As though there is no strawberry shake anywhere in his entire history of human experience. As though we did not, one hour and eighteen minutes ago, stand a hand-span apart in a dark kitchen and conduct the worst five-word conversation of either of our lives.
I refuse to be the one who reads more into that flick than there is. I bend back down to my strap.
“LISTEN UP.”
Coach Declan’s voice goes the whole width of the rink without raising itself by a single decibel.
The whole team obeys at once, the noise of forty blades dragging in the same direction settling into a single hush.
Coach Whitlock and Coach Marek straighten slightly on either side of him with the precise discomfort of two men who have been told the meeting was about to be moved to the boards.
“As of six a.m. this morning,” Coach Declan announces, flat and even, “Iris O’Shea is officially rostered to this program. Sector two. Starting goaltender consideration. Effective immediately.”
The rink freezes.
Properly freezes. Twenty bodies that had been doing the small fidgety pre-drill shifting all stop at once, sticks in hand, breath plumed. The fluorescent hum becomes, in the absence of any other sound, mortifyingly audible.
Coach Whitlock’s clipboard does a small involuntary thing.
“Excuse me.”
“Mm,” Coach Declan replies. Not a question. A reminder he heard.
“Declan.” Coach Marek, lowering the coffee mug for the first time in living memory. “When, exactly, did this get approved.”
“Yesterday afternoon. The captain submitted the housing-and-roster paperwork on his way to the four-thirty debrief. I countersigned at five. Headmaster’s office stamped at five-forty. Pack confirmation came through at six this morning.”
“You —” Whitlock looks at Marek. Marek looks at the coffee like it has betrayed him. “— you were going to mention this when, exactly.”
“I am mentioning it now.”
It is, technically, the truth.
“That’s right.”
Jude’s voice carries across the ice in the easy unhurried way it carries everywhere, and a heartbeat later the captain himself is skating into the open space between the two team halves, the captain’s letter on the chest of his white pinnie picking up the overhead light.
He comes to a clean stop a stride off Coach Declan’s shoulder, planted square, posture unbothered.
“Submitted yesterday. Confirmed this morning. Iris is part of our pack. She’s ours. ”
Matteo glides in behind him, on his other shoulder, white pinnie pulled crooked over his shoulder pads in the deliberate slouch he wears like a personality.
He has not bothered to hide the grin. Rémi follows last, quiet and enormous, taking up the third point of the triangle, and the three of them stand at center ice flanking my head coach in a configuration that does, for the first time in twenty-four hours, look like a unit.
I am, ostensibly, still examining my pad strap. The strap has not changed.
A long, low whistle goes up from one of my sector’s defensemen, the sort of impressed under-the-breath whistle a man makes when his teammate has just done something he secretly admires and will roast him for later.
From the far half of the rink, a chorus of low scoffs and grunts comes back, the small mean wind of a group of men who have just learned the door they tried to close has been pried open over their heads.
“Hold the fuck on.”
That is Brennan. Sector one’s captain. The voice I have only heard described to me and now get to learn for myself, deep and braying and laced with the particular masculine outrage of a man who has been told, in public, that something he assumed was his decision was, in fact, not.
He skates a half-circle out in front of his crew, the dark sweep of his pinnie cutting the air like a flag a person planted on a hill they cannot defend.
The body is impressive. Six four, broad through the chest, blond hair cropped close.
Were this a different morning and I were a different woman, I might describe him as good-looking. I am, blessedly, not.
“An unpacked Omega cannot be on this team. That is league regulation. That is not a gray area. So someone explain to me right now how the pink-haired walk-in is suddenly skating in a white pinnie when, last I checked, she did not arrive with a pack on her back.”
Voss, from his usual orbit at Brennan’s elbow, snorts. “Oh, come on. She probably batted those big sad eyes at the captain over a piece of paper and the captain bent the rules. We’ve all watched it happen before. Omegas have one job and they’re very good at it.”
A few low laughs spill out of the sector-one half. Some uglier than others.
Breathe, O’Shea. Strap. Stick. Don’t look at them yet.
I do not look at them yet. I do, however, lift my head out of my pad just enough to track the back of Jude’s neck, because I know he is going to do something and I do not want to miss it.
Jude does not do anything.
It is Rémi who skates forward.
Half a stride. No more than that. Just enough that he is now standing inside the gap between the two sectors instead of beside it, and the entire rink registers the movement the way the rink always registers Rémi Bellerose moving, which is to say with the small reflexive flinch of an audience watching a piece of furniture decide to walk across the stage.
“She is part of our pack.”
Low. Even. Five words, the way Rémi tends to issue words at all, like he has only been allotted so many for the calendar year and intends to use them where they will land.
The rink, which had not entirely settled from the announcement, freezes again.
Differently. The first freeze was shock at policy.
This one is the shock of a roster suddenly remembering that the quietest man on it has a voice, and that the voice is currently, on the ice, in full view, speaking on a stranger’s behalf.
Even Brennan’s jaw stalls.