Chapter 5 Jamie
JAMIE
The team wins in Nashville and goes to a bar on Broadway and I go with them because I'm supposed to.
This is the thing about being a rookie. You go.
You go to the team dinners and the bar nights and the charity events and the optional skates that are not actually optional.
You go because belonging requires presence before it requires anything else, and the alternative to going is staying in the hotel room alone, and I have done enough alone to know that alone does not get easier with repetition.
Alone just gets quieter, and the quiet is where the thoughts live, and the thoughts are not my friends right now.
The bar is loud and warm and crowded with Broadway tourists and bachelorette parties and a scattering of hockey fans who recognize us from the jerseys some of the guys are wearing over their button-downs (Jonah has a Reapers cap on, which is the subtlety equivalent of a neon sign).
I order a Sprite at the bar because I'm nineteen, and the bartender gives me the specific, sympathetic smile reserved for people who are obviously underage and obviously with a group and obviously not having the same kind of night as everyone else.
I take my Sprite to a booth. The booth is in the back, near a hallway that leads to the restrooms, and from here I can see the room without being in it.
This is my preferred social configuration: present but peripheral, visible but not central, close enough to the group to technically be part of it and far enough to watch.
I watch.
Cole Briggs and Mik Volkov are at the bar.
Cole is telling a story, animated, using his hands in the way that hockey players use their hands when they talk about anything, as if the whole world is a play they're diagramming.
Mik is next to him, not participating in the story but participating in Cole, his body angled toward Cole's body with the gravitational certainty of an object that has found its orbit.
When they leave, twenty minutes into the evening, Cole puts his hand on the back of Mik's neck.
The gesture is casual. The gesture is owned.
The hand on the neck says: this person is mine and I touch him because I am allowed to and the allowing is so old and so settled that neither of us thinks about it anymore.
I think about it.
Jonah Park is at a table near the stage, where a cover band is playing something country.
He has his phone propped against a bottle of Dos Equis and he's FaceTiming Ren, who appears to be in their apartment in Atlanta, lying on a couch, laughing at something Jonah is saying that I can't hear over the music.
Jonah's face, while Ren laughs, transforms. The easygoing charm that is Jonah's default setting sharpens into something more specific and more vulnerable.
The face he shows the world is a great face. The face he shows Ren is a better one.
Wes Chen is in a corner booth, alone except for his phone.
He is texting. The murder face, which I have learned is the name for Wes's default expression (coined by Luca, adopted by the team, apparently a real and documented phenomenon), has been replaced by something I have never seen on that face.
Softness. The kind of softness that arrives when a person who is made of edges allows the edges to round, temporarily, in the presence of someone who is not threatened by them.
Wes is texting Luca, and the texting is making his face do things that his face does not do in public, and the privacy of this (a man in a corner booth having a private expression about a private person) makes me look away because it feels too intimate to observe.
Mars Santos is at the end of the bar, phone to his ear, speaking in Portuguese.
His voice is low and warm and cadenced in a way that the English version of Mars is not.
English Mars speaks in short, analytical bursts that sound like they were processed through a computer before reaching his mouth.
Portuguese Mars speaks in curves. The warmth in his voice is startling, like discovering that a granite building has a heated interior.
Everyone has someone.
Jonah catches my eye from across the room.
He tilts his head, the universal Jonah gesture for "you okay over there?
" and I give him a thumbs-up, which is the universal rookie gesture for "I'm fine, please don't come over here and be perceptive at me.
" Jonah accepts the thumbs-up because Jonah respects boundaries even when his every instinct is to obliterate them with warmth.
He goes back to his FaceTime. Ren says something on the screen and Jonah laughs, and the laugh is the sound of a man who has someone to laugh for, and the sound carries across the bar and lands in my booth like a stone in still water.
I am sitting in a booth in Nashville with a Sprite that is losing its fizz and a chest that is doing the thing it does when I watch people who have found each other.
The thing is not jealousy. It's closer to bewilderment.
A confusion about the mechanics. How does a person get from here (alone in a booth, unnamed feeling, search bar closed) to there (hand on neck, face on phone, softness in a corner)?
What are the steps? What is the sequence of events that converts a person from someone who has a feeling into someone who is allowed to act on it?
I don't know the steps. I don't know the sequence.
I don't know the first word of the first sentence of the instruction manual, because the instruction manual is written in a language I haven't learned yet, and learning the language requires admitting that you don't speak it, and admitting you don't speak it requires admitting that you need to, and the needing is the thing I am not ready to name.
So I drink my Sprite. I watch the band. Two rookies from the fourth line come by and invite me to their table and I go because I'm supposed to and I laugh at their stories about billet families in juniors and I contribute a story about my father's coaching (the time he made the entire JV team skate suicides because someone forgot to lock the equipment room) and the story is funny and true and the telling of it costs me nothing because the story is about hockey and hockey is the language I already speak.
But the performance costs something. The performance always costs something.
The energy required to sit at a table and be Jamie Kowalski, fun rookie, good teammate, one of the guys, while the unnamed feeling presses against the inside of my ribs like a second heartbeat.
The performance is a wall, and the wall requires maintenance, and the maintenance is exhausting, and the exhaustion is invisible because the wall is designed to be invisible.
That is the whole point of the wall. Nobody sees it.
Nobody sees the labor of keeping it up. Nobody sees the boy behind it who is drinking Sprite and watching couples and feeling the shape of a thought he cannot think.
The bar closes at midnight. The team filters out.
I share an Uber with two of the fourth-liners back to the hotel.
Jonah is already in bed when I get to the room, asleep in that instantaneous way of his, the phone still on his chest, the FaceTime with Ren presumably ended mid-sentence like all of Jonah's evenings.
I lie in the dark. The hotel ceiling is white and textured and Nashville is muffled outside.
The room smells like hotel (detergent, recycled air, the ghost of a thousand strangers who slept here before me) and the smell is anonymous in a way that makes the dark feel larger, like lying at the bottom of a well.
I take out my phone. I open the browser. The cursor blinks.
I type two letters. Is.
I stare at them. Two letters on a white screen.
The beginning of a question I can't finish.
Is it normal to. Is it possible that. Is there a word for.
The possible endings multiply in my head, each one a door I could open, each door leading to a room I have never entered, and the rooms are dark and the rooms are mine and the rooms have been waiting for me to arrive.
I delete them. I type three letters. Am I.
Am I what? Am I different? Am I wrong? Am I the thing I think I might be? The letters sit on the screen like objects on a table, small and inert and harmless, and yet deleting them feels urgent in a way that is disproportionate to their size.
I delete them. I close the browser. I turn off the phone and put it face-down on the nightstand and press my hand against it as if the phone might open itself and type the question without my permission.
The dark is quiet. Jonah breathes. The hotel is still.
I lie awake for a long time. Not thinking about anything specific.
Just lying in the general vicinity of a thought that I can feel the shape of without seeing the details, the way you can feel a wall in a dark room without touching it.
The thought is there. The wall is there.
I navigate around it. I don't look at it directly.
Looking at it directly would require turning on a light, and the light would illuminate other things, and the other things are not things I am prepared to see.
The cursor blinks in my memory. Patient. Persistent.
Am I.
Two letters. Two words. The beginning of something.
I fall asleep before the end arrives.