Chapter 5
Benson
The lights aren’t all the way up yet. The maintenance guy — Frank, he’s been here since my dad was an undergrad — is in the back flipping Camdenkers, and the rink is in that half-lit state where the glass looks gray, and the flags hanging from the rafters are just shapes.
The Zamboni is running on the next sheet over. I can hear it through the wall.
I’m on the bench with my bag at my feet, lacing my skates.
I’m threading the laces through the second-to-last eyelet when I remember being eighteen years old in the passenger seat of my dad’s truck.
We had just driven home from the rink in Plymouth where I won the juniors championship in double overtime on a goal I will, for the rest of my life, be able to describe in the present tense.
My dad had both hands on the steering wheel as he glared at the garage door.
The driveway light was on, the one with the motion sensor that had been broken for two years and stayed on whenever it felt like it.
It was December, so there was salt on the pavement.
My dad is a legend in my book. He coached my Squirts team, my Pee Wee team, and for two years, my Bantam team.
He yelled at refs and called assistant coaches in the parking lot at midnight.
One time, he threw a water bottle at the bench in a way he later apologized to me about. But he doesn’t cry.
He put his head down on the steering wheel, and I had no idea what to do.
It was dead silent when I noticed his shoulders moving.
When he lifted his head, he wiped his cheeks with the back of his hands.
I could only stare. The image is branded into my brain to this day. I won’t ever forget that moment.
“I’m proud of you, son,” he said under his Camdenth.
He reached over and grabbed my shoulder, forcing a grin through his tears.
“So proud.” He meant those words with his entire body.
I could feel it in his palm. “It’s not just because of the hockey.
Hear me? It’s your perseverance and resilience.
You work hard. You challenge yourself. You don’t give up.
” He wiped his face with his free hand. “Keep that forever, Benson.” He squinted his eyes, staring right at me.
“Hear me? Don’t lose your edge. Soon you’ll be out of this house, and it won’t be about making me proud anymore, son.
Make yourself proud. I need you to hear me that this was never about me.
You have real talent, but hard work trumps that every time. Understand?”
I nodded as he gripped my shoulder tighter.
“You’re a smart boy. I have no doubt that you’ll go out and accomplish whatever you set your mind to.” He nodded, wiping the tears that followed. “I love you, son.”
“Love you, Dad.”
Then he got out of the truck, closed the door, and walked into the house.
I sat in the truck, staring at the closed door.
He was right. The man was right about a lot of shit that went over my head, but I get it now.
I’m in my fourth year of college, and hard work trumps talent every single fucking time.
I finish tying my skates, but I stare at nothing for a minute.
I don’t know how long I sit here for, but that night replays in my head.
I walk to the boards. The rubber matting under my skate guards.
The smell of fresh ice. I take the guards off and hook them on the rail.
The first stride is smooth. I do a slow loop.
I’m not pushing. I never push when I’m out here this early.
This isn’t training. This is the hour I keep for myself before anyone else gets here.
Right now, I’m just a kid skating. I do another loop.
The Zamboni in the next sheet shuts off. I have seven months until the draft.
Frank gets the rest of the lights up around six.
The rink goes from gray to the white-blue.
The shadows under the boards disappear. You can see the lines.
The freshmen come in first. Four of them in a clump near the visitor bench, fully geared up, looking stiff.
Hayes is one of them — kid from Minnesota, big, slow start to fall camp, missed two assignments in Monday’s practice and got chewed out for it.
I watch him sit down to put on his helmet. He’s tense in his shoulders.
I turn my attention to Stan whose walking like he just got out of bed. He’s holding a Dunkin coffee in one hand and his stick in the other. He’s got one shin guard on while carrying the other. He sees me on the ice and lifts the coffee.
“Reeve.”
“Ermington.”
“This is offensive.”
“What is?”
“That you’re already out there. We have,” he checks his watch — he doesn’t have a watch, he’s checking his bare wrist — “fourteen minutes.”
“Mm.”
“I am going to put on a shin guard.” He goes into the room. I keep skating.
Percy comes through the tunnel already in his pads.
He has the mask up on top of his head and he is mouthing something — I can read it from here, un, deux, trois, he counts in French during his stretch — and he goes to the same spot in the corner he goes to every Wednesday and starts the same routine.
Hip flexor, hip flexor, hamstring. The rotation of his head.
Once you’ve been on a team with Percy for a while, you stop noticing it.
The freshmen are noticing it. They’re all staring.
Blue is on the ice within sixty seconds of coming through the tunnel. He never stretches in the room. He stretches on the ice.
Drew Faulkner, Mickey Tate, and Walker Owens walk out together, joking about something. Owens catches my eye and nods. I nod back. Theo Marsh, Sam Reichel, Casey Brogan, and Trent Mackey follow behind. The last few trickle out.
Rowan is last. Calm, as always. He skates a slow lap, taps his stick against the boards as he passes me, and falls in.
Coach Fuller comes out of the tunnel at six-fourteen and blows the whistle. Practice starts. We do edges first. Then a passing drill. Then, the Camdenkout drill we’ve been running since I was a sophomore.
Stanley, Blue and I get put on a line for the rush drill.
We have been on a line together since November of my sophomore year.
Stanley on the right, Blue on the left, me in the middle.
There is a way Stanley plays that I have learned to understand.
Blue does what is in front of him, and you can set your watch by it.
I sit between them, read both of them, and pass.
We run the rush three times. Third time through, Stanley takes a stretch pass from me at the offensive blue line, drops it back to Blue without looking, Blue puts it cross-ice to the back post where I’m already coming down, and I one-time it past Hayes-the-freshman, who’s playing token defenseman in this drill and never had a chance.
Coach yells, “That’s it. Reeve’s line — that’s the rep, watch that on tape.”
Stanley does a lap with his arms over his head like he scored at the Garden.
“I didn’t even pass it to you,” I say to him at the bench.
“My presence created the lane.”
“Your presence created the rebound.”
Blue takes a sip of water. “He didn’t pass to you.”
“Get out of here, Golding.”
I cackle, and then we run it three more times.
We scrimmage for the last twenty minutes.
The team is sharper than Monday’s practice.
Coach has us in mixed groups, so the lines aren’t set, which means I’m playing with two freshmen and against my actual linemates, which is a thing Coach does to me in week one every year and pretends he isn’t doing on purpose.
Percy is in the net for the other group. He doesn’t dive or pad-stack. He’s always in the right spot before anyone even thinks of the shot. Stanley tries to roof one short side, and Blue cuts to the slot. The pucks just hit him.
“This is annoying,” Stanley says to me at center ice.
“Yeah,” I agree. I’ve been watching Percy and don’t get it.
Stanley kicks his foot. “He didn’t even move.”
“He moved,” I say.
Stanley blows out hot air, putting his pointer finger up. “He moved one inch.”
“That’s all he needed.”
Stanley skates off, shaking his head.
Halfway through the scrimmage, there’s a scrum in the corner.
Walsh and a freshman defenseman named Patel are both digging for a puck and Walsh, who is six-five and a senior and is having a Wednesday, gives Patel a forearm that’s bigger than the situation calls for.
Patel comes back with a shove. Walsh shoves harder. Patel’s stick comes up.
I’m closer than the linesmen would be in a real game. I get there first. I don’t yell. I don’t pull anyone. I get my body between them and look at Walsh.
“Hey.” I stare at him.
He stops.
I look at Patel. “Take a Camdenth. Get the puck.”
I look at Walsh. “I need you on Saturday. Don’t be stupid.”
That’s it. They back off. The scrimmage resumes.
Coach blows it for the last time at seven-fifty. We line up on the blue line for stretches. Coach says four sentences about the home opener, three sentences about effort, one sentence about not being late for film at six o’clock tonight. We stretch and step off.
I grab my phone from my cubby on the way through the tunnel. The lock screen has three notifications. Group chat. Group chat. One text.
Madison: Hey, you around this weekend?
I look at it for a second, lock the screen, and drop the phone in my bag.
I think about Madison for about as long as it takes to walk from the cubby to the locker room door.
I hooked up with her twice last spring. I haven’t thought about her since May.
She’ll randomly text me from time to time, but they never mean anything.