7. Chapter Seven
Stanley
“Where’s your gamer?”
Benson, three stalls down, half into his pads, nodding at the fresh stick the equipment guy’s just laid across my palms.
“Retired her.” I turn it over, feel the weight of it. “Sentimental reasons.”
Rowan’s head comes up. “Sentimental?”
“She gave me three good years, Row.” I run my thumb down the shaft. “Three years of love. We had a beautiful run, me and her. But you can’t hold a girl back from her dreams forever.” I sigh, heavy, a man at a graveside. “Time for fresh wood.” I look at Benson. “It’s a good brand.”
Blue throws a roll of tape at my head. And down the bench, Benson, tying his skate, gives me a look that’s about three-quarters bought and one-quarter doing math — because Benson’s known me too long to fully buy anything — so I wink at him, and he shakes his head, and he goes back to his laces.
The only person in this entire room who knows where my gamer actually is, is me.
And the funny thing is that I don’t care she has it.
I have never in my life cared about a single thing I couldn’t get back, and that goes double for a hockey stick.
She thinks she took something from me on Friday.
She walked out of this building with a tremendous sense of accomplishment, and she went home and stood it up in her bedroom like a hunting trophy, and she thinks that’s a point on the board.
We’ll find out.
I start wrapping the new one. Same tape, same wrap, heel to toe, the way I’ve done it ten thousand times. It feels different in my hands when I’m done.
I dig my phone out of my bag. I scroll down to Linwood, A. — saved in here for years, sitting there untouched the whole time, a number I’ve had and never once dialed — and I type.
Me: How’s my new tenant settling in?
Send.
Me: Take notes for me, princess. There’s gonna be a quiz.
Send.
I drop the phone back in my bag, and I don’t look at the screen again.
That’s the whole trick of it. You throw the line out, and you walk away from the water.
A man who watches for the response has already lost, because now she’s got something of yours too — your attention, your waiting — and I’m not in the business of giving that away for free.
I lace up and hit the ice.
Second lap of warm-ups, I let my eyes go to row three.
She’s there. Same fancy coat, posture like she’s holding up a flagpole, and she’s not looking at her phone. She probably read it. Which means I’m in her head. I grin so wide my cheek pad shifts in my helmet.
I skate the line back toward our end, and I pass right under her glass. I don’t stop. I just lift the new stick once in her direction as I go by. A tip of the hat. This. Look at my new stick.
The new stick is a gift from God.
First shift, I wire a slap pass through three sets of legs and onto Theo’s tape like I threaded a needle in the dark, and the stick releases a half-tick faster than my gamer ever did, snappier, whippier, a little meaner — and I clock it immediately. I let not one molecule of it reach my face.
Mid-first, I score. Clean. No glass tap, no signature in the air, no airplane. I bury it top corner and bump Benson’s glove and skate back like it’s a Tuesday.
Second period, I find Walker tape-to-tape across the slot, a pass I had no business completing, and he one-times it home.
He looks at me like I’ve personally rewritten the meaning of his life, because to a guy like Walker, a feed like that is heaven.
I raise one arm, and the bench comes off its hinges.
Third period, I score again.
And now — now I can afford a gesture.
I turn toward row three after this one. I take my time about it, because the whole point is that she sees me choosing it. I lift my glove, and I point. Two fingers. Right at the new stick.
See this one? Look what you did, princess. Best thing that ever happened to me.
Then I turn and skate to the bench, grinning like an idiot. I don’t look back.
Funny how the universe works. She thought she stole something from me Friday night.
Turns out she was just clearing space.
I let myself check, once, after the boys are done mauling each other — one quick flick of the eyes up to row three.
She’s writing. Head down, phone up out of her lap now, thumbs going. Bowed over it. Writing it all down, every goal, every assist, every point I’m putting up on the back of the stick she handed me, building my case for me in my enemy’s own report.
I grin the whole way to the bench.
The locker room’s a war zone after. We won, I’m the player of the game, and Drew is standing on a bench screaming something that isn’t words.
Fuller catches me in the hallway on the way out, hand on my shoulder, that rare thing where the eyebrows aren’t doing anything sarcastic.
“Good work tonight.” He means it. “That. Right there. You’re going far, son. Keep it up.”
I changed the stick, I think.
I don’t say it. I just nod and let him believe he coached it out of me, because that’s good for him and free for me.
Percy passes me on his way to the showers.
“Better, eleven.”
I love that miserable goalie. I’d take a puck for him.
My phone goes off in my bag. My Dad. I answer.
“There he is!” He’s grinning, I can hear it. “Three points. They paying you yet, or do I have to keep feeding you?”
“Direct deposit’s the dream, old man, but the NCAA’s got opinions.”
“The NCAA can kiss my—” and he’s off, and I give it back to him. He laughs, and I laugh, and for a minute it’s just the easy thing it always is between us.
“Heard from Linwood this morning, by the way.”
Aspen’s old man. The bench boss. My father’s best friend.
“Asked how you were doing. Said that he’s been keeping tabs on you. Wanted me to pass it along. He’s proud of you, kid. Said so himself.”
My hand goes still on the handle of my locker. “Tell him thanks.”
“Tell him yourself. You’ve got his number.”
“Yeah. I will.”
He says something about my mother and her flight tabs. I crack jokes back, and he hangs up, easy, the way he ends everything.
I sit down on the bench in my stall, half out of my gear, and I don’t scroll down two names below hers to her father’s contact because that is a line, and even I know where it is.
She keeps an image of him winning the cup on her damn desk, and I know exactly what that man’s approval is worth to her.
I know she’d skate through a wall for one sentence of what he just handed me for free.
Her father is proud of me.
I would never tell her that. Not in a war, not in a hundred wars.
That’s the second one now. The second piece of real dirt I’m holding on Aspen Linwood — the shark is the first — and I take this new one and put it in the same vault, in the dark, with the door shut, where I keep the things I’m never going to use.
Then I stand up and snap my bag shut, because sitting with that is a sucker’s game, and I’ve got a poster to make.
I come through the front door of Hawthorne House with the gleam of a man with a plan. I go straight up the stairs, into my room, and shut the door before anyone can ask.
I open my laptop, and I pull up a photo of myself from media day — a real one, a magazine shoot, the smize cranked all the way to a hundred, holding my now-retired gamer across my chest with both hands like a debutante posing with a bouquet. Gorgeous. Tragic. Perfect.
I open a Word doc. I drop the photo in dead center.
Across the top, two-hundred-point font: MISSING.
Underneath: Last seen Friday night, Camden Arena. Believed to be taken by a known accomplice operating out of Hawthorne Street.
And along the bottom, smaller, where the phone-number tabs would go.
REWARD: A moment of my time.
I sit back and look at it, and I grin so hard it hurts.
Six copies. I print six, because I can use all of them.
I go downstairs and ask the room for the laminator with total sincerity.
Benson, who has stopped questioning my intentions, answers, “Hall closet, top shelf.”
Perfect. I find it easily and laminate all six, one at a time, watching each one come out the far side, hot, glossy, and permanent.
I’m mid-laminate when there’s a knock on my door.
“Stan?” Rowan sticks his head in. “You good in here?”
“I’m elite, Row.” I don’t turn around.
“What are you doing?”
“Memories.”
A long pause. He’s in the doorway now. I can feel him taking in the laminator, the glossy stack of my own grinning face fanned out on my bed, the second-degree premeditation of it all. He opens his mouth. He closes it. He decides that he is happier not knowing. He leaves.
I gather my posters and walk out the front door. I put my hood up and shove the roll of tape in my pocket. Cold air is on my face, and the whole street is asleep.
Three doors down, the house is dark except for the porch light, and her window is dark too. The curtains are drawn this time. Smart girl.
I’m grinning the whole way. When I get to her window, I check the street, up and down.
It’s quiet as a held breath. Nobody’s around.
I pull four strips of tape, and I press the laminated sheet flat to the outside of her glass, photo facing in, top corners, bottom corners, all four, snug enough to hold against the wind. I put the rest of them up and smile.
When she opens those curtains in the morning, the first thing she’s going to see is my face. Smizing. Holding the very stick she stole, across my chest, like a man who misses something he’s perfectly fine without.
I step back into the yard and admire my work.
Then I walk home with my hands in my pockets, whistling.
Back in my room, I open the laptop again, go to the team’s shared drive, and find the broadcast cut from Friday night. Not tonight’s. Friday’s, specifically, on purpose — because Friday is when I had my stick. And because Friday is the scene of the crime.
I trim it down, and I save it. Linwood_Game1_FullTape.mp4.
Then I open the thread with her — Linwood, A. — where my texts from this afternoon are still sitting there, gray, unanswered, exactly as I knew they’d be.
Me: For your reports.
I attach the tape.
Send.
I set the phone on my nightstand, where I’ll see it light up if it does. Which is –– you know –– just in case.
I strip down to a t-shirt and shorts and climb into bed and flop onto my back and stare at the ceiling for exactly two seconds.
Then I close my eyes, and I smile.
I sleep like a baby on the nights I win.
Tonight, three doors down and on every scoreboard that matters, I’m winning.