Chapter 3 #2
I get it on the half wall with a touch of space. One stride, then two, weight on the inside edge. I slip the puck to my backhand when I see an opening like a curtain. I see Slade cutting back. I see the goalie’s shoulder twitch—and then I see nothing.
It’s the legal kind of hit that doesn’t feel legal from inside your skull. A body, shoulder high to my chest, my head whipping on the swivel of my neck. The boards come too fast and in slow-motion at the same time. I don’t even hear the whistle.
Then the world turns dark with only stars shooting into my vision and then… nothing.
Coming back is like walking out of a pool with all your clothes on.
It’s heavy at first. Then you are aware of small things, like the ice brutal against the back of your arms, a burn at your cheekbone, the ridiculous thought that someone needs to fix the arena lights because they are too bright and one is haloing a person’s head like a painting.
“Kendall,” I say, except my mouth doesn’t shape it right. I can tell because she shakes her head. The kind of headshake that says I am here and we are okay but we are not doing this your way.
“Hi, M?kelin,” she says, low, steady, not soft. The Doctor voice she uses with all the players when she’s in doctor mode. Not a great sign for me. There’s a hand on the back of my helmet, anchoring, and another near my jaw. “Don’t move yet. Eyes on me.”
Her eyes are very green. It’s important information and not important at all. I swear there’s a sprinkle of hazel in them too. I try to focus harder on them but my eyes feel blurry and heavy.
“What period is it?” she asks.
I blink. I catch sight of Theo kneeling at my hip, the world narrowing to our circle and the scrape marks around us. “Third,” I say. It feels true. I hope it’s true.
“Score?”
The drum in my ear is my pulse.. “One-one?” I offer, and the moment it leaves, I know I’m wrong.
“Okay,” she says, in the same even tone. No judgment. She moves a penlight, and it becomes a comet with a tail. “Follow my finger.” The light shifts left and I try to make my eyes do the thing but they lag like a streaming game on hotel Wi-Fi.
I try to grin because that’s what I do when anything hurts. It makes my cheek feel like glass.
Slade is a looming shape at the boards, murderously quiet, and then I see Scottie skate up next to him. I can’t see Wolf and that either means he is hunting someone or serving penance. I want to tell everyone it’s fine. I want to sit up and demonstrate fine. My body sends a memo that says nope.
“Don’t try to move,” Kendall says before I even twitch. Her hand presses briefly, a reminder, not restraint. “You’re doing well. What’s your full name?”
“Aleksi Henrik M?kelin,” I say, and the syllables click in that familiar path my tongue learned at six.
“Team?”
“Hawkeyes,” I say, like she doesn’t know.
“Give me a fun fact, M?k,” she says using the nickname the team calls me.
“Did you know that Saturn is big enough to hold the earth one-thousand times?”
She leans into my field of vision, blocking the neon cyclone, and for a second, she is the whole world.
It's not the halo light, it’s her. She smells like cold and peppermint and that stupid orange sanitizer.
I could be twelve and have a scraped knee.
I could be thirty-four and bleeding. Either way I’d listen.
“Any neck pain?” she asks.
“No.” It’s honest. My neck is a rubber band, but it isn’t breaking.
“Headache?”
“Little,” I admit, and that earns a tiny nod like I passed a test by not lying.
“Good. You’re coming off,” she says, already signaling.
Somewhere in my line of sight, the stretcher option is a question mark, but she shakes her head at Theo—no board, not needed.
“Scottie and Slade,” she calls without looking, and there they are, two walls with legs.
“We’re going slow. Aleksi, we’re going to roll to your side and up. On my count. One—two—three.”
They could lift a truck. They lift me like I am a net full of fish I forgot I was carrying. The world tilts and then steadies. My skates find ice in a way I don’t trust. Kendall’s hand is on my elbow, not for show. I wish I was faking this for drama, but I’m not.
We move toward the gate. People pound the glass—three angry thumps, three sympathetic ones, twenty idiots with beers sloshing. The PA announcer is saying something that floats above us like a bad cloud. The bench parts, coaches lean, I swallow. It doesn’t change the taste of metal in my mouth.
In the tunnel, the sound turns to the squeak of my blades on rubber matting and the echo of the crowd getting further away.
The adrenaline finally gives up a little.
My legs realize they are attached to my body.
Kendall’s voice shifts gear to her concussion checklist. It’s now all about lights, nausea, dizziness, any ringing?
—”yes”. She and Theo slot me onto the little bench in the quiet room like they’ve done it a hundred times…
and they have. She palms the back of my head again when she checks my helmet ridge for blood.
I close my eyes because it makes the world less like a tilt-a-whirl and more like a dark room where someone left the door open.
“You got clipped high,” she says, narrating so I stay with her. “We’re going to run through orientation and symptoms and then you’re staying with Theo. No arguments.”
“Wasn’t planning to,” I say, which is a lie I used to tell. But I don’t lie to her. “What’s the score?” I ask, like I didn’t just fail that test.
“Two–one, them,” she says. “Eight minutes. Your line’s eating up minutes and not letting anything pretty through.”
“Sounds right.” My tongue feels thick. “I’m fine,” I add, because some habits die very, very last.
She arches a brow the way she did when I was bleeding last night and flirting like a moron. “You’re concussed,” she says. No apology. No sugar coating it. A diagnosis and a wall to lean on at the same time.
I think I smile but I only know that because it hurts.
Theo takes over the checklist. I answer like a good boy.
Kendall watches my eyes, then my hands, then my eyes again, as if my pupils are trying to tell secrets.
I want to tell her a thousand things. About the phone and the forest app and how she sleeps when she finally lets herself, about how I will sit on any plane on earth if it means she won’t be afraid for two hours, but she is my doctor right now and I am her problem and the ice is still out there eating minutes. She still has a job to do.
“Stay with him,” she tells Theo, and then to me, “Don’t move unless you need to puke, in which case, do warn Theo first so we can jump out of the way.” The last part she’s teasing, Theo’s already got a puke bag ready just in case.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She hesitates at the doorway, half a breath and no more, then she’s gone in a gust of cold air and a flash of teal and back team colors, back into the chaos we came from.
I let my head thump back against the cinderblock wall and listen to the game as if it will tell me a story about myself I couldn’t hear on the ice.
The story it tells is short and unfriendly.
We lose… by one.
I don’t see the goal. I hear the horn and the building’s joy and our bench’s stunned quiet and I hate everything for a second: my timing, my skull, my dumb beautiful sport.
Theo squeezes my shoulder. “We’ll get them at home,” he says, and I believe him because the alternative is unthinkable.
I close my eyes and see the light haloing Kendall’s hair again, the moment I woke up to her voice and the way she made the world small in the way that doesn’t hurt. I will not say angel. I will not.
But if I did, no one would hear it here.
The locker room smells like loss.
Not the bitter kind just yet—it’s the dull version, wet gear and frustration under the hum of the vents. Every player moves slower than he means to. Equipment bags hit the floor with the quiet thud of a collective hangover.
I’m half dressed, still in compression pants and one sleeve of my undershirt when Kendall reappears.
She’s traded her sideline jacket for the navy team hoodie, which means she’s ready to get to work, hair twisted into a knot that’s trying to escape.
Her expression is pure calm—the kind you only get when you’re barely holding your own adrenaline together.
“Light sensitivity?” she asks.
“Yeah.” I say.
“Headache?”
“Only when I think about the scoreboard.”
That earns me a look that isn’t a smile but isn’t not one either. She steps closer, shining her little penlight, checking my pupils. I can smell the faint coffee on her breath from between periods. The sound of the team behind us fades to a low static.
“Are you still dizzy?” she asks.
“Only when you’re this close.”
She exhales through her nose, and then gives me a side-eye with a head tilt. “Real answers would be more helpful right now, considering your condition.”
“Which is technically concussed,” I say. “It explains a lot.”
Her hand hovers near my jaw, the light moving between my eyes. “You scared us for a minute.”
“I scared me too,” I admit. “Did Wolf go nuclear?”
She purses her lips like, as a doctor, she can’t condone his behavior, but as our team doctor she has a biased opinion that she won’t be sharing with me. “He did his job,” she says, which means someone on Colorado’s team is probably icing bruises in interesting places.
Theo calls from behind her, “He’s cleared to fly, Doc, but he’s not playing until the neurologist signs off.”
“I heard,” I say.
Kendall answers without turning. “He knows.”
The way she says it—gentle but final—hits lower than any hit I took tonight. She finishes the last of her chart notes and looks at me again. “We’ll re-evaluate tomorrow after the neurologist has a look at you.” She holds up a hand between us. “Don’t argue. I already know you want to.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I object.
Her eyebrow arches as if calling my bluff.
“Okay, I was thinking about it.”