1. Theo #2
I end up looking at Creed instead. I don't mean to. It keeps happening.
He plays the way he skates—aggressive, fast on first step, not elegant.
When he gets into a battle along the wall he doesn't stop until his man is off the puck, and he comes out with it every single time.
He doesn't show off. He just wins his touches and then he's where he's supposed to be.
There's a quietness to watching him play hockey if you didn't know who he was. He's efficient.
I shouldn't have thought the word efficient. I delete it.
He's good.
He's more than good. He's the kind of player who doesn't get his due because the league has already decided what his due is. I can see it in two shifts. I wonder if he knows.
Then he looks up across the neutral zone and catches me watching.
He doesn't smile. He doesn't nod. He just holds my eyes for one full second and lets me see him seeing me, and my body does something it has never done on ice in my life.
It goes hot under the gear. Hot everywhere, and with a specificity that does not feel like anything it's supposed to feel like on a rink, and I am wearing two hundred dollars' worth of padding and I am still afraid my face has told him.
I do the breathing exercise. Four in. Seven hold. Eight out. It doesn't touch me. My pulse is in my throat and my throat knows a thing my head won't agree to.
I drop my gaze to my blades. I hope nobody saw. I hope nobody ever sees. I hope my face doesn't do anything my face is not supposed to do. I skate to the bench door on the next whistle because Dad is calling lines and the one he's naming is not mine.
The locker room after practice is a different animal than the locker room before. The volume is twice what it was and the air is wet and everybody is dismantling the practice we just did, retelling it while it's still warm.
“Benched for the whistle.” Jax has got his skate off and is waving it like a gavel. “He benched a guy for the whistle. That's a new one, boys. That's one for the tape.”
“He's setting tone.” Somebody on the opposite wall, still in his base layer, chucks a piece of stick tape into the laundry bin without looking.
“He's setting tone, sure. On day one. With Creed.”
Grayson leans back in his stall and stretches his arms over his head until something cracks. Veteran, quiet. Not chirping. Observing.
“That's how it goes, though,” he says. “New coach, new rules. Happens every time.”
“Yeah, but not with Creed.”
Somebody floats a line about the fine structure and somebody else answers with one about the union, and the joke builds and breaks and builds again, and I sit on my bench and unlace my skates one eye and one hole at a time. My shoulders are up around my ears. I drop them. They come back up.
Then the room quiets a quarter-inch and I know he's in the doorway before I see him.
Creed doesn't say anything. He goes to his stall, which is four down from mine on the opposite wall, and he starts taking his gear off without the chatter everybody else is doing.
He doesn't look at me. He doesn't have to.
I can feel him not looking at me, a heat on the side of my face I don't have to open my eyes to find.
“Mad Dog,” somebody says, half a laugh in it. “Welcome back.”
“Fuck off,” Creed says, pleasantly.
The room laughs. The room keeps talking. Nobody tries to sit me down for a pep talk about my father. Nobody comes over. I'm grateful and I'm alone; I'm not sure those are different things.
When I've got my base layer off, I take my towel off the hook and walk to the showers. I don't look at Creed's stall. I don't look at anybody's stall.
The showers are the worst part of a new room. It's where the hierarchy gets drawn and redrawn. Everybody pretends not to look at anybody. Everybody looks. I have been in a lot of locker rooms and I still haven't figured out how to do it without feeling like I'm doing it wrong.
The stall at the far end is the one I want. The wall is a wall on one side, which is half a problem solved. I get in, turn the water hot, face the tile. I can hear the room through the water: laughter down the hall, a cell phone somewhere, the hiss of three other showers already running.
I close my eyes. I do the exercise my sports psychologist taught me two cities ago. Four in, seven hold, eight out. I do it twice. The knot in my chest un-clenches a notch. I get the soap.
The shower next to mine turns on.
I don't open my eyes. The showers here are open-topped; the partitions only come up to the shoulder. Whoever it is can see me if they want. I keep my face in the water.
“Sweetheart.”
It's under the sound of the water, which means he's close to the partition, which means he's leaning on it. I don't answer. I don't move. My body has every available muscle locked. My face is in the water. He can't see my face.
“Nice skate today.” He says it friendly. He says it like he's about to buy me a beer. “Real nice.”
I keep my eyes closed.
“You know what your dad did to me today, sweetheart?”
I don't answer.
“He benched me.” A pause. “For the whistle. He benched me for the whistle. Everybody in this room saw him do it. Your old man's gonna try to make an example out of me. I get it. It's day one. He's setting a tone.”
I don't answer. My heart is hitting my ribs like a fist.
“Here's what's gonna happen, sweetheart.” His voice drops.
It does not get louder. It gets quieter, which is so much worse.
“He's gonna come at me, and I'm gonna come at him, and we're gonna do this whole song and dance all season.
And somewhere in the middle of it, I'm gonna pick a night.
And I'm gonna put my hands on you. And I'm gonna ruin you.”
I have not moved. I cannot move. The water is hot and it is cold at the same time. My whole skin has become its own animal.
“You ever been with a man, sweetheart?”
I don't answer.
He laughs, low, close to the partition. I can feel the vibration of it through the tile. “Yeah. I didn't think so.” The water keeps running. “Gonna be a real nice thing for your dad, knowing I got to you first. A real nice thing.”
He turns his water off. He doesn't wait for me to say anything. He wouldn't have known what to do if I did. I hear his footsteps on the tile, slapping away, the grunt of him toweling off at the end of the row, the door swinging shut.
I stand with my face in the water past the point the hot has started to hurt. I count my breaths. Four in, seven hold, eight out. Four in, seven hold, eight out.
My body is doing something I have never given it permission to do.
I have never given it permission to do much of anything.
I have eaten what I was supposed to eat, slept the hours I was supposed to sleep, moved my body through the drills and the lifts and the practice schedules Dad set for me like a good car through its maintenance intervals.
My body is a professional instrument. That's what Dad calls it—when he calls it anything at all.
“Take care of the instrument.” I have never done this to the instrument.
I don't even know what this is, except that every nerve in it has just been told it has been waiting all its life and now it's been told for what.
I turn the water colder. It doesn't help.
I tell myself: he is trying to hurt my father through me. I tell myself: he is a bully and a predator, and he has nothing to do with who I am. I tell myself: you are not the kind of person this happens to.
Under all of it, quiet, in a voice I don't want to hear: Yes, you are.