7. Theo
THEO
Six AM at the rink is not a practice. Six AM at the rink is a punishment with skates on.
I am on the ice at five forty-five. Paul drove me.
Paul did not speak in the car. Paul parked in the first spot near the door because Paul is the coach and walked ahead of me through the players' entrance as if he did not know I was behind him.
I know I am behind him. My skates were over my shoulder.
My bag was at my hip. My mouth tasted like the toothpaste I brushed with twice because brushing it twice was a thing I could do that was not thinking about what I did in my bedroom.
I did not sleep.
I slept maybe forty minutes in the gray part of the morning.
I woke up every time my thigh touched my other thigh and the touch reminded me of a hand.
I woke up every time my sheet moved. I woke up at four because a garbage truck three blocks over did the hydraulic thing garbage trucks do, and I lay in my sheets looking at the Y on the ceiling, and I thought good boy, and I flinched as if the thought had physical weight. At five, I got up.
The locker room was empty when I got here. The overheads buzzed on one at a time. My stall is on the far wall, three down from the door, because I am new and because Paul believes the rookies should not be near the door. I tape my shin pads. I breathe. Four in, seven hold, eight out.
I am on the ice before any other player arrives—because Paul wants me to be on the ice before any other player arrives.
I skate the perimeter. I warm up the way Paul taught me to warm up, which is the way I have warmed up since I was nine, since before I knew that warming up was a thing normal families did not do, since before I knew there was another way to be a person.
My legs are heavy. Not physical heavy. The heavy of a body that has been holding something all night and has not been allowed to put it down.
I do not look at the door. I do not wait for Maddox. I have one job on the ice and the job is not to be the kid who looked at the door.
He comes in anyway.
I know he comes in because him coming in is a feeling.
I had it in the bar. I have it now. I do not turn my head.
I watch my skates. I push a circle around the near face-off dot and then another one.
When I finally have to turn because the drill would not make sense if I did not turn, he is at the bench with his helmet off and his hair wet from the shower in the locker room, and his eyes are on me.
I believe his eyes have been on me since he walked in, and he does not pretend otherwise.
He does not smile.
He does not do the corner-of-the-mouth thing he has been doing at me since Monday.
He looks at me like he is about to decide something about me.
I look back.
I look back because I do not know what else to do and because not looking back would be worse than looking back. It is three seconds, maybe. The longest three seconds the morning has had. Then he puts his helmet on. The bars of the cage go between us.
I skate.
Paul does not mention the bar.
Paul mentions everything except the bar.
He lines us up at center ice in three rows.
He walks the rows. He does not raise his voice.
He does not need to. He says, “Last night's game was won in the second period and lost in the third and we are going to talk about why.” He says, “Nobody on this team has earned a single thing about his reputation and the reputations you have are the ones you built two years ago.” He says, “This team does not go to bars. This team, from tonight forward, does not close a bar down when the game was a one-goal win and there is a practice Saturday morning. You are professional athletes. Behave like one.” His voice is the voice he uses on me when he is about to take the car keys away, except he is using it on twenty-two men, and the twenty-two men are standing very still on their skates.
He does not look at me while he talks.
He does not look at Maddox while he talks.
Not looking is a way of looking.
Magnus, three over from me, shifts his weight. Jax, two down, studies the ice between his skates. Phoenix, at the head of the row, stands at parade rest and faces Paul head on, because Phoenix is the captain, and Phoenix absorbs.
When Paul is done, he skates backwards three strides, turns, and blows the whistle.
“Drill one. Line rush. Three units. Laurent, you're with Magnus and Grayson.”
It's not a demotion. It is not a promotion. It is a line I have not practiced with because Paul has been moving me between lines every session to see who I don't get in the way of. Today he is moving me again. I understand what today is.
I skate to my spot.
Drills are drills.
Drills are where I live. Drills are the one place on earth where my body knows what it is doing without consulting me.
I have been doing drills since I was four.
I have been doing Paul's drills since I was six.
My edges are clean because Paul made my edges clean and because he used to film my edges and make me watch them on the living room TV while he pointed at what I had done wrong.
My edges are clean today.
My passes are not.
My first pass to Magnus is half a stride behind him. My second pass is on his tape but too soft. My third pass I put in his skates. Magnus does not chirp. Magnus knows enough not to chirp when Paul is on the bench with his arms crossed.
Grayson does chirp, a little.
“Wake up, Laurent,” he says, passing close, barely loud enough to register as chirping.
“I am awake.”
“You're not. You're somewhere. Come back.”
My edges cut the ice a little too sharp on the next turn. I am aware that my heart is doing something my heart does not do in drills. The heart in drills is calm. The heart today is doing a thing that has its own agenda.
Maddox is on the other line.
I can feel where he is without looking.
I do not look.
The chirping starts in the second drill.
Phoenix runs the second drill himself. Paul is at the bench making notes on his tablet. Players who are not in a rotation stand in a loose group at the far blue line. I am in that group for thirty seconds between reps. I stand with my stick across my knees and breathe through my mouthguard.
“Virgin.”
It's Magnus. Low, not bothering to lean in. Magnus does not whisper.
“Magnus.”
“Coach's boy. What do you think Coach is writing on that tablet, right now, about the bar.”
I do not answer. I look at my skates. The skate tip I have been favoring is the right because the left was retaped this morning and I do not trust it yet.
“I bet he is writing your name. I bet Virgin is going home early.”
“Don't.”
“Don't what, sweetheart.”
The word sweetheart in Magnus's mouth is not the word in Maddox's mouth.
It is the word a man uses when he wants to watch you flinch at the word.
I flinch at the word. I do not mean to. My body flinches before I can stop it, and Magnus sees me flinch, and Magnus's face opens into the smile it has been wearing all week, the one that says oh.
Oh, this works on you. I am going to use this.
“Sweetheart,” he says again, softer.
My jaw locks.
“Magnus, stop.”
“Tell me to stop louder.”
My hand tightens on my stick.
“Magnus.”
“Flint.”
Not me.
Not Paul.
Maddox.
Maddox is suddenly there, behind Magnus, close enough that his stick is across Magnus's chest at the level of Magnus's collar bone, horizontal, in cross-check position except he has not cross-checked, he has just put the stick there.
He is not skating. He is standing. His weight is forward. His helmet is on.
Magnus tilts his head and looks at him, not at me.
“Mad Dog. This is a drill.”
Maddox does not move the stick.
“You're not doing the drill. You're standing in the line chirping a kid. Shut your mouth. Get back in the drill.”
“I was—”
The stick presses a fraction harder into Magnus's chest.
“Shut. Your. Mouth.”
Maddox's voice is not loud. It is the thing voices do when they stop being sound and start being weight.
It is the voice that went with the hand on my chest in the alley.
The voice is the same voice. I am realizing this, which is a thing I did not want to realize on the ice, with my helmet on, in front of the team.
Magnus looks at the stick across his chest.
He looks at Maddox's face.
He looks at me.
The smile goes out of him. Not all the way. Most of the way.
“Fine, Creed. Fine.”
Maddox takes the stick off Magnus's chest. Magnus pushes off and skates to rejoin the rotation. Maddox does not look at me. Maddox does not say anything to me. He turns and skates to the far side of the line and stands there with his stick in his hands and his eyes on the drill.
On the bench, Paul has looked up from the tablet. He has seen the last five seconds of that.
Paul looks at Maddox. Paul looks at Magnus. Paul looks at me.
Paul does not whistle the drill dead. Paul writes something on the tablet.
I skate into my rep like a man breathing through something underwater.
Nobody chirps me for the rest of the practice.
It is not that they forget. It is that they remember.
Magnus is not the only one who saw what Maddox did.
The second-liners saw. The third-liners saw.
Jax saw. Phoenix saw and his face did not move because Phoenix's face does not move at anything.
But the grammar of the rink takes the event and converts it into information, and the information travels from stall to stall and rep to rep without a single word being spoken, and by the time we are in drill four the rotations are treating me differently.
Nobody hits me harder than they have to.
Nobody shoves me in the corner when I pick up a loose puck.
Grayson, who chirped me earlier, skates past and bumps my shoulder and says, good set, Laurent, which is not a thing Grayson has said to me all week.