Chapter 18
WALL
I THINK TOO much, and that’s a problem.
It has never been a problem before, but then again, I’ve never been keeping a secret for this long in my life.
I’m on my fifth mental re-run of last night as I enter the locker room before morning skate, and the funny thing is, nothing happened last night. And it’s the nothingness that somehow weighs more that all the previous nights combined.
Patrick showed up at Theo’s as some point.
I missed him walking in, but got woken up by a gentle tap on the shoulder, a hushed voice urging me to move to the bed.
And then we just were, the two of us supporting the third, silently, because neither of us seemed to be able to find the right words.
No touching, no shows, just being, and sleeping, existing in a shared space, a concept so confusing that I realize what’s going on in my surroundings way too late.
I’m already halfway to my stall before I notice the fuckery afoot.
The guys nearest the door go silent first, and the quiet rolls down the stalls ahead of me like a wave I'm generating, until by the time I reach my corner the only sound in the room is somebody's skate blade being stoned, slower and slower, and then that stops too.
The entire team, all suddenly busy. Snooze pretends to be asleep at an angle no spine allows. Groover and Ace are sharing one magazine between them, and the magazine is upside down. Petrov is reading his phone with his screen off.
The last time this room went quiet for my arrival, there was a fish in my glove. I set my bag down and check my glove.
Empty.
I check my helmet. Empty.
I run a hand along the top shelf of my stall and come away with nothing but dust.
Great. So it's worse than a fish.
Then I see my practice jersey.
It's hanging front out, which is wrong. The equipment guys hang them sideways. But that’s not all that’s different, because above the Wolves logo, on the left side, a letter has been stitched.
A.
My breath gets stuck in my throat for one long second.
We don’t need a new A. We already have three, and most of the time, they don’t even seem to remember it’s them. Which can only mean one thing.
I swallow and my eyes dart to Washington, who’s currently super-focused on strapping on his pads. They were already strapped when I entered.
I allow myself two more seconds of feeling my feelings before I fix my face, because in the trophy-case glass across the room I can see twenty reflections, and every single one of them is pointed at me.
They're waiting. They want a Moment.
They’re not getting it.
I take the jersey off the hook, pull it on, and reach for my skates.
The room comes back online.
"He's just putting it on!" Becker's voice cracks on the last word. He uses Kane’s shoulder to get himself upright, then clears an entire bench getting to me. "He's just— Did everybody see that? He's lacing up!"
"What did you expect?" Kane asks, rubbing his shoulder.
"A reaction! One reaction!"
I am reacting. Internally, where reactions belong.
Becker plants himself in front of my stall, so I work around him. He moves to stay in my eyeline. I keep lacing. "Do you even know what that means?"
"Alternate captain."
"It means dad is dying and you're the oldest!"
"Retiring," Washington says from his stall, without looking up, and Becker shoots daggers in his direction, still butthurt. We’re all still butthurt.
“You know it’s illegal, right?” I ask.
“It’s not if it’s on your helmet. We checked.”
Groover folds his arms and turns to Ace. "We're staying out of it. It's his moment."
"Dignified," Ace agrees. "We're being dignified."
I give that vow a minute. Tops.
Becker goes back to his own stall, digs under a pile of gear, and comes out with—
Are there fucking cue cards?
Yep.
Great.
That means he's known since at least last night, which means the entire team has known since at least last night, which means this entire morning was rehearsed and no one made a peep.
They're getting better at this, which is worrisome.
Becker steps up onto the bench, and the team arranges itself, guys rotating to face him, Hammer leaning out of the shower doorway with a toothbrush in his mouth, Kane already filming. I sit down and start on my pads, one buckle at a time.
"Gentlemen." He raises the cards above his head. "Today, a letter passes to a new generation—"
"It's the same generation," Groover says. Fifteen seconds. I overestimated him.
"—a new chest. A chest that has carried this room for years. Quietly. Without thanks. Without feelings—"
"Get to the shirts!" Hammer says around the toothbrush.
"Don't rush art." But he snaps his fingers at Kane anyway, without breaking eye contact with his congregation. "The box."
Kane sets the phone down against a water bottle, still recording, and produces a cardboard box from under the bench.
T-shirts. Becker starts firing them around the room backhand, no aiming, and the room turns into a receiving drill, guys snagging them out of the air, pulling them on over base layers and half-strapped pads. Somebody yells about sizes, a trade happening across the aisle.
Mine hits me in the chest. I hold it up and read it.
A IS FOR APATHY.
Accurate. Decent print quality, too.
I fold it once and set it in my stall.
Jinx arrives at my elbow while Becker is still distributing. He sets a lit candle on my shelf, next to my spare blocker, adjusts it a quarter turn, and steps back to evaluate his work. "For the transition," he says.
I blow it out.
He relights it. He came prepared for resistance.
I blow it out.
"He's already changing things," Jinx says to Washington, wounded.
"Leave it unlit, Jinx."
"Unlit does nothing!"
"Neither does lit," I say.
Jinx looks at me like I’ve injured a puppy, picks up his candle, and carries it back to his own stall, where it will apparently do something.
Somewhere behind me, Petrov clears his throat. “This is a moment of great gravitas.”
Becker jerks his head back. "Seriously, who is tutoring him? This is becoming a problem."
Petrov shrugs. "The word chose the day."
Washington waits until the room starts interrogating Petrov, then crosses to me, quiet, and then it’s just the two of us in a corner of all that noise. He taps the A on my chest.
"Officially," he says, just for me, "Nothing changes. The rulebook's very clear on that."
"And unofficially?"
"Unofficially, you’re being groomed."
The words land somewhere behind my chest protector, and something climbs my throat. I swallow it down and give him what's left. "Okay."
"He said okay!" Becker yells from the bench, arms flung out to the room. "That's practically a speech!"
Fists shoot up in every corner, twenty men in apathy shirts celebrating a single word, and I bend down over my laces so nobody sees my face, because I’m pretty sure my face is currently spilling my secret—I’d take a bullet for every idiot in this room, and they definitively don’t need to know that.
The door cracks open and Coach Martin pokes his head in. He takes in the shirts, the candle burning in Jinx's stall, the cue cards, Kane's phone still filming from the floor, and lets all of it go with one slow blink. “Congratulations. Practice started eight minutes ago."
The skate goes well, which is its own problem.
My reads come early, my rebounds die where I put them, and between drills I catch myself glancing down on the A on my chest. I'm playing like a man with something to be happy about, and every time I freeze the puck I can feel Becker watching me be happy about it.
At the water break he skates a slow circle past my crease and says nothing, which means surveillance.
The gym after empties slow, then all at once. I'm finishing my last set on the bench when Becker racks his dumbbells at the next station and stays.
"Good day, huh?” he starts, and before I can say anything, he adds, "You know I know, right?"
The bar stops mid-rep, and so does my heart.
In the span of a single breath I run months of tape looking for the leak.
The grinning at my phone in my stall, twice, minimum, but more likely daily.
Or maybe it’s all those co-chair syncs that have become more frequent than any charity event requires.
Or Tuesday, in the showers. Did I hum? I think I hummed. Who hums? Happy people hum.
I rack the bar before my arms can incriminate me further and sit up, assembling a face and, somewhere behind it, an alibi. “Know what?”
"Not the what," Becker says. "The that." He sits down on the next bench, elbows on his knees, towel hanging from his hands, and for a moment, the bits are gone.
This is the other Becker. The one maybe five people alive have met.
"You've been happy for months and lying about something for months, and those are both new. So. Whenever you’re ready. "
Stopping my exhale of relief is its own workout and for a moment, it’s all on the tip of my tongue. Two names, one admission. The sentence has been ready for weeks, sitting in my chest, waiting for a door. And here's a door, open, held by the best friend I have.
My mouth opens and the sentence disintegrates. "Soon," is what comes out instead.
He scrutinizes my face for a painfully long moment, then nods and rises to his feet. It’s not until he’s at the door when he spins around and the regular Becker is back. "The corkboard has a section reserved."
***
I’VE BEEN PARKED outside my mother's house for six minutes, engine off, earbuds in, windows up. I checked the street first, twice, to make sure it’s empty. This is not a performance that can afford witnesses.
"Grze?kowiak," the app says.
"Grez-KOW-ee-ak," I say.
Red buzz.
"Grze?kowiak," the app says, with infinite patience.
"Gzheh... SKOH-vak."
Red buzz. The screen offers me an encouraging message. Almost there!
I'm nowhere near there. The app is programmed to be polite.
I break the name into zones, the way I'd break down a shooter.
Front half first. The rz lands. I've had the rz for two days now.
The rz is mine. It's the soft middle that keeps folding under me, the same spot every rep, that ? sound that has no business existing, and I run it again, and the buzz comes again.
"Fuck."
The phone speaker is probably distorting the reference audio. Except speaker is fine and I know it.
I try it quieter, half-voice, like sneaking up on it.
Buzz.
I try with my eyes closed.
Buzz.
A delivery truck rolls past and I stop mid-vowel and sit there with my mouth open until it turns the corner. There are limits to what this street needs to see.
Again. Full voice. Front half holds. The middle holds. The ending wobbles a bit.
Green chime.
I sit up straighter. Again, because once is luck.
Green chime. The streak counter ticks to two, and the screen prints out cartoon confetti. Great job!
I’m hiding in my car outside my mother's house, a grown man with a new letter on his jersey and a shutout column in the league's top five, genuinely warmed by cartoon confetti.
There's an urge to run it once more, for margin, but I know better. You don't re-test a save that worked. I pocket the earbuds, and walk to the door.
The door opens before I ring the bell, which means she’s been watching me from the window.
“Hi, mom.”
She greets me with a stern nod and looks me up and down, twice, before letting me in.
I’ve been triaged.
The house smells like pot roast. She points me at the cabinet with the plates without turning around from the stove, and I set the table the way she taught me before I could skate, forks left, knives blade-in, glasses at one o'clock. Her systems predate my systems.
We sit. She lets me get three bites in.
"That second goal Tuesday," she says. "You guessed."
"I was screened, mom," I answer around the food in my mouth. "I had a read."
"You had a hope."
She picks one save a game to hate, and she's never wrong.
I eat my green beans like I’m seven, because she’s watching me like a hawk. Then, she adds more to my plate without asking. "Cholesterol.”
My phone buzzes on the table and I make a grave mistake of checking it.
Theo has sent a photo of the gas-station flowers, still standing in the protein shaker on his counter, captioned day two. thriving. My mouth curls up into a smile before I can stop it.
I glance up to find Linda Wallace watching me over the rim of her glass. If she noticed, she keeps it to herself.
The dinner continues mostly uneventfully.
She tells me the neighbor two doors down put his house up for sale and priced it like it has a view.
I tell her the season's going well. She says she knows, she watches, which I knew, and there's half a minute where it's just forks, and it's comfortable, and I make the mistake of relaxing into it.
My phone buzzes again and I silence it without looking.
But it doesn’t matter. My mom spent decades reading vitals off faces for a living, and I've just handed her a chart.
She takes another bite, chews, swallows, and doesn't look up from her plate when she finally says, "Bring her over next time."
My fork goes down and I take a long, steadying breath. My mom isn’t Becker, no denial ever survives with her. I swallow around the lump in my throat and say exactly as much as I have the courage for. “Him.”
I don’t have it in me yet to tell her the truth. That there are two of him.
She takes a sip of water, considers it, and then, her lips curl into a rare, wide smile. "Finally, something interesting."