Chapter 21
THEO
BY TEN IN the morning I've checked my phone fourteen times, which counts as a monk-level of restraint, all things considered.
There's a list making rounds online with my name third on it, the deadline is five hours out, and my phone is right there in my stall, facedown, humming with evil. Fourteen deserves a medal.
Around me, everyone is performing normal so hard it's crossed into community theater territory. Nobody asks whether I've heard anything and nobody mentions Anaheim. Guys who steal my tape on the daily are giving me careful little smiles.
I'd rather be booed.
A few stalls over, Stevens laces up inside his own bubble of clean air. Sixth on the same list, which means nobody talks to him either. Our eyes meet and we trade one nod, and yeah, I’m a part of the problem.
Dziedzic sets my skates beneath the stall, freshly sharpened, which is its own problem, because they were freshly sharpened yesterday, too. I watched him do it, then complained about the hollow for six minutes straight. Now they've been done again, perfect and unasked for.
The equipment guy being nice to you is how you find out you're dead.
Two minutes before practice starts my phone buzzes, and my hand gets there so casually I nearly take out my water bottle.
The group thread is now called three toothbrushes one cup, because I renamed it Sunday and neither Patrick nor Wall commented about it. They’ve been walking on eggshells too.
Wall has sent a photo of his own skate.
Wall: Left one snapped. Replaced it.
That's the hole message. A lace.
No how are you holding ups, or thinking of yous, no promises about anything being fine.
I take the phone with me to the ice. Fifteen is still monk shit, thank you.
Another message waits for me when the drill resets:
Wall: Becker got his head stuck in a jersey.
And again, half an hour later:
Wall: Update: still stuck.
The man is at his own practice, with his own pucks to stop and his own coaches to disappoint, and every thirty minutes he reaches out to put one dumb, ordinary fact in my hands, because he knows it'll be fine is the thing people say right before it isn't. He just stands in the crease with me from Chicago, on the half hour, sending proof the world's still stupid, and it’s one of the only things keeping me upright now.
That, and my skates with their tremendously sharp edges.
At the other end of the ice, Patrick resets his crease. Then he resets it again.
To the untrained eye, he’s goaltending. To me, a decorated Patrick scholar, it's the equivalent of finding him running down the highway naked, screaming at clouds. Patrick resets once. He does everything once. Anything done twice should have been done correctly the first time.
On the next rush, one of our rookies loses his man, who strolls in at the far post with an open net and a dream.
Patrick kills the dream right away, then his stick cracks against the post. "Get your shit together or get out of the drill."
The rink goes so quiet you can hear the compressor.
Exhibit two—Patrick doesn't snap, ever. Publicly, nothing has bothered Patrick since the invention of recorded history. That’s his entire brand. Somewhere in the Arctic, a polar bear looks up, while half my team glances at me like it’s my fault.
Which it kind of is, but they don’t know the extent of it, so…rude.
Two minutes later, Patrick skates the full length of the ice, taps the kid once on the shin pad, and glides back to his net like nothing happened, his version of flowers and a card. The rookie looks more terrified now than when he got yelled at.
During the equipment break my phone buzzes with a new sender, one that’s currently forty feet from me.
Patrick: I'm here if you need anything. Goalie session ends at four.
Complete sentences, punctuation, and stated time.
He's officially broken.
When I look up, his eyes dart down to his skates as he pretends he wasn’t looking.
There are days when being cared about feels warm and fuzzy, but today’s not that day. Right now, it feels like two very large men are pressing against my ribcage from two different cities. It’s very romantic. Also, hard to breathe.
By lunch, the whole building has caught my nerves.
ESPN is on in the lounge when I walk in, my own face parked in a corner of the screen under a deadline banner.
I’m not even two steps in when somebody changes the channel.
We land on figure skating and a dozen grown men instantly develop a passion for a Finnish teenager's triple loop.
I'm being pre-mourned.
The Finnish girl falls, making three defensemen wince. Cool, cool. Even the substitute programming has a body count.
I plaster on my I didn’t see that, carry on face and check my phone as I unwrap my sandwich.
Wall: Petrov's word of the day is "lousy." He is using it about the management.
Wall: The management is now involved.
The second one gets an actual laugh out of me, loud and sudden, and Stevens looks over from the far end of the lounge, a look that reminds me I’m not legally allowed to laugh today. I hold up the phone toward him and he nods like I’ve sufficiently explained myself.
Berg passes through the lounge once. I scan his face for my future, expecting to find one of his only two settings, emergency or disappointment. Today he's wearing a third face, smooth and unreadable, a factory option nobody knew existed.
At 2:47 exactly, and I know that because I gave up my monk ambitions around lunch, Berg appears in the tunnel, catches my eye, and jerks his head toward the exit.
There it is. Now is when I find out. No biggie.
How do I breathe, again?
I skate off while the drill keeps running behind me. At my stall, my gloves stage a mutiny, the first refusing to come off, the other coming free so suddenly I punch my own stall. I’m nothing if not coordinated and highly-functioning under pressure. Anaheim will be thrilled.
The hallway to Berg's office has never been this long, which makes sense—the clock has been drunk all day.
With each step, my brain adds a new line to the goodbye speech.
Thank the team. Thank the staff. Avoid saying you'll regret this unless the moment really asks for it.
By the time I reach the door, I've also decided Ducks orange will make me look jaundiced and prepared a formal complaint to the state of California.
Inside, Berg acknowledges me with a nod and point at the chair on the other side of his desk.
I manage to stay relatively vertical as I haul my ass to him, before I stop behind the chair, and grip the back, because sitting down feels like agreeing to something.
"Before you say anything—“ I start before I even know what I’m going to say, because speaking first was the goal in on itself. “I've had a great time here, and I regret nothing, except calling your neutral-zone system 'jazz defense' to that reporter, which I still stand by artistically—"
"Sit down."
The rest of my verbal vomit dies down in my throat and I plop down.
Berg slides a document across the desk, and I brace for the shape of my new life. A flight time, maybe. The word Anaheim. A cartoon duck.
From the top of the paper, a Vipers logo stares back at me. I blink at it twice before my eyes skim the first page, although even that sounds generous, letters refusing to form into proper words.
Somewhere in the middle of the second page, bolded, sits a string of letters that forms into something that reads suspiciously like, TERM SHEET. My brain, which has spent all day protecting me from hope, and can't change systems without a meeting, isn’t willing to accept it. "What is this?"
Berg looks at me like I asked him what ice is. "What does it look like?"
It looks like the letters keep refusing to rearrange into a trap. I put one finger on the page, the tip brushing over a date two years from now carefully, as if the ink can still be erased with one wrong move. "An extension? But—"
"But what?"
I swallow. "Well, the guy said—"
"I told you not to listen to online gossip," Berg not so much says as barks.
"Coach!” I somehow resist the urge to jump to my feet. “The gossip has a blue checkmark and one-point-eight million followers—"
"The gossip doesn't run this team, does it?"
I open my mouth, then close it. I guess it doesn’t. It just ran me, for three weeks straight.
Berg leans back. "The GM is waiting. Sign it or don't, but stop reading bullshit. Your entire generation lives exclusively online, for god’s sake."
"But—" My voice goes for a note I can’t even produce. On the desk, two years continues to be two years. "Wait. Waaaait.” And now I’m on my feet. “How long have you known?"
"Three weeks. Why?"
Three—?
I clench my teeth to stop myself from barking right away. I’m not sure what either my current nor future contract says about punching the coach.
After three long breaths, I force myself to sit back down and point the pen at him. "And you let me walk around all this time thinking— I cleaned my oven, Coach! Do you understand what it takes to get me inside an oven? I found the light!"
"I considered telling you." He shrugs, entirely unrepentant. "Then you put together the best week of forechecking since I’ve known you, and your agent agreed to keep his mouth shut. Turns out scared suits you."
"You're a monster."
"Sure. Anything else?"
Well, duh. There's a whole speech shoving at the back of my teeth, with words in it like replaceable, and energy, and if I open my mouth even a fraction, all of it is coming out.
He watches the fight happen on my face for a moment, then asks, "Anything else except quoting idiots?"
The speech folds.
I sign before my eyes can blur any further. The pen skids on the last stroke and the signature comes out drunk. It doesn't matter. Two years counts in any handwriting.
I put the pen down and reach blindly to my right, and my hand lands on a tissue box sitting exactly six inches away, clearly pre-positioned, because a grown man looked at his morning and penciled in my breakdown between coffee and the deadline.
***