11. Ace
ELEVEN
ACE
A couple of days had passed since Goldie walked into the conference room at the arena. Before that meeting, my life had started to feel like Groundhog Day. Work out, slam protein, practice, run, game, repeat. I wasn’t bored, but I wasn’t content either. My life felt the way Gideon’s looked: structured, disciplined, and boring.
Now, with the session with Goldie coming up, something was back. My stomach felt like it did before my first NHL game: pukey.
What were the chances that the one chick who had caught my attention, and then rejected me, was going to be sitting in a room alone with me? At least now there was a reason that I couldn’t sleep with her—it would be unprofessional, for her. That seemed better than rejection.
After practice, we had a free afternoon. Instead of going for a run, I picked up the phone and called Ethan. An hour later we were lined up at the golf dome with five buckets of driving range balls between us.
“I thought it was bad luck to golf before the end of season.” The ball cracked as Ethan made contact. It sailed well past the three-hundred-yard marker.
“Where did you hear that?” I pulled out my driver and waggled the head a couple of times over the ball before sending it into the next atmosphere. I popped it high and it dropped before the hundred-yard marker.
Ethan laughed and leaned against his club. “I thought it was a superstition thing. At least it was when I played in Florida.”
Smiling, I set another ball on the tee. “Maybe it was to stop you guys from playing too much golf in the season.” We’d only been through one bucket of balls and already I could feel it in my shoulder. It was in our contract that during the season, we wouldn’t do sports that could result in an injury, like skiing, or race car driving, but as far as I knew, golf wasn’t on the list.
Ethan scratched his cheek with his gloved hand. “So you’re telling me that you’ve never heard that it’s bad luck to play golf during the season?”
I nodded and popped another ball high in the sky.
“Motherfuckers.” Ethan hit another perfect shot. “I totally thought that it was a superstition. I guess it doesn’t matter. The courses here are covered in snow anyway.”
Ethan had grown up in Florida and started his career there. “What do you think of playing for Toronto?” I asked. He had been on the team a year longer than me.
He shrugged. “I was pumped to get traded. I thought the fans here would be wild, and it seemed like the Tigers were on their way to the finals.”
Nodding, I pushed over the bucket of balls with my club and nudged one towards the tee. “I thought the fans would be crazy too. Season tickets are too fucking expensive for the wild crowd, I guess.” Toronto had insanely expensive season tickets that were mostly bought by corporations. Toronto fans were tame in comparison to some of the smaller cities.
“Yeah,” Ethan agreed. “Also, the weather sucks. The houses are expensive and I prefer women in bikinis to Canada goose parkas. But I really don’t care about that shit. All I want is to win the Cup again. Toronto seemed the place to be…for that.”
I let the comment linger in the air between us. Before Gideon and I showed up, Toronto was returning to its glory days. Focusing on the ball, I took the club back slowly and then completely topped the ball. It dribbled off the platform onto the astroturf. “It’s a good thing your slap shots are better than your golf shots.” Ethan flagged down a server and had her bring us a round of beer. He cracked one and handed it to me, and then cracked the other.
“To the golf season. May it come late this year.” I held up the can. Ethan and I both knew that a delayed start to the golf season meant we were still in the playoffs. Ethan’s eyes betrayed him. He glanced away before smiling and tapping his beer can to mine. “To a June golf season.”
I sipped my beer and wiped my mouth with the back of my gloved hand. Before I could take another shot, Ethan stopped me. “When you do a slap shot, where is the puck?”
“What?” I stepped out of my stance. “It is wherever it is.”
“Kind of like a wherever you go, there you are kind of thing? How zen of you.” Ethan set his club down on the mat. “Pretend the ball is the puck and you are going to hit the perfect shot into the top corner over the goalie’s shoulder. Stop thinking so much.”
Squeezing my eyes shut, I imagined skates on my feet, and instead of a white ball, a black puck. I shifted forward, putting the ball further ahead in my stance, then drew the club back and smashed the shit out of it.
Ethan raised his hand and I high-fived him. “That’s how it’s done.” He took another gulp of his beer and leaned on his club. “What about you? What do you think of the team?”
I shrugged, wanting to get back to hitting balls to see if I could replicate the shot. “I grew up in Northern Michigan, so I’m used to the shit weather, and I think parkas are sexy.”
Instead of hitting more balls, Ethan took a seat on the bench behind the platform. “What do you think about this study Coach is making us do?”
Ethan was one of the ten guys selected to be a part of Goldie’s paper. I picked up my can from the ground and sat next to Ethan on the bench. The cracks of golf balls punctuated the air around us. “It’s probably a good thing. I mean, the more we learn, the better, right?”
“Yeah.” Ethan slung his elbow over the back of the bench. “I feel like we’re being punished though, more like volun-told, not volunteered.”
“Have you had one?” I asked.
“One what?”
“A concussion.”
“Of course.” He shook his head as though I’d asked him if grass was green.
“Maybe we’re the ones who have had the most knocks to the head and that’s why coach picked us for Goldie’s study.”
“Goldie?” Ethan raised his eyebrows. “Are you on a first-name basis with professor hot tits?”
I stiffened, but couldn’t blame Ethan. Goldie’s rack was fucking phenomenal. His eyes would have to be swollen shut to miss them. “She’s not my type.” It wasn’t a lie. Goldie wasn’t my usual “type.”
“What’s that? Smart?” Ethan jabbed me with his elbow. “Yeah, me neither. She’s a keeper. That’s the kind of woman we end up with ten years from now, not during our prime.”
“You’re such an ass.” I laughed, relieved that Ethan wasn’t ready to settle down and that he recognized Goldie was on a whole other level. “Have you had a session yet?”
“Yeah.” Ethan finished his beer and crinkled the can before tossing it perfectly into one of the bins. “I thought everyone went yesterday.”
Everyone went yesterday?
“Not me. What kind of stuff did she do?”
Ethan ordered another round of beer and two more buckets of balls. “She probed me.”
“What?” This time I didn’t hide the surprised look on my face. My brow crinkled into furrows beneath the brim of my Tigers hat.
“Right up the ass.”
My eyes bugged out of my head. “I thought that it was brain stuff.”
Ethan practically spit out the sip of beer he’d just taken. “Oh, Acer. It’s a good thing you’re awesome at hockey. I was just kidding. She put this scanner cap thing on my head and asked me a boatload of questions. She probed my noggin with her words.” He pointed to his head.
“Oh.” I couldn’t believe I had been so gullible.
“Although, I wouldn’t be averse to letting that girl put a—”
“Stop.” I held up my hand. “Let’s get back to golf.”
After an afternoon of shooting golf balls and day-drinking, I was tipsy and exhausted. I fell onto my sofa and scrolled through the years of games I had saved. I found the one I was looking for—Chicago versus Miami. Ethan and I were teammates now, but a few years earlier we had been opponents. He was a serious player, like Gideon. Ethan flew under the radar, staying off the hit lists and earning points to keep him at the top of the league, but not the tip top.
While the game played in the background, I checked my phone one more time. There was still nothing from Goldie. Could I have written down the wrong number on her sheet? Why had everyone else had a session with her and I hadn’t heard a word?
I set down the phone and rewound the last play. On the screen, I deked out Ethan to slip the puck between the Miami’s goalie’s pads.
Ethan was good, but I was better. At least, I used to be better. Sighing, I selected one of the current season’s games and watched as I fumbled the puck multiple times in one play, overshot passes, and was in the wrong fucking spot on every play. What had happened to me? When I was traded to Toronto, I lost my mojo.
Gideon’s face appeared on the screen. He wore a full-faced plastic shield, called a fish tank. In one of his junior years, a skate had sliced up his cheek. It hadn’t healed well, and he’d worn a fish tank ever since. I remember the game vividly because it was terrifying, and probably traumatizing too. I was playing Junior B and he was Junior A. I was sitting in the stands with our father when the player in front of Gideon fell, the blades of his skates in the air. The stick belonging to the player chasing down Gideon had accidentally become entangled in his skates.
The whole rink had gone silent when my brother’s face hit the skates. When Gideon stood, he touched his glove to his face and seemed puzzled by the red on the fingers of his glove. From where I sat, all I saw was my idol, my big brother standing in a pool of red that was getting bigger by the second.
Now, Gideon’s eyes were dark and his scar was white against his golden complexion. He got his looks from our Greek mother. My pale ass and freckles came from my dad’s Irish heritage. As he skated across my TV screen, I watched him make mistake after mistake.
I rewound the game and watched again. Holding my breath, I realized that there was a pattern. A bad one. We only fucked up when we were on the ice together. Shaking my head, I decided to study all the games from the current season. It had to be a coincidence, and I was going to find evidence that it wasn’t true. After three more Steamwhistle Pale Ales, and analyzing every current season Tigers’ game, I hadn’t found any evidence to disprove my theory. Gideon and I played well when we weren’t on the ice together, but everything fell apart the second we were on the ice at the same time.
Fuck. I turned off the game and put on a Seinfeld rerun. I needed to laugh. What I’d discovered wasn’t funny. At all.
My phone chimed with a text message. My heart paused a beat, but it resumed its regularly scheduled pumping when I saw it was Ethan on the other end, and not Professor Goldie.
Ethan wanted to hit the range again. I texted him back and agreed, but added a question, one that I wouldn’t have asked if I hadn’t been tipsy from all the pale ale.
U got Prof. Goldie’s number? I lost it.
When my phone pinged again, Ethan had set up another session at the range and included Goldie’s contact information, saved under Professor Hot Tits. I shook my head and accepted the file, making a mental note to update her name in my phone.
Fuelled by Steamwhistle, I only debated for one second before tapping on Professor Hot Tits’ name. The phone rang three times before she picked up.
“Hello?”
I sat up, brushing Doritos crumbs from my chest. Thankfully, the phone screen was dark, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I hadn’t accidentally facetimed her. The timer on the screen ticked away as I debated whether or not to hang up.
“Is this Goldie?” I asked. “I mean, Professor Goldie,” I added before she could reply.
“Yes, it is.” There was a reluctance in her voice. “Who is this?”
“It’s Acer. I mean, Ace Bailey. I’m calling because I haven’t had a session with you yet and I wanted to make sure I didn’t write down my phone number wrong on the paper.”
The seconds ticked by slowly. As a player, I knew the importance of time, and the difference that one second could make in a player’s life.
“Hold on, Mr. Bailey.” Some paper rustled in the background and then she came back on the line and perfectly recited my phone number. “Is that correct?”
I hadn’t thought this through. Now what? “Um. Yeah. That’s right. I have a pretty busy schedule, you know, and if you want me to participate in your study, I’m going to need a little bit of notice.” I winced, wishing that I didn’t sound like such an asshole.
“Fine then, Mr. Bailey. How about tomorrow at five thirty a.m. You’ve got practice at seven thirty.”
I glanced at the calendar on my fridge. Did she think that I would balk at showing up that early? If she did, the joke was on her. I had grown up practicing before sunrise since I was a teenager. “That’s perfect.”
“Great.” The word didn’t match her tone. She sounded like it was anything but great. “I’ll see you in the gym at the arena at five thirty.”
After the call disconnected, I shuffled into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. I didn’t know what to expect in the session, but I knew I didn’t want to show up hungover. I spent the rest of the evening eating cold chicken breasts and broccoli, courtesy of the team’s nutritionist.
Instead of chugging beer while I watched every game tape from the 2024 Toronto Tigers’ regular season, I hydrated with tap water.
When I finally fell into bed, I tossed and turned, and got up to piss at least three times. I wondered if the chicken breasts were bad, but as I wound myself up in the sheets thinking about how I was going to prove to Goldie that I wasn’t an arrogant player, I realized it wasn’t salmonella in my guts, it was butterflies.