Chapter 16
Jamie — Past
I was sixteen years old and played the best game of my life.
I knew it the way you knew certain things on the ice — not thought, not calculated, just known, the way your body knew a clean pass from a bad one before your brain caught up.
I had been playing hockey since I could remember and I had never felt like that.
Like the game was running slightly slower than usual.
Like I could see the whole ice at once, every player, every gap, every half-second before it opened.
Like I was exactly, precisely where I was supposed to be and everything I did from there was just a matter of letting it happen.
The tournament was the biggest one our school had entered in three years.
Scouts in the bleachers. College programs watching.
Coach Heller told us before we took the ice that this was the one that mattered and I believed him because I always believed that — every game was the one that mattered, every practice was the one that counted, every drill was the one between here and wherever I was trying to get.
That was not pressure to me. That was just how I moved through the world.
I had been building toward that game my whole life without knowing.
I also had not anticipated Jonah Reardon.
Jonah had been on the team since September.
He wasn't the best player. Top third, maybe, on a good day — solid defenseman, read the game well, worked harder than almost anyone in practice.
But that wasn't the thing about Jonah. The thing about Jonah was that he was relentlessly, almost violently kind in a way I had never encountered in anyone before.
He remembered things. Asked follow-up questions.
Noticed when someone was having a bad day and quietly adjusted, made more room, said something small but nice, exactly what you needed to hear. He always said the right thing.
He did it to me in the third week of October and I didn't know what to do with it.
I'd had a brutal practice. Everything was off — timing, passes, my shot pulling wide every single time.
I was at my stall afterward, gear half off, jaw welded shut, running through every mistake in order over and over again, lost in the loop, when Jonah sat down next to me and said, completely unprompted, that my work in the first half was the best he'd ever seen from anyone on the team.
He wasn't trying to make me feel better. He said it the way he said everything — like it was simply true and therefore worth saying. I didn't know what to do with that. I said thanks and went back to focusing on my gear and spent the whole ride home thinking about him.
That kept happening.
Jonah kept happening.
The way he passed — always exactly where I needed it, like he'd already mapped where I was going before I decided.
The way he found me after good plays, not loud about it, just a hand on my shoulder or a look across the ice that said I saw that in a way that mattered.
The way he laughed at things I said that weren't jokes exactly, just observations, and somehow he always caught the humor in them anyway.
Like he understood me. Everyone else thought I was too serious, but Jonah really saw me.
I stopped letting myself think too hard about how he laughed or smiled or made me feel. I stopped letting myself think too hard about a lot of things involving Jonah.
We scored the first goal of the game together.
My pass, his shot — a play we'd run in practice a dozen times but never with that precision, never that clean.
The puck found the net before their goalie had finished moving and the sound that went through the rink was immediate and enormous and Jonah turned around and found me on the ice the way he always found me, like he already knew where I was.
He grabbed my face.
Both hands. The way you did when you were overwhelmed with something and your body moved before your brain did.
His gloves were off and his hands were cold from the ice and he grabbed my face and said something I couldn't hear over the noise and I looked at him and he watched me and there was a half second — just a half second — where the rink and the noise and the scouts in the bleachers and everything else went quiet.
He felt it too.
I knew because his hands didn't move. Because he was looking at me the way I had caught him watching me three or four times that season when he thought I wasn't paying attention, and I had been paying attention every single time.
Because he was looking at me the way I looked at him.
Then the team was around us and the moment faded and we were back on the ice and I skated to center and faced off and I did not look at the bleachers.
I already knew my dad was there. I already knew he saw. I already knew I had fucked up and shown too much.
The break came at the end of the second period.
We were up by two. I had been everywhere on the ice — two assists, one goal, a defensive play in the final minute that Coach Heller would probably diagram in practice the following week.
I was running on something that didn't have a name.
The pure clean high of playing exactly as well as you were capable of playing, of having a body that was doing everything you asked of it, of being so inside the game that nothing outside of it existed.
I came off the ice and was reaching for my water bottle when I saw them.
Jonah and his dad. They were along the boards, maybe twenty feet from me.
His dad had his arm around Jonah's shoulders — easy, natural, the way you held someone you were proud of without needing to announce it.
He was saying something in Jonah's ear. Jonah was grinning wide, the one that took over his whole face, and his dad pulled him in and shook him a little and Jonah laughed and his dad was laughing too and there was nothing complicated about any of it.
That was the thing.
There was nothing complicated about any of it.
It was just a father and his son after a good period, easy and warm and unremarkable, the most ordinary thing in the world. I watched it for longer than I meant to.
"Your left edgework is still breaking down."
My father's voice.
Right at my shoulder.
I turned.
He was standing close, arms crossed, eyes moving back to the ice like he was reviewing something.
He'd been there the whole game. I knew that.
I always knew where he was in the stands the way you knew where a specific sound was coming from even when you were trying not to listen.
The way you avoided something you didn't want to see.
"During the first play especially," he said. "You're compensating and it's costing you half a second."
I said nothing.
"The turnover in the first period —"
"I recovered it."
"You recovered it because they weren't ready.
They'll be ready in the third." He said this with the patience of a man who had always known more than everyone in the room.
"You're dropping your shoulder on the approach.
You've been dropping it all season and you keep not fixing it.
Do I have to punish you, Jamie? Are you ever going to learn? "
Across the rink Jonah's dad was still talking to him. He was pointing at something on the ice, explaining something, and Jonah was nodding and his dad ruffled his hair and Jonah ducked away from it laughing and his dad grabbed him back.
"Are you listening to me?" His patience was running thin.
"Yes," I said, solemnly. I looked at the ice.
I listened to my father take apart the best period of hockey I had ever played in my life, piece by piece, with the quiet methodical patience of a man who had never found anything I'd done to be quite enough.
The dropped shoulder. The hesitation on the right side.
The turnover. The two seconds in the first play where my edge work wasn't what it should have been.
He went through all of it while the team moved around us and Coach Heller talked to the defense and somewhere Jonah was laughing at something his dad said.
I drank my water and I kept my eyes on the ice to stop my eyes from blurring.
Be strong. Don’t show anyone anything. Shove it down.
I went back out for the third period and I played the best hockey of my life. We won by three.
The locker room after was loud in the way locker rooms were after real wins — not polite, the uncontrolled noise of a group of people who had just done something together and couldn't quite believe it yet.
Someone had music going. Someone else was yelling about something.
There was gear everywhere and the smell of sweat and ice and tape and I was sitting at my stall with my skates off letting it move around me. Just taking it in quietly.
Jonah found me before I'd gotten my pads off. He sat down next to me the way he'd been sitting next to me for months and didn't say anything. Just sat there with his elbows on his knees looking at the floor, still catching his breath from the game.
Then he said, without looking up, "I've never played with anyone like you."
I looked at him.
He looked up.
And there it was again — that thing from the ice, from the goal celebration, from every look across the rink that whole season.
Right there between us in the noisy locker room, quiet and completely clear.
He wasn't trying to do anything with it.
He was just — letting me see it. The way he let me see everything, without checking first, without any armor.
I looked at him for a second too long.
I could let myself have it for just a second.
"Jonah." Coach Heller's voice from across the room.
He went.
I looked at my skates and I sat very still.
My dad was waiting outside the rink.