Chapter 35
THIRTY-FIVE
WATERBOARDING IS ILLEGAL, RIGHT?
The urge to (water)board my own teammate isn’t a new one—I’m best friends with Pecan who routinely pisses me the fuck off.
But this is different.
Dyers’s a conceited, sanctimonious jackhole who deserves my skate being shoved up his ass.
Whenever he skates near me, he oinks.
The fucker oinks.
And it messes with my game. Totally screws with my head.
If the NCAA allowed fighting, I’d be on his ass like he played for the other team, but I keep it together.
I’m already intending on tanking the game. I don’t need to add ‘anger issues’ to the list of negatives a scout could attribute to me.
Resenting the full-face grill as perspiration makes my eyes sting, I watch Alec take the face-off after the puck falls out of bounds.
Somehow, the fumbler wins.
When he shoots the puck my way, I let it drift to Mason and retreat, circling back toward Pecan as I monitor the ice.
Mason loses possession and the Cougar shadowing him scoops it up with a puzzled frown because a Mite could have retained the puck with that level of sloppy stick management—the Cougars are bottom of the frickin’ league and they’re playing better than we are.
Alec pushes me when I fail to intercept, roaring, “Get your head in the game, man,” and I heave my ass down to our O-zone.
I need a balance—I have to show up enough for Coach not to bench me while derailing the game from the ice.
When Dyers shuffles past me, again, he oinks. The urge to feed him my stick is unreal, but as my head whips around to glare at him, the puck shuttles over to me and there’s no avoiding it.
With a small clip from the heel of my stick, I watch in dismay as it powers through the air, whipping past the Cougar’s goalie’s glove and landing in the top right corner.
The crowd cheers, but I can sense the bewilderment at the lack of a celly. The team claps me on the shoulders, but I shove them off and skate over to my starting position.
Yeah, I fucked up.
By the time the first intermission rolls around, we’re down 3-1.
The craving to feed him my stick. Inch. By. Inch. Has returned.
Until I inhale and exhale it.
But I can’t. I won’t. There’s a plan. Denny’s concocting it as we play.
When I sink onto the bench in my cubby, I yank off the straps on my helmet and swipe a towel over my head.
How I let D convince me to play tonight, I have no idea. The last place I want to be is on the ice, and considering it’s my home away from home, that’s really saying something. It makes sense that we’re losing anyway—I purposely stayed away from my pregame ritual as a ‘fuck you’ to the Dukes.
No “We Are The Champions” before warm-up and I refused to change the tape on my stick.
Makes sense the game’s a bust.
When Alec struts over to me, all red-cheeked and blustery with indignation, I don’t even look up. “What the fuck, man?”
I lock my eyes onto my skates.
It’s either that or—
No.
Denny asked me not to get into any more fights.
Instead of wringing his neck, I screw up the towel in my hands. Toss it onto the floor. Then grab my stick and peel off the tape from the handle.
One - don’t hit him.
Two - don’t walk out.
Each turn of the tape, all eight of them, has me gritting my teeth so hard that I’m going to need to visit a dentist.
“Leave him alone, Alec. You’d be fucked up too if someone on your goddamn team, someone who’s supposed to have your back, pulled that kind of stunt on your girl,” Mason snipes.
Without breaking focus on my stick, I dip my chin in thanks.
“There are scouts out there!” Alec roars. “You’re making us look bad with this—”
“What’s making us look bad is your shit skills as a captain,” Pecan bites off. “You’re fucking around and finding out, Alec. You want us on board, playing well and winning, then you shouldn’t go behind our backs and pull some messed-up stunt to get that fucker back in the room.”
“You have no right to—”
“Sure I do. I just bet you took that picture. The angle was right, and the rest of us hate that dick, but you keep sticking up for him.”
“God, you’re all a bunch of whining babies,” Dyers butts in, but I can hear his smug smile.
My knuckles ache with the need to beat into him.
Fuck. Fuck.
I suck in a breath. Grab the tape. Start the process. All eight times because that’s the first time Denny told me she loved me. At eight. As a brother, sure. But it always mattered to me.
Being a part of her family always mattered to me.
“Did you hear someone talking?” Pecan puts a hand to his ear. “It was like… some little bitch speaking out loud.”
“For fuck’s sake.” Alec groans. “We need to win this one!”
Ignoring him, I snag the bottle of water Gregg tosses at me before clapping Alec on the back. Hard enough for him to almost fall into my cubby. “I think you know what to do if you want us playing cohesively.”
Cursing, our captain strides off, but Gregg mutters, “Suck on that, fuckface.”
If I weren’t so furious, I’d laugh.
In the second period, I intercept a pass between two Xavier Cougars players and shoot the puck down the ice to Gregg.
Who purposely fumbles it.
Even though the goal’s clear, wide open, no D-men around. Well, there weren’t any. Gregg’s so slow, half the Cougars show up and the puck goes out of play, proving that he’s deep into the sabotage.
Alec roars, “Gregg!” but he just shoots him a grin and skates back to the line.
The rest of the game’s a mess.
Dissent in the ranks isn’t fun, and Alec doesn’t have the people skills on a good day to manage us. Never mind a shitty one. As for Coach, he’s too busy screaming up a storm to actually coach.
We lose 9-1.
One of the worst defeats in team history and a personal disaster for Peeks’ GAA—one that he, along with the other goalies, embrace after being shuffled in and out of nets the entire game.
“Is it wrong that I’m glad that score will be associated with my name for all to see and know until the end of time?”
“According to Denny, civilization’s on its way out, Peeks.”
“Gah, she would say that. I hope it goes on and on just so that in 2451, some punk’s looking through our records and wonders how a pretty decent team lost 9-1.”
“They’ll never think it’s over our star forward’s girl.” Mason cackles.
Honestly, it’s strange for everyone to be so happy that we had such a sound defeat, but there ya go.
As they trudge into the showers, I notice they bump fists with Peeks.
“What did you do?”
He shrugs as I stop him from heading that way too. “Showed up for Denny. Should have done last year. I failed her.” His Adam’s apple bobs. “Had to figure out that showing is better than telling.”
“Hailey told you that, huh?’
“Maybe. Denny’ll be mad that we threw the game.”
“Yup.” I clap him on the shoulder. “But she deserves no less.”
“Damn straight. We’re about to get hauled over the coals by Coach.”
“Worth it.”
We bump fists too.
Coach lets us shower then, as predicted, while he hands us back the phones he confiscates before every game, he tears into us.
When he zooms in on me, I arch a brow. “I told you I wouldn’t play with Dyers.”
“There’s ruining your chances of being drafted, and that’s ridiculous enough, but the team’s?! I won’t have it!”
“What are you going to do, Coach? Dump us all in favor of one crappy forward with an ego bigger than his skill set? Nah, I don’t think so. This is a unified decision.”
“Oh, unified, is it?” Coach snaps, turning red in the face.
“Considering everyone but Alec and Dyers dropped the ball tonight, I reckon so,” Mason snipes. “I refuse to play with some low-life nepo baby who’s taking up a spot someone else deserves.”
“Yeah,” Joker chimes in. “I think it’s weird, Coach, that you’re backing him. Has his daddy called you too?”
To say the apple red of his cheeks blossoms into a neon pink is an understatement. “HOW DARE YOU?”
“Think that hit a nerve,” Pecan mock-whispers.
“I should suspend you all!”
“Nah, the only one who deserves to be suspended is the douche sniffing coke before games,” I jeer. “But maybe Joker’s right…”
As my words wane, the vein in his temple looks fit to burst, but he stomps off instead.
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” Pecan hoots.
“He definitely took a bribe,” Joker mutters.
“Yeah, I got that vibe too.”
Mason douses himself in deodorant as he watches Coach storm off to his office through the thin window on the door he just slammed. “Think we should report it to the NCAA?”
“Sure, but not yet. Because we all sucked, they can’t replace us. It’s unlikely they would before the holidays anyway. Still, we keep it up and we’ll get Dyers tossed off the roster. Something’s being worked on that’ll help.”
That earns me this half of the locker room’s attention because the one thing team management implemented was putting Dyers as far away from me as possible.
“Do tell,” Joker crows.
“Nah. Wait for the surprise.” For the first time, I can grin. But it fades when I check my cell.
Denny: You didn’t have to do that. Honestly
I choke on my fury.
Me: You deserved no less
Denny:
Her sadness oozes through the damn screen. My hand tenses around the cell so hard that I can hear the device creaking under the strain.
I know what’s going on with her. She found her niche here. A comfort zone. But that’s gone. That fucker ruined it for her.
Needing a breather, I head for the fridge to snag another bottle of water. I need to cool down or I’ll lose my shit.
But fate’s just not on my side.
I open the door.
A piece of paper flaps in the breeze.
It’s tacked onto one of the shelves.
I hear a snicker behind me.
And all my good intentions go flying out the window.
Later, Pecan’ll tell me that it was like some kind of fucked-up ballet.
That I almost pulled a pirouette, I spun around that fast.
But Dyers tripped my triggers and was foolish enough to get close to me to witness the aftermath of his prank.
It’s a hat-trick hit for this semester—my arm flies back and collides with his face.