Chapter 1 #2
Gerard takes off alone while we catch our breath. I glance over at Oliver, who shakes his head subtly. Don’t intervene. We all know the rules.
By the fifth solo suicide, Gerard’s shoulders are shaking. I frown. The golden retriever is breaking, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.
“Better,” Coach finally says, though his tone suggests it’s anything but. “Get back in line.”
Gerard skates over, and I bump my shoulder against his. He sniffs once, hard, and straightens up. That’s my boy.
“Alright, power play drills!” Coach announces. “Graham, get in the net. Everyone else, you’re going to pepper him until he learns to stop a puck or dies trying.”
Kyle skates to the crease with the resignation of a man walking to his execution. He knows what’s coming. We all do.
The first puck catches him in the shoulder. The second one deflects off his blocker. The third one—a nasty wrister from Oliver—hits him square in the mask with a sound that makes me wince.
“Keep shooting!” Coach orders. “Graham, you’ve got cement in your skates or what?”
Puck after puck rains down on Kyle. One clips his thigh. Another finds the gap between his chest protector and arm pad. I watch him absorb hit after hit, and I feel each one in my own body. His collarbone. His hip. That soft spot on the inner thigh that no amount of padding truly protects.
“Larney! Stop daydreaming and shoot!”
I fire off a wrist shot that Kyle barely gets a glove on. It ricochets off his catching mitt and into the net.
“Pathetic!” Coach roars. I’m not sure if he’s talking to Kyle or me. Probably both.
“Come on, boys!” Oliver calls out, his voice straining to maintain its usual optimism. “We’ve got this! Channel that energy!”
But even Oliver’s encouragement sounds hollow by the second hour. His cheers become less frequent, his voice more ragged. When Nathan trips over his own stick and face-plants into the boards, Oliver’s attempt at a joke falls flat.
Gerard gets singled out again during the passing drills. His passes are fine—better than fine, actually—but Coach finds fault in everything. The angle. The speed. The way Gerard holds his stick.
“You call that a pass, Gunnarson? My dead grandmother could—”
“You already used that one,” Kyle mutters from the net, and I hold my breath.
Coach’s head swivels toward Kyle with predatory precision. “What was that, Graham?”
“Nothing, Coach.”
“That’s what I thought.” He turns back to Gerard. “Again. And this time, pretend you actually want to be here.”
The tears are back in Gerard’s eyes. He blinks rapidly, jaw clenched so tight I’m worried about his molars. But he lines up the pass and executes it perfectly.
Coach says nothing. Just blows his whistle for the next drill.
My legs are screaming by hour three. Every muscle fiber begs for mercy. My lungs have graduated from glass shards to full-on razor blades. Sweat drips down my back, pooling in places that will no doubt chafe later.
I want to cry. I really, truly want to let the tears fall and admit that this is too much, that I can’t do this, that maybe I should have stayed in Boston and worked at a hardware store for the rest of my life.
But I need to keep impressing Coach. Prove to him that I belong here, that I am the best hockey player he’s ever seen.
This is what I was born to do.
I dig deeper. Find reserves I didn’t know existed. When Coach calls for another set of suicides, I’m the first one to the line. When he demands faster shots on Kyle, I wind up and let it fly with everything I have.
Kyle stops it. Barely. But he stops it.
“That’s more like it, Larney!” Coach surprisingly sounds pleased, and the validation shoots through me like a drug.
Gerard glances over, and I see the question in his eyes. How? How do you keep going?
I don’t have an answer for him. All I have is this burning need to prove that I belong here. That all the sacrifices were worth it. That Drew Larney isn’t just some kid from Boston with a chip on his shoulder and too much to prove.
“Water break!” Coach gratefully announces. We all collapse against the boards like puppets with cut strings.
Oliver hands out water bottles, his usual cheerfulness completely depleted. “Good job, everyone,” he says flatly.
Gerard tilts his water bottle back, gulping desperately. The excess escapes the corners of his mouth and traces paths down his flushed neck.
“Two more hours,” someone groans.
“Two more hours,” I repeat, changing it from a death sentence to a promise.
Because that’s what Drew Larney does. He survives. He pushes through. He makes himself indispensable.
Even if it kills him.
As the day progresses, to tune out the pain in every limb, I find myself thinking about when I was six years old. I was frozen in the kitchen doorway, watching my dad stuff clothes into a duffel bag while Mom begged him to stay. The memory is as unexpected as it is brutal.
“Please, think about the boys,” I remember her saying with my baby brother in her arms.
Dad didn’t say a word. He zipped his bag and walked out. I stood there, frozen in despair in my dinosaur pajamas, wondering what I’d done wrong.
After that day, Mom worked doubles at the hospital to keep the lights on.
I remember the weight of my baby brother in my arms, his tiny fists grabbing at my shirt while I walked around the living room at two in the morning.
Mom would stumble out in her scrubs, eyes red-rimmed with exhaustion, and I’d lie.
“He just woke up,” I’d say, even though I’d been pacing for hours, singing off-key lullabies I half-remembered from episodes of Barney.
Eventually, I taught myself how to cook macaroni and cheese because Mom had passed out after a thirty-six-hour shift.
I learned how to forge her signature on permission slips because she forgot, too overwhelmed to remember school existed.
I watched my friends complain about curfews while I figured out how to stretch twenty bucks for a week’s worth of groceries.
And the worst part is I can’t even hate my mom for any of it.
She did what she had to do. We survived because of her sacrifice, her endless shifts, her determination to keep us fed and housed.
But, fuck, sometimes I look at my brother now—fifteen, carefree, the biggest worry being whether that girl from his English class likes him back—and I get this ugly twist in my gut.
He got the childhood I never had. Mom remarried when he was five and I was eleven, got us out of that apartment, and gave him stability.
He’s never had to lie awake wondering if the heat would get shut off during freezing winters.
Never had to pretend he wasn’t hungry. Never had to grow up overnight because someone had to be the man of the house.
We get another break, and I grab my water bottle. I squirt what’s left into my mouth, trying to wash away the bitter taste of old memories. Nobody knows this but hockey saved me from an early death.
When I was ten, a charity program provided free equipment and lessons to children from low-income families.
The second I stepped on that ice, everything else faded away.
No more bills, no more crying brother, no more exhausted mother.
There was just me, the puck, and the beautiful simplicity of trying to score.
Hockey became my escape, then my obsession, then my ticket out. Every early-morning practice, every late-night game, every bruise and broken bone—it all meant that I could be more than that six-year-old kid watching his world fall apart.
“You good?” Kyle asks, pulling off his mask. His face is screwed up in a slight expression of concern, which for Kyle is a rarity.
“Yeah,” I lie, because what else am I supposed to say?
That sometimes I still wake up in a cold sweat, thinking I hear my brother crying?
That I check my bank account obsessively, terrified of seeing zero?
That every time someone says I’m cocky or arrogant, I want to scream that it’s armor.
That underneath, I’m still that scared little kid trying to hold his family together?
“Alright, bring it in!” Coach yells three hours after he blew his whistle for the first time today.
We huddle around him at center ice, breathing hard and dripping sweat despite the arctic temperature of the arena.
As I drink him in, I realize something. What I feel for Coach isn’t only attraction, but something else.
Approval. Recognition. All the things I never got from the man who was supposed to teach me how to be one.
Coach sees potential in all of us. He pushes us to be better, and never gives up when we’re ready to call it quits. He’s present, demanding but fair, and invested in our success.
“Alright, gentlemen. That was mediocre at best.” Coach crosses his arms, and I try not to notice how the tracksuit strains across his biceps. “We’ve got a long road ahead, and right now, half of you skate like you’ve got anvils strapped to your ankles.”
He pauses, letting the criticism sink in.
“But.” Another pause. “I saw some fight out there today. Some of you apparently want to be here. That’s what’s going to carry us through the second half of this season. Heart. Grit. The willingness to bleed for the guy next to you.”
His eyes sweep across our exhausted faces, and for a split second, they land on me. My heart does something stupid.
“Hit the showers. Recovery day tomorrow, then we’re back at it Wednesday. Dismissed.”
We start filing past him toward the tunnel, and that’s when it happens—Coach’s hand connects with each ass as we go by. It’s a tradition, one of those weird hockey things that would probably get him fired in any other profession. But here, it’s Coach being Coach.
Gerard gets his smack and full-on giggles, like a kid getting tickled. The sound is so absurd after hours of torture that I almost laugh with him.
“Thanks, Uncle Jack!” Gerard chirps, and Coach’s eye twitches.
“I’ve told you not to call me that here, Gunnarson.”
“Sorry, Coach Uncle Jack!”
Coach sighs the sigh of a man who has known Gerard’s father for decades and deeply regrets it.
Oliver is next. He receives his ass slap with a curt nod, all business, like they closed a deal on a used car. “Coach.”
“Jacoby.”
Kyle shuffles past in his goalie gear; he doesn’t even acknowledge the move. No flinch, no nod, not even a blink. He just keeps walking like Coach is a turnstile he has to pass through.
Then it’s my turn.
Coach’s hand lands on my ass, firm and brief, and yeah, I still get a thrill. Sue me. But instead of walking past, same as always, I stop. Turn my head. “Thanks for today, Coach.”
His hazel eyes meet mine. For a moment, nothing. Then his mouth twitches—the smallest movement, barely there, gone as quickly as it appeared. But I saw it. An almost-smile. Recognition.
“Get some rest, Larney. You earned it.”
I walk toward the tunnel feeling ten feet tall. The arena ceiling might as well be the sky for all I care.
In the locker room, the mood is lighter now that the torture is over. Guys strip out of their gear, trading complaints and jokes in equal measure. The smell of sweat intensifies, but nobody cares. We survived.
“Did Coach smile at you?” Gerard asks, yanking off his shoulder pads.
“I think I hallucinated it,” I admit, unlacing my skates. “Oxygen deprivation.”
“No, I saw it too,” Oliver confirms from across the room. “Larney got a Coach Donovan smile. That’s rarer than seeing a unicorn.”
“What did you say to him?” Nathan asks, his pink hair plastered to his forehead with sweat.
“Just thanked him for practice.”
The locker room goes quiet for a beat.
“You thanked him?” Gerard sounds genuinely confused. “For that? Drew, he made me do solo suicides until I almost cried.”
“You did cry,” Kyle points out.
“Almost cry more,” Gerard amends.
I shrug, peeling off my jersey. “I don’t know. Felt like the right thing to do. He pushes us because he gives a shit.”
Oliver studies me with those green eyes that miss nothing. “You’re a weird dude, Larney.”
“Thanks.”
“Wasn’t a compliment.”
“Taking it as one anyway.”
Gerard laughs, and the moment passes. We’re back to being a bunch of sweaty guys in various states of undress, complaining about sore muscles and debating whose ass hurts more from Coach’s slaps.
But I hold onto that almost-smile. File it away in the mental folder labeled “Reasons Drew Larney Belongs Here.”
It’s a folder that’s gotten thicker over the past two and a half years. And today, it grew by one more page.