Chapter 7 #2
“Just something he said.” My teammates had begun to stream out the door, cat calling and whooping it up. “Let’s go.”
“Kill ‘em tonight, Graham.”
“Yes ma’am.”
But… yeah. Not so much.
For the first eight minutes of play, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. In the first place, Hartley was kicking ass, so the D-men like me didn’t have a whole lot to worry about. My teammate Trevi, a junior wing, fed Hartley an early goal, and all seemed well.
Things deteriorated very quickly about nine minutes in.
On the next faceoff, I watched one of the Saint B’s wings — a giant with the name EROS printed on his back — yapping into Trevi’s face. I couldn’t hear what was said, but the look on Trevi was far past ordinary annoyance. His face turned the color of raw meat.
The next time I noticed Eros, he was leaning over Orson, who was minding the goal tonight. And Orson’s jaw was as hard as concrete, though he didn’t remove his eyes from the field of play.
So I knew this Eros must be a real piece of work.
But I didn’t get to witness his assholery firsthand until a little later.
Saint B’s had the puck, and it was my job to get it back.
As I flew behind our net on the backcheck, I heard the guy ragging on Orson.
“You’re Rikker’s favorite, right? ‘Cause you’re already wearing knee pads. ”
Holy crap.
Distracted by the comment, I didn’t get to the puck fast enough. Their other wing flung it to the Saint B’s center, who flipped it to Eros. The asshole took a shot. But Orson butterflied himself in the crease, saving it.
Play moved down the ice, but not before I heard Eros lob another one of his gems into Orson’s face. “Faggot! I bet you like it when Rikker comes in your crease.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Orson growled.
A minute later my shift was over, and I swung myself over the wall. A row of tense faces greeted me. The snarl on Big-D’s lips was as ugly as I’d ever seen it. Eros’s poison had begun to spread.
Rikker was living out my nightmare tonight. Because it’s one thing to tolerate the gay guy when everything is going well. And it’s another thing to have some red-faced asshole yelling “faggot” into your face.
Trust me. I’d know.
The upshot was that my team began playing a sloppy game of hockey. And that meant that Coach got pissed off. Which meant that Hartley got pissed, too. The players, not to be outdone, got pissed off that Coach and Hartley were pissed off.
And nobody would even look at Rikker.
Meanwhile, Eros took long shifts, asking his toxic little questions. “How many to a bed on your road trips?” And, “do y’all usually jerk together before practice, or after?”
Each of these little ditties had the effect of exploding my teammates’ ability to concentrate. Their passes stopped connecting, and our offensive strategy broke down.
Theirs didn’t.
Orson got shelled, saving shot after shot. Each time he fell onto the puck, stopping the action, our team might have had a chance to regroup. Instead, Eros or one of his cronies, shoulder to shoulder in the faceoff circle, started the taunts anew.
Inevitably, Eros and Rikker ended up helmet to helmet on a faceoff.
I could not look away. From the bench, I could see Eros’s mouth moving.
And Rikker’s eyes were angry slits. After the puck dropped, I saw Rikker haul off and shove his former teammate in the gut.
The refs didn’t see it, because Hartley had won the faceoff and play rocketed toward Saint B’s goal.
Rikker didn’t get away with it though. Not really. Because when Hartley passed him the puck a few seconds later, Eros saw his chance.
The next two seconds seemed to last a week.
Rikker skimmed the boards and scouted for his opening.
I saw him adjust the angle of his stick in preparation to take a shot.
But I also saw Eros dig in his edges, accelerating toward Rikker like a torpedo.
And it didn’t matter that Rikker got his pass off.
There was no stopping the bigger guy’s momentum.
Because recovering the puck was no longer the point.
The hit was brutal. Eros slammed Rikker into the plexi, and I watched my teammate crumple like a bag of rocks onto the ice.
Eros stumbled, too. That’s why it wasn’t really efficient to hit another player so hard.
Like they taught you in physics, for every action, there was an equal and opposite reaction.
So if you go around flattening people, you’re going to get knocked around, too, losing precious seconds with the puck.
The only reason to hit like that is if you’re trying to injure. Or at least make a point.
Eros made his.
Rikker lay on the ice, unmoving.
Rikker
Oh, fuck. Oh… fuck.
Get up, I ordered myself. Now. At least once a season this happened. That awful feeling of having the air knocked out of me — like my lungs didn’t remember how to expand, and my guts had been permanently compressed.
But even without air, I lurched to a seated position.
Somehow I got one skate back onto the ice, and struggled for the second one.
The hockey game narrowed down around me, and there was only a thin slice of my consciousness left — a straight tunnel between the spot where I’d been brutalized and the bench.
Go, asshole, I ordered myself, even though I still hadn’t drawn a full breath.
Somehow I limped toward my team, and somebody — Bella — yanked the door open for me as I approached.
“Fucking egregious!” she screamed, pushing me onto the bench. “I will kill that motherfucker.”
Bella kept up her litany of curses while I bent over at the waist, willing myself not to puke through the bars of my helmet grate. I needed to pull myself together, and right away. Even half conscious, I knew I couldn’t afford to look beaten right now.
I pulled myself into a vertical position again. Even as my stomach stopped clenching, the other parts of my body that had gotten slammed began announced their displeasure. My ribs were practically vibrating. And I was going to have a bruise the size of Massachusetts on one hip.
Bella’s worried face was parked right in front of me, and as I rose up, her eyes went wide. “You’re bleeding.”
Now that she mentioned it, I could feel something wet on my jaw.
“He slashed your chin.”
Whatever. I was so busy hurting in other places I didn’t even care.
But she unclipped my helmet grate and lifted it. Then she grabbed it with two hands and angled my face toward the ice. “Hey ref!” she shouted. “Look at this shit!”
“Bella, Jesus.” I tried to pull away, but when someone has you by the facemask, that’s pretty much impossible.
She swung my mask to follow the ref as he skated by, and I had to grab her wrists and wrench her off of me.
“Let go of my fucking head.” It was hard to even describe how angry I was in that moment, and how drunk I felt from the pain and the disbelief.
If instant death had somehow been offered to me right then, I would have been tempted to accept.
“But slashing you in the face is a disqualifying penalty!”
“Just…” I yanked my glove off and swiped at my face. When I looked at my hand, there was a pretty good smear of blood there. But I’d live.
Somebody had passed Bella the first aid kit, which she was now yanking open. “Let me wipe that off and see how big the cut is.”
“Better glove up,” Big-D said as the buzzer rang for the end of the first period. “You don’t want to get Rikker’s blood on you.”
“Shut your fucking mouth,” Bella snapped as she pulled on a blue latex glove. Because that was the policy. I’d seen her do it many times before.
But it didn’t matter. Big-D’s comment was out there, and I hung my head like a fucking pariah. I’d spent the whole first semester trying to convince my team that I wasn’t scary. And in the span of twenty minutes, Eros had torn away any goodwill that I might have built up.
Fucking Eros.
Fucking Saint B’s.
Fucking reporter.
Fuck my life.
Coach gave a five-minute rant in the locker room before the next period.
He was practically spitting fire. “What did we just fucking talk about before the game? This is your rink. Your ice. And you’re letting some prick from a second rate team throw you off your game!
FUCK him! How many shots on goal are you going to let these assholes take before you fight back? ”
He threw his clipboard into the wall and stormed out.
There was a moment of utter silence in the room before my teammates — red-faced from both exertion and anger — began filing back out to the bench. I followed them, trying not to wince every time my chest pad moved against my ribs.
“Are you good to play?” Hartley asked me when it was time for the second period to begin.
“Of course,” I snapped. They would have to drag my lifeless body off the ice before I’d give up. But, shit. Two more periods to go. This was already the longest night of my life.
Every second of the next period cost me.
Eros hadn’t attacked me again. Yet. But for the first time in my life, I played scared.
When our shifts overlapped, I spent too much time looking out for him, and too little time watching the puck.
I missed three passes in a row, and that made me want to puke almost as badly as getting slammed in the guts had done.
And every time Eros got anywhere near my teammates, he kept up the douchey commentary. “I bet you guys like holding each other’s sticks, don’t you?” I heard him say.
Stupid shit, right? But he was just distracting enough to do two things: lose us the game, and remind my teammates that I was a liability.
Meanwhile, Saint B’s offensive line continued to fire a hailstorm at Orson. And in between, Eros taunted our goalie with questions about how often the team showered together.
Orson let in two goals that period. But he saved about a thousand.
The third period had just begun when Eros finally managed to get in Big-D’s face in the corner. I was too far away to hear the first part of it, but when they came toward our bench, I could hear Eros asking: “…do you spit or swallow?”
Big-D’s face turned blood-red. And when his shift was up, he straddled the bench and gave me a rough shove out of his way.
“Enough!” Hartley spat. “Pay attention to the fucking puck, okay? What’s your job, here?”
“I didn’t sign up for this shit,” Big-D returned. “And I’m not throwing down for him if they jump him again.”
“Shocker,” I muttered.
Orson let in another lamplighter, unfortunately, and the whole bench grunted with disappointment.
And then it was time to faceoff again. I heaved myself over the wall, coming face to face with Graham for a second.
His face was red, and his eyes were burning with something that I couldn’t read.
But it was probably disgust, the same as everyone else.
Saint B’s won the faceoff, and Graham took off after the puck. He correctly anticipated the pass to Eros, and leaned in. Hit him, my subconscious begged. As if it mattered. As if anything could make this moment more bearable.
But Graham didn’t hit him. Instead, his weapon was a simple poke-check. But he got that stick in there just a little further than necessary, and managed to trip Eros even as Graham passed the puck to Hartley. I blinked, wondering if that was intentional.
Eros went down hard, and the ref didn’t call Graham on it.
The moment that Eros picked himself up off the ice, he skated toward Graham. And in that moment I learned two things: 1) the night could still get worse. And 2) the word “faggot” is the easiest English word to read off someone’s lips. I watched it roll off Eros’s ugly mouth.
Graham flinched so big that I could see it across the rink.
And then? Well… That’s when I really lost my shit. Because my teammates could not be called that word because of me. Shutting him up was the only thing that mattered to me anymore.
Eros went after the puck, and I went after Eros, choosing a vector across the ice that would put me at the same point along the boards where he’d arrive.
It wasn’t rational. That spot on the ice wasn’t even mine to cover.
But I just charged, both ends of my stick in my hands.
I cross-checked him in the hip, and he did a Roadrunner-style splat onto the plexi.
The hit was blatantly illegal. But it didn’t matter. Because I already knew that the refs weren’t going to be my biggest problem.
It only took a couple of seconds for another Saint B’s player to power over to us and throw a punch at me.
I ducked, so it only grazed me. I don’t even remember throwing off my gloves.
But then they were gone, and I was swinging back at him.
The arrival of Hartley at my side to back me up was just a blur on the edge of my consciousness.
Then the blur developed a distinct black and white color scheme, as the linesman and the ref jumped in to separate the four of us.
“You’re done!” the ref shouted, my right arm restrained in his grip. “Major penalty and disqualification. One game suspension.” He gave me a hard shove toward the bench. “Off the ice. Right now, or I’ll make it a two-game suspension.”
In the NHL, fighting was just part of the game. In college? Not legal.
I barely registered the sound of the screaming fans as I skated off, head down.
And then Coach was yelling at me. At us, actually.
Because Hartley was standing right beside me.
“You fucking guys! Dumber than posts, both of you. We have to play fucking Union next week, and you won’t fucking be there. Thanks for that…”
He was still yelling as I limped down the chute. The roar of the arena died when the door shut on us. And then it was just Hartley and I, alone with our shock.
The captain collapsed, defeated, onto his locker bench. His voice was so low that I almost missed what he said. “I have never been ejected from a game before.”
“You’re welcome,” I spat. Not that I was making any sense. Another guy might have even thanked Hartley for throwing down like that.
But I didn’t want anyone to throw down for me. That was the fucking problem. I didn’t want to be that guy who brought down humiliation on the backs of his teammates.
I tossed my pads onto the floor one after another, and then stomped into the showers, staying under the water as long as I dared. But before the team came off the ice, I was out of there. I got dressed and snuck out of the building. Like the loser that I was.