Chapter Eight
Easton [reading off a notecard]: Describe my ideal vacation.
Oh, I’m going to get so much [bleeping noise] for this.
Honestly, I’d just stick around here for the summer.
Maybe take a week to go camping in one of the national parks, couple hikes in Muir Woods.
Fishing on the pier, barbecue in the evenings. I love it here. Why go somewhere else?
Vanderbilt: Oh man, perfect vacation? I took my wife to Cabo two years back. We ran into Vladi—that’s Dmitriyev, our tendy—there. It was pretty sweet. We rented a boat, did a bunch of snorkeling, a lot of partying.
Breezy: I always go home to see my family. Someday, I want to take them all to Italy to see where my grandparents and great-grandparents lived.
Luca: [rolls his eyes] Of course Breezy said Italy. My ideal vacation will be to take my siblings to Montreal so they can both mock him for what passes as Italian culture in Canada.
Breezy [off-screen]: I heard that! I would love to meet your sibs!
Tom: Oh, I don’t know. I guess I haven’t been on many big vacations.
Phil always makes me go fishing with him in the summer, which is the most boring thing I’ve ever done.
But it’s nice to get together off the ice.
Maybe I can talk him into an island in the Caribbean somewhere. I bet they have fishing too.
Top comments:
phileastfanclub: East bringing peak team-dad energy to the room.
seelionssaylions: Would love to hear how Dmitriyev felt about playing third wheel in Cabo lol.
firecrackers_spark: God, this team is so wholesome it makes me want to puke. Put Calabrese and Mazetti in a ring and let them fight!
stickstickpuck: @firecrackers_spark—Your team eats deep-dish pizza. I bet they’d both annihilate you.
(From an “Ask A Sea Lion” reel posted to Instagram, 12/04/2024)
The last time Ben entered a public high school was for his graduation.
Schools had a lot in common with prisons, in his opinion, with large halls surrounding walled-in courtyards where someone else regimented the inmates’ time.
Thankfully, Phil lived in a good neighborhood, so the school had decent ratings and probably wasn’t a complete hellhole.
Walking through the linoleum-lined hallways, no one could guess. It looked like every other hellhole.
Ben wondered why no one had invested in a different design for lockers before now. They were the same in every school he’d ever been in, only spray-painted in different colors.
Dropping Charlie off for his first day was supposed to be a quick errand, but ten o’clock found both Ben and Charlie still in the principal’s office, going over records.
Charlie’s mother might have been a piece of shit, but she’d had the foresight to pack his birth certificate and transcripts when she’d kicked him out.
Unfortunately, all of those contained incorrect gender markers and listed a Utah address.
On the phone, the principal had assured Ben they would sort something out.
In practice, this meant signing a stack of paperwork that simply wouldn’t end.
At least no one had misgendered Charlie so far.
“You’re sure you’ll be okay?” Ben asked when they finally finished dealing with every form the school could think of.
Charlie shrugged.
“You could stay home another day,” Ben offered.
It would be inconvenient. There was a practice scheduled for this afternoon, and he didn’t want to take Charlie to the rink too much if he could avoid it.
The longer the press didn’t spot Charlie the better.
Mostly, no one cared about the coach’s family, but San Francisco Herald beat reporter, Olivia Starling, loved human interest stories that veered into gossip, and the coach’s trans nephew would be a good one.
If she caught wind of Charlie, it would inevitably lead to questions about Ben’s family, his background, and finally, his job. He did not need to blow his cover yet.
Not to mention the pressure on Charlie if he were put online.
But Charlie shook his head wordlessly and slung his backpack over one shoulder.
“You have my phone number, right? You can call if anything happens, I’ll be there.
” He’d bought Charlie a phone on Monday as his first act as prospective guardian.
Pedagogically unsound, maybe. Practical, definitely.
He wondered if Charlie was too old for a serious talk about social media.
Would Ben have to put effort into understanding TikTok? God, he hoped not.
“Whatever,” Charlie said and let the principal lead him to math class.
Ben watched him go for far too long. They still hadn’t talked about what had happened with the family, and in the absence of facts, Ben’s imagination filled in the gaps.
Just because Ben’s siblings were bigots didn’t mean they were ignorant.
They must have seen the signs of nonconformity and tried to suppress them, ending in Charlie’s desperate bid for freedom in the form of a haircut.
It was the uneven edges of the cut that worried Ben, reminiscent more of a knife than of scissors, along with Charlie’s curt statement about hurting someone.
On the one hand, Ben was glad Charlie had cut his hair and not other things.
On the other, he knew from his own childhood how the matriarchs in their family utilized children in the household.
The more sinful they thought the child, the more they felt the need to keep them occupied.
Ben got very good at keeping a clean house.
It didn’t help with his own declining sense of self-worth, nor with the buildup of emotions he had to let out somehow.
He found release through ill-advised sexual encounters and bad writing.
In Charlie’s case, it could get worse if he didn’t get someone professional to talk to who knew their shit.
The school bell rang, and Ben cursed. He was late to meet with Phil’s lawyer.
He reached her office twenty minutes after the scheduled time and was immediately bombarded with yet more paperwork.
Applying for guardianship meant even more forms, many of them asking for information Ben simply couldn’t provide.
He didn’t have a long-term position, not under his legal name anyway, and he also didn’t have a permanent residence.
Phil’s lawyer, a sharply dressed woman who insisted he call her Marisa, admirably walked him through the entire process, but she couldn’t make it less overwhelming.
She suggested he enter Phil’s address as his own even though he had no proof he lived there and didn’t intend to stay.
Did it count as lying to the courts if it was only true for now?
Marisa also couldn’t stop the summons going out to Charlie’s parents.
He assumed they wouldn’t protest, or Charlie wouldn’t be here, but he hadn’t seen any of his siblings since he’d left Utah. He’d never asked them for anything before.
Unbidden, he remembered Phil’s serious face in the kitchen. He’d chosen to let Ben stay with him, let Charlie stay with him, because he believed kindness was the most important thing he could offer. Ben’s family would never have done the same.
Ben pushed the thoughts aside and got back to the forms. With any luck, they could get the application sorted by Christmas. It would be good for Charlie if Ben could keep this phase of insecurity brief.
Which meant Ben had a responsibility to remedy the other sources of insecurity, such as where they’d live and how to turn a gig-based, transient job into something secure.
Time to start sending out résumés. The Bay Area boasted dozens of newspapers and magazines; someone must need a staff reporter.
Maybe it would even be on a topic Ben didn’t hate.
Unlikely in this economy, but possible. So long as he didn’t get stuck doing society gossip, Ben would be fine.
Four years of a job he didn’t love in return for Charlie getting an education and having a stable home seemed like a more than fair trade.
For that, Ben would happily sacrifice moving around, following stories.
He just hoped he could nab a beat he actually knew something about.
Practice wasn’t till the afternoon, so Ben drove to the rink in Palo Alto and spent some time at his desk, establishing a timeline of Trout’s meetings with the team owner, Maxwell Van Giesing, and bets fishfordinner had made at similar times.
It matched up decently well—usually a bet followed a meeting within forty-eight hours—but it was all circumstantial.
With a sigh, Ben closed out of the document after saving it to a thumb drive and sending it to himself via email just to be safe.
Once he’d finished, he noticed an unopened email in his inbox, a response from Pulvermacher about the screenshots Ben had sent while picking up Charlie.
The message contained only two words: “Not enough.”
At quarter past two, he realized no one had come to bother him in the last hour. Practice had been scheduled to start half an hour ago.
But when he wandered down the hallways, he found an empty rink, except for the custodians riding Zambonis over the ice. That was odd. There hadn’t been any events yesterday, and they didn’t need to clean the ice before practice, only after.
“Where were you this morning?” Vernon Edwards asked. He was the offensive coach, a decently nice guy who had actually gotten a degree in sports education at some point. He was also a total pushover, which made him a perfect foil for someone like Trout.
“This morning?” Ben asked.
“For morning skate? Were you sick? Are you sick?” He took a big step back. “I cannot afford to get sick.”
Ben blinked. He checked his watch, then realized it told the time and not the date, so he checked his phone.
Fuck.
It was Thursday, not Wednesday.
Today was a game day, and practice had been this morning, not in the afternoon like yesterday.
“Shit,” he muttered. “I’m sorry. I’ll be there later.”