2. CHAPTER TWO #2
“We’ve got six weeks before postseason hockey matters. You do not have time to fix seven things.”
He pauses.
“You have one.”
That gets me.
“One thing,” he repeats. “You know what yours is. If you don’t, come ask me and I’ll tell you faster than you’d like.”
Then he blows the whistle.
Practice is ugly. Which is probably the point. Coach breaks us into groups after twenty minutes. Mackey comes with me. Benson comes without being asked. Percy takes our net.
At the other end, I hear Fuller barking at somebody to get inside the dots, followed by Stanley arguing that he is “already inside emotionally.”
I stop listening.
Benson sets up near the top of the circle. Mackey waits on the far side of the net. I take a puck out toward the neutral zone and turn back toward our end. It feels stupid to dump a puck behind my own net on purpose.
Coach stands near the wall. “Go.”
I send it in.
The puck wraps behind the net.
I turn.
Skate.
Percy’s voice comes from the crease. “Pressure. Right.”
I look over my shoulder. Benson is coming hard from my right side, exactly where I expect him. My brain makes the decision before I reach the hash marks.
Wall.
I get behind the net. My stick reaches the puck. I send it up the boards. The whistle goes.
I stop.
Fuller skates toward me.
“What’d you see?”
“Reeve.”
“What else?”
I look around.
Mackey is standing eight feet away on the opposite side of the net with his stick on the ice. Open. I didn’t see him. Not because he wasn’t there. Because I stopped looking.
Coach waits.
“Nothing,” I reply.
He demands, “Again.”
I skate back out.
Second rep.
Dump.
Turn.
Percy calls pressure again.
I look over my shoulder at twenty feet. Benson is coming from the same side. Everything in me wants to make the same decision. Wall. I force myself not to. At eight feet, I look again. Benson changes his angle. He comes underneath this time, taking away the reverse.
The far side opens. Mackey is there. I can see him because I actually turned my head. I get my feet around, arrive facing more of the ice instead of locking myself against the boards, collect the puck, and move it across.
Mackey takes it clean and walks out.
“There,” Fuller says.
It feels terrible. Like I completed six separate tasks to make one pass I normally make without thinking.
“Again.”
We keep going.
First look. Feet.
Second look. Pressure.
Puck.
Decision.
The more I think about it, the worse I get.
I know how to retrieve a puck. I have done it thousands of times. Now I am skating toward one like somebody handed me written instructions and I’m reading the damn list in my head.
Benson strips me on the eleventh rep.
Clean.
I’m halfway through my second look when his stick comes underneath mine, and the puck is gone.
He walks it straight out front.
Percy has to make the save.
“Fuck,” I shout.
“Again,” Coach says.
I go back.
Next rep, Benson cuts underneath.
The middle opens.
Or looks open.
I decide I am not going up the wall because I’ve apparently turned this drill into a personal fight with the boards. I take the puck and try to cut through the middle. Benson’s stick closes the lane immediately.
Turnover.
Another chance from the worst place on the ice.
Percy makes the save and says something under his breath in French.
I shake my head. “Yeah, I know.”
Fuller skates over. He doesn’t look annoyed, though I am. “You don’t have to use the middle because you see it.”
I breathe hard through my nose. “Then what the fuck am I doing?”
“Seeing it.”
He taps my shin pad once with his stick. Then he skates away.
I stand there with my hands over the top of my stick, watching him go. And that’s different. That isn’t what Aspen wrote. It’s not what Fuller is asking. The wall isn’t the problem. The middle isn’t the answer. The problem is deciding before I know.
I skate back to the puck pile.
Sixty-two of ninety-one went up the wall.
Maybe sixty-two was right.
Maybe forty was right.
Maybe seventy should have.
That isn’t the point. The point is I didn’t choose sixty-two different times. I chose it once. Then I kept repeating the decision.
“Again,” I say.
Mackey bends over with his hands on his knees. “You said twenty minutes.”
“We haven’t been out here twenty minutes.”
“It has been forty-eight.”
I look at the clock. “Okay.”
“That is all you have to say?”
“Ten more.”
He looks toward the ceiling. Benson is already skating back into position. Percy taps his stick against the crease.
Mackey sighs. “Ten.”
We do twenty-two.
By the last few, I stop narrating every step inside my head.
Most of the team gets off the ice like the building is on fire.
Mackey leaves before I can ask him for anything else.
I’m following when the toe of my right skate catches a rut near the boards.
My foot turns. I go into the wall harder than I meant to.
Nothing hurts. Then I push off. Something in the boot shifts.
I sit on the bench and pull the skate off. The top eyelet on the outside has torn most of the way through the leather. Metal hanging loose. If I tighten the laces, it’ll rip out completely.
Benson stops beside the bench. “Bad?”
I shake my head. “Punch job.”
“Equipment open?”
“Not today.”
“You want to call someone?”
“No.” I put the skate in my bag. I’m not asking somebody to come to the rink on New Year’s Day because one eyelet is loose. “I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
When we get back to Hawthorne, I can smell the food before Benson gets the door all the way open. Bacon. Coffee. Something with onions.
Stanley stops behind me and grins. “They cooked.”
Blue looks past him into the house. “They cooked?”
“Because they love us,” Stanley says, proud.
I drop my bag beside the stairs. “Or because they were hungry.”
He shakes his head. “Negative mindset.”
Lucy sticks her head around the kitchen doorway and announces, “They’re home.”
Benson is gone before anybody else moves. He crosses the room, puts both hands around her waist, and lifts her off the floor.
I go around them. Not my business. But this is. The kitchen table is covered. Eggs. Bacon. Pancakes. Fruit. Coffee.
Mara is sitting on the counter holding a glass. Gianna is already at the table.
Lucy tells Benson, “G drank half the orange juice.”
G shrugs. “Mimosas are traditional.”
Benson says, “It is ten-thirty in the morning.”
She takes a sip. “That is when mimosas happen.”
Gianna looks different than she did last night.
Her hair is tied on top of her head. No makeup that I can see.
Oversized Camden sweatshirt, bare legs tucked beneath her chair.
She looks awake. Which feels unfair. I barely drank anything, and I feel like somebody took my body apart at practice and put it back together wrong.
She looks at me when I walk in. Just for a second. Then at my bag. “How bad was practice?” She almost laughs over the rim of her mimosa.
“Fine,” I reply.
Benson, behind me, laughs.
Gianna looks back at me. “That means terrible.”
I counter, “It was fine.”
She puts her cup down and says, “You look like shit, Laurens.”
I shrug. “I’m hungry.”
I get a plate.
She smiles into her coffee.
I look at her smile for a second, and then focus on grabbing food.
The room fills up around the table. People talk over each other. Someone complains about the toaster. Stanley takes over one side of the kitchen because he believes being Aspen’s boyfriend somehow qualifies him to help.
I eat standing at the counter for the first few minutes because sitting down would slow me down. Hockey hunger is different from normal hunger. It feels like the inside of your body is missing something.
By the time I sit, Gianna is stealing bacon from Stanley’s plate.
He slaps at her hand. She gets it anyway and laughs.
She moves through this house like she has always belonged here.
She doesn’t live at Hawthorne. Doesn’t play hockey.
Isn’t dating anybody who does. Still, she knows where everything is.
Takes food off everybody’s plates. Yells up the stairs without asking if someone is sleeping.
Opens the fridge and complains when nobody buys the creamer she likes.
Benson brought her into this world. At some point, everybody else stopped treating her like a visitor.
Stanley swallows half a pancake. “I’ve been thinking.”
Benson puts down his fork. “No.”
Stanley scoffs. “You haven’t heard it.”
He shakes his head. “Still no.”
Stanley ignores him completely with a wicked grin on his face. “New year. New rules.”
I lean back and agree with Reeve. “No.”
Blue nods, “Agreed.”
Stanley points toward the wall beside the kitchen. “Aspen.”
She turns from the sink.
Stanley mutters, “The thing.”
She says, “It’s upstairs.”
Stanley gets up.
Gianna watches him leave and looks at Aspen. “What thing?”
Nobody answers.
She laughs. “Ermington is so fucking weird, I swear.”
He comes back less than a minute later carrying a whiteboard. The room reacts immediately.
“What is this?” Benson asks.
Gianna starts laughing. “You did not buy another one.”
Stanley looks offended. “This is not another one. This is a new one. Nothing like the old one.”
He props it against the section of wall where the old board used to hang.
Nobody says anything for a second.
The space has been empty for months after he broke it for Percy. I stopped noticing the empty space. Or I thought I did.
Stanley takes the markers out of the package. “Before everybody gets emotional, I would like to say that tradition matters.”
“You bought it this morning?” Blue asks.
“I bought it three weeks ago. It was supposed to be a Christmas present, but––” he shrugs, “this is better.”
“That’s worse.”
Stanley ignores him. “We need rules for the last semester.”
There is something about the way he says last semester that makes the room quieter than it was. Then he ruins it.
“And we need lore.”
Melly looks at him. “Lore.”
“For the next guys. History. Traditions. Something to keep Hawthorne from becoming boring after we leave.”
“You want to lie to the freshmen,” Gianna says.
Stanley corrects, “I want to establish culture.”