3. CHAPTER THREE
GIANNA
I get my hip against the side of the laundry cart and shove.
It goes about a foot and a half and stops, because one of the wheels on this cart has been dragging since November, and Donovan keeps saying he’ll put in for a new one.
The whole thing is full of practice jerseys that came off the ice ninety minutes ago and got dumped straight into it, still wet, in a pile. I shove again. It goes this time.
The equipment room at Camden runs the length of the hallway behind the home locker room, and it’s basically a garage with better lighting.
Concrete floor with a drain in the middle.
Two industrial washers and two dryers along the back wall; both dryers are running right now and are loud enough to shake my brain.
Steel shelving runs from floor to ceiling on the left, all labeled in Donovan’s handwriting.
Skate bench and the sharpener on the right, under the good light.
The whole room smells like hot detergent and wet gear. There’s no fixing that. You can wash everything in this building every single day, and the room still smells like this. I’ve stopped noticing except when I get in my car afterward and catch it in my own hair.
I get the cart to the washer, open the door with my elbow, and start loading.
“Gianna.”
“Yeah?”
“Did you count the socks?” Donovan’s somewhere behind the shelving. I can hear him moving boxes.
I answer, “I counted the socks.”
“How short are we?”
“Nine.”
He comes around the end of the shelf with a clipboard and a pen behind his ear. Donovan’s got maybe fifteen years on any of us and the shoulders of a guy who used to play something, and I have never once seen him sit down.
“Nine?”
“Nine pairs. From a full set of thirty-one.”
He’s not talking to me anyway. He’s annoyed. “Over ten days.”
I nod. “Yeah.”
He writes it down. “They took them home.”
I force my mouth into a line.
“Every year.” He clicks the pen. “Every single year.” He shakes his head and goes back around the shelf.
Nobody in my family completely understands why I picked this major.
My mom asked me once if I wanted to work in hockey because of Benson, which is a fair question considering I followed him to Camden in the first place.
But Benson is the reason I knew this world existed.
He isn’t the reason I stayed interested in it.
I’m elbow-deep in a washing machine full of other people’s sweat, and I’m going to be here another two hours.
But there’s a version of Camden hockey that people see — the lights, the horn, the people in the stands on a Friday — and then there’s this, which is a concrete room with a floor drain where somebody has to know that there are thirty-one pairs of socks and where all of them are.
I like knowing where things are. I like that when the team gets on a bus at six in the morning, everything they need is on it because I put it there.
Nothing can be great without the people who work behind the scenes, and I love being part of that.
Cole’s at the sharpener with his back to me, running a pair of steel through, and the noise of it cuts across the dryers every few seconds in a way that goes through my molars.
He’s a junior. He’s been working here since his freshman year, which means he’s been here a year longer than me, and he pretends to know so much more than me. He can pull a holder, set a rivet, match somebody’s hollow off a number in a spreadsheet without asking.
When he finishes a pair, he runs his thumb down the edge without looking at it.
He is also, objectively, extremely good-looking.
Dark hair, forearms, played hockey before he got injured.
I had a crush on him for about six weeks of my freshman year.
Then I watched him eat yogurt, and nothing –– I mean nothing –– will ever clean my eyes of that.
Some things can’t be undone. My crush is no more.
Cole pulls the steel, checks it, sets it in the rack, and picks up the next one without turning around.
“Faulkner’s are done,” he says. “Whitfield’s next.”
“Okay.”
“Somebody put Whitfield’s in the Beaumont slot.”
I respond, “Wasn’t me.”
“It was Evan.”
“It wasn’t Evan,” Evan says.
Evan’s on the floor at the end of the shelving with a scanner and two open boxes, doing the stick inventory, which is a job that takes four hours and makes everyone who does it insufferable for the rest of the day.
I go back to the washer, get the last of the jerseys in, and start the load, then I go get the towels off the drying rack, and Evan watches me do it from the floor.
“I was gonna do that.”
“Okay?” I say.
“I’m just saying.”
“And I’m just doing it.”
He goes back to the scanner and mutters something into the box.
Then, ninety seconds later, “Those don’t go on that shelf.”
“Donovan told me to put them there.”
“That’s not where we usually––”
“I told her to,” Donovan says, from somewhere behind the shelving, without any change in his voice at all.
I smile at Evan.
He does not smile back.
Every place you ever work has one person who irritates you by breathing incorrectly, and mine is a twenty-year-old boy named Evan with a barcode scanner.
Donovan comes back around with the clipboard and starts going down it. I get my phone out to type as he goes, because I learned early on that Donovan does not repeat himself and does not slow down.
“Jerseys through both washers tonight, dryers overnight, hang them tomorrow before two.”
“Okay.”
“Tape’s low. Clear and white. There’s a case of each in the back hallway. Break it down and get it stocked before Tuesday.”
“Yes.”
“Log anything broken from today. Reichel cracked a shaft. It’s on the bench. Do it properly with the number and the date, not a sticky note.” He looks at me. “Three times.”
“I won’t use a sticky note,” I promise, because it was three times, and he talked to me about it each time.
“Skates in the rack go back to their stalls tomorrow morning. Don’t guess. If the tape on the blade guard doesn’t have a number, ask Cole.” He flips the page. “And start the road list for the fifteenth. Two games, one night.”
I look up. “Me?”
“You.”
“Not Cole?” I ask, confused.
“Cole’s doing the steel inventory that week, and you’re going to be doing this in April whether you like it or not, so you’re going to learn it now while it’s a two-game trip and I can fix whatever you screw up.”
I widen my eyes. “That’s inspirational.”
“Start with last year’s list. It’s in the drive. Don’t just copy it. Half of it’s wrong.”
He walks off.
Cole runs another blade and doesn’t turn around.
“He gave me that in October, my sophomore year,” he says. “It’s a good sign.”
“It’s a spreadsheet.”
“Yeah, but he’s not going to give it to Evan.”
Evan, from the floor, says, “I can hear you.”
Still, I look at the note on my phone again after Donovan walks away.
Statistics is at nine in the morning in a lecture hall built for two hundred students and filled with about ninety. I get there eight minutes early because it’s the first day and I have never in my life been late to a first day.
I’m not bad at school, but I’ve got a 3.4. I’ve never dropped a class, and I liked Sport Finance so much last semester that I read ahead. I’m just scared of this one.
The professor comes in at nine on the dot, plugs in his laptop, and starts talking before the slide is even up.
For the first eleven minutes, I’m completely fine.
At minute twelve, he writes something on the board with about nine parts to it and says, “And obviously we’re going to be working in terms of the sampling distribution, not the population, which is the distinction that half of you will spend the semester failing to internalize. ”
Half the room writes that down.
I understand every single individual word coming out of this man’s mouth. It’s the order he’s putting them in that’s pissing me off.
I write down sampling distribution ≠ population and put a box around it and then a second box around the first box.
At the end, he tells us the first homework is due Thursday, and there’s a quiz next Friday, and everybody makes a noise. He mentions it’s worth two percent, and everybody stops.
I get outside and stand on the steps in the cold for a second with my hands in my sleeves.
Lucy took this class. Benson took it too, and he needed help, which should probably make me feel better.
It doesn’t. I stand on the steps with my hands tucked into my sleeves and watch my breath cloud in front of me.
I live with the best tutor available to me.
I would also rather eat the textbook than ask her on day one. Benson would enjoy that far too much.
Event and Facility Management is at ten-thirty in a room that seats forty, and it’s full. I get a seat in the second row because I know from Sport Finance that you can’t hear anything past row four in these rooms.
Professor Ives doesn’t do a syllabus day. She puts one slide up and leaves it there.
SPM 240 — YOU ARE RUNNING A REAL EVENT.
“Here’s how this class works,” she says.
“You will not be planning a hypothetical gala. You will not be building a fictional budget for a fictional venue with fictional money. You are going to conceive an event, pitch it to me, build a real budget, take it through the actual university approval process, staff it, execute it on a real date in a real Camden facility, and then evaluate it afterward with real numbers.”
Somebody in the back says, “Wait.”
“You’ll work in groups of three or four. You’ll pitch in week four. If I approve the pitch, you build. If I don’t approve it, you pitch again in week five with less time.”
A guy two seats down from me raises his hand. “How long does the final report have to be?”
Professor Ives looks at him for a second. “That’s the question you have.”
“I mean––”
“Twelve pages,” she says. “Which is going to be the easiest part of your semester.”
She goes to the next slide.