3. CHAPTER THREE #2
I’m already thinking about what my project could be. I’ve got my notebook open and I’m not taking notes on the lecture. I’m writing down four things, and then a fifth thing, and then crossing out the second one because it needs a liquor license.
“Two more things,” Professor Ives says. “First, you will be graded on execution, not on ambition. A small event that happens is worth infinitely more in this class than a spectacular event that collapses in week ten.”
Fine.
“Second.” She puts up a slide with a flowchart on it that has maybe nine boxes.
“Every event has an approval chain. For most of you, that chain is short. Reserve a room, submit a form, done. But if your event involves athletics, university facilities, sponsors, minors, alcohol, outside vendors, media, or ticketing, your chain changes, and it gets longer, and it involves people who have never heard of you and do not care that you have a deadline.” She taps the screen.
“Find out what your chain is in week one. Not week six. I have watched three separate groups lose an entire semester because they built something beautiful and then found out in March that they needed a signature from Risk Management.”
I write that down. Then I look at my list of five things and realize four of them are in the rink.
I start the group chat from a table on the second floor of the library, eating a sandwich.
Gianna: TONIGHT. GIRLS NIGHT. NO MEN.
Lucy: I have a date with Benson. First one we’ve had in like two weeks.
Penelope: I have studio and my internship. Sorry.
Melly: I told Blue we’d do a thing. Let’s plan another time.
Aspen: Can’t. I’m busy with work. Swamped actually.
Mara: I’ll go.
Mila: Same.
Gianna: Thank God!
Lucy: Love you too.
I put my phone face down and eat the rest of the sandwich.
Nobody did anything wrong. That’s the annoying part. There’s no one in that chat I can be legitimately mad at, because everyone is busy and has something going on.
Last year, I could put four people in a car in twenty minutes.
Now it takes eight messages to find out that two of them are free.
It’s not that anybody doesn’t want to. Everybody’s life just got bigger, and mine got bigger too, and the parts don’t line up the way they used to.
I think that might be the part bothering me more than everybody getting boyfriends: nobody decided to change anything. It just changed.
I sit there for another minute.
Fine.
If I can’t get everybody out, I’ll go where everybody already is. Because at any given moment, half of the people in that chat are in one house, and it’s the house my brother lives in, and nobody there has ever once asked me why I go over as much as I do.
My shift starts at two. Practice is at three-thirty, so between two and three the equipment room is the busiest place in the building.
Guys come through in twos and threes on their way to the locker room.
Somebody wants a new stick. Somebody wants his old stick, which he broke, and wants to know why we don’t have another one exactly like it, since it was discontinued in 2019.
Somebody’s helmet clip snapped. Casey Brogan cannot find his left glove and is genuinely upset about it.
I’m at the bench with a bin of blade guards, matching numbers, because Donovan wants the skates back in the stalls by three and about a third of them have tape on the guards with no number on it.
Rowan comes in carrying one skate.
Cole looks up first, because he’s standing right there at the sharpener. “What’s up, Laurens?”
“Eyelet’s gone.” Rowan puts the skate on the bench and turns it so the outside of the boot faces up. “Top one, outside. Donovan punched it on the second, and it held for about a week.”
Cole picks it up and looks at it with his thumb over the spot. “Yeah, it’s not the rivet. It’s the leather. There’s nothing left around it to hold anything.” He turns it over. “How hard do you lace these?”
“Hard.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Can you do it?” Rowan asks.
“I can put a patch behind it and re-rivet it. It’ll hold. It won’t be pretty.” Cole’s already moving toward the back bench. “Give me a minute. Ten, maybe.”
“Okay.”
Cole asks, “You go into the boards on that side?”
“New Year’s Day.”
“Right.” Cole disappears behind the shelving. “You should’ve brought it then.”
Rowan doesn’t answer that, which is what I’d have done too.
I finish the guard I’m holding, put it in the bin, and walk over.
“Laurens,” I greet.
“Hey, G.”
I look at the skate on the bench. “What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“He definitely did something,” Cole says from the back.
“Sounds about right,” I say.
Rowan makes a sound that’s about eighty percent of a laugh and leans back against the counter with his arms crossed. He’s in a T-shirt and shorts with his practice socks already on, which means he was three-quarters dressed when he found out he couldn’t lace up.
I go back to the bin.
“You start classes today?” he asks me, filling the silence.
“Yeah.” I nod.
“How’d it go?”
I raise my eyebrows. “Well, statistics is already ruining my life.”
He tips his head. “Ruined your brother’s, too.”
I say, “Ha-ha.”
“You have Schaefer?”
I stop with a blade guard in my hand and look at him. “Yeah.”
“Had him sophomore year.”
“You took STAT 215.”
“Everybody in the major takes it.”
And that’s — okay. I did know Rowan was in Sport Management.
I think I knew. It’s the kind of thing you absorb about somebody’s teammate without ever once having a conversation about it, the way I know that Percy doesn’t sleep and that Stanley pays for everything anywhere they go.
But I’ve never talked to Rowan about his major.
I’ve spent two years in the same rooms as this guy and we have talked about approximately four things about nothing important.
“How’d you do?” I ask.
“B minus.”
“Benson got an A.”
“Benson had a tutor, and I’m not so sure he got an A.
Pretty sure he didn’t have Schaefer.” He shifts his weight against the counter.
He continues, “It gets better after the first month. The first month is all sampling, and it’s the worst part, and everyone thinks they’re stupid, and then he starts doing tests, and it turns into steps. You’ll be able to do it.”
“Sorry, sir. I don’t think you know anything about me.”
He doesn’t look offended. I catch Evan’s face across the room. He would be eavesdropping. I put another guard in the bin.
“What else are you taking?” Rowan asks.
“Finance. Sport Law. Public speaking, which is going to be a joke, and Event and Facility.”
“Two-forty?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
“That’s the event project.”
I turn around. “You know about it?”
“Did it when I was your age.”
I put my hand on my hip. “Okay, old man.” I look at him. “What’d you do then?”
“Youth clinic.” He answers like he knew I’d ask.
Again, he’s not offended by my remark, and I like him a little more now.
“Saturday morning, second sheet, eight to eleven. Forty-two kids from the Camden youth program. We had eight of the guys from the team come run stations, borrowed gear from Donovan, did concussion waivers through the athletics office, no money changed hands, so we didn’t have to touch ticketing or a cash box. Set up at seven, out by noon.”
I wait like he’s not done telling me. “That’s it?”
He nods. “That’s it.”
“You had eight Camden hockey players in a building, and you didn’t charge anybody anything?”
“It was free on purpose. That was the point.”
“No — okay, no. Listen to this.” I put the guard down.
“You do it on a home game Saturday. You do the clinic in the morning on the second sheet, and every kid who registers gets a ticket to that night’s game, and their parents buy tickets because they’re already driving there twice otherwise.
That’s forty-two kids and eighty-four adults you just put in the building on a Saturday.
You get one sponsor — one, the sporting goods place on Ferris, or the pizza place, anybody — to cover the jerseys, and the kids wear them at the game, and then you walk them out on the ice during first intermission and their families lose their minds and take four hundred photos with your sponsor’s logo in every single one of them. ”
Rowan looks at me.
“Then you evaluate it on ticket revenue instead of a survey,” I say. “Which is a real number. Which is the whole thing Ives said this morning.”
He nods slowly. “That would’ve been a lot more work.”
“But it would’ve been better.” I grin.
He shrugs. “Mine got an A.”
My smile drops. “That’s not the point.”
“It was kind of the point,” he says easily.
“No. The point is you had forty-two kids, eight players, a rink, and an entire athletic department available to you, and you did the easiest version.”
Rowan looks at me for a second.
“You’re going to make this class harder than it needs to be.”
“I’m going to make it good.”
His mouth shifts at one corner. “Yeah. I can tell.”
I don’t know if he’s making fun of me or if that’s an actual compliment, and his face isn’t helping.
Then he nods toward the event notes I’ve abandoned on the bench. “Your intermission thing has a problem, though.”
I straighten. “What problem?”
“Intermission’s eighteen minutes. You’d get maybe nine once they resurface. Forty-two kids on and off the ice in nine minutes is a lot of kids.”
“So do half of them.”