3. Captain Energy
Captain Energy
The locker room smelled like wet gear, burnt sugar, and the particular kind of fear young men tried to bury under loud voices.
Noah set the dented brownie tin down on the center table hard enough to get attention, then popped the lid with a flourish. “Gentlemen,” he said, “your captain would like it noted that if these are overbaked, that’s because institutional stress is ruining my art.”
A couple of laughs broke loose on reflex.
Good. Reflex counted.
Dylan Avery looked up from where he was half-untying one skate, tension still braced between his shoulders. “You call that art?”
Noah pointed at him. “You score on a clean far-post finish in drills today and then you can critique the baker.”
“I did score yesterday.”
“Against our backup with his glove hand in hell.”
That got a better laugh, even from Dylan.
Cole, sitting two stalls down, took one brownie and then another like he’d forgotten what his hands were doing.
Freshmen circled food when they were anxious.
Noah had noticed that by week two of every season.
Put sugar in the room and half the panic bled somewhere less destructive.
The room around him kept moving. Tape ripping.
Sticks knocking lightly against stall dividers.
The sharp medicinal bite of liniment. Equipment bags unzipped open like wounds.
On the far side, somebody had speaker duty and was losing badly to a playlist that sounded like it had been built by committee and caffeine.
Noah touched each stall as he moved past it on the way to his own.
Not obvious. Never obvious. Just knuckles to wood, quick and practiced, a lap of the room to settle his own pulse.
One, two, three. Familiar names painted above familiar spaces.
Boys turning into men under fluorescent lights and pressure. His people.
Take care of your people first.
The code had gotten him this far. It was also becoming a problem he could feel in his teeth.
Cole hovered near the brownie tin again. “You really make these every game?”
“Every game-adjacent crisis,” Noah said, dropping onto the bench at his stall. “At this point I’m one board ruling from opening a bakery.”
“Mercer’s Midnight Lies,” someone called from the shower corridor.
Noah barked a laugh. “Terrible branding.”
“Accurate branding,” Dylan muttered.
That one landed a little differently.
Noah glanced over. Dylan looked away fast, face reddening as if he hadn’t meant to say it out loud. Or had. Hard to tell with nineteen-year-olds and stress.
Noah bent over his gear bag and started sorting tape, compression sleeve, extra laces.
Routine was oxygen. If he kept his hands busy, his face stayed easy.
“If we’re workshopping names,” he said, “you can all contribute once you’ve learned to fill out your tutoring logs like functioning members of society. ”
Silence clipped through the room.
Too direct.
Noah regretted it immediately.
Cole swallowed. Someone coughed. From farther down, a junior defenseman said, too brightly, “Okay, wow, fun topic.”
Noah straightened and snagged a brownie for himself mostly to buy two seconds. “Relax,” he said, tone lighter. “I’m not doing compliance office hours before practice. I charge for that.”
Dylan scrubbed both hands over his face. “They’ve got me in a follow-up tomorrow.”
Cole went still beside the table.
Noah looked at him. “And?”
“And what if I say something wrong?”
There it was. Not the joke version. The real thing under it. A room full of guys pretending this was just paperwork while every younger player quietly tried to calculate whether one bad answer could blow a hole through the season.
Noah took a bite of brownie and swallowed around the dry, overbaked edge.
Burnt sugar. Too much cocoa. He’d left them in three minutes too long because his head had been somewhere else.
“Then you correct yourself,” he said. “You tell the truth as clean as you can. If you don’t remember, you say you don’t remember. You don’t guess.”
Cole’s eyes flicked up. “That sounds like a trap.”
“Most honest answer in the room,” said a senior goalie from the corner.
A few more grim laughs.
Noah leaned his forearms on his thighs. His left thumb ached, dull and familiar.
He’d retape before they hit the ice. Same spiral, same tension.
The ritual mattered because some days the only thing standing between him and his own temper was repetition.
“Listen to me,” he said, and didn’t raise his voice because he never had to when he meant it.
“Nobody helps the team by panicking. Nobody helps themselves by trying to sound polished. If they ask you what happened, tell them what happened.”
Dylan stared at the floor. “What if what happened was stupid?”
Noah’s jaw tightened before he could stop it.
Across the room, two sophomores had gone quiet enough to listen without appearing to. One of the freshmen by the laundry cart was winding tape around his stick blade so hard the roll kept snapping. Fear moved through a locker room fast. It smelled different than pregame nerves. Sourer. More hidden.
Noah said, “Then it was stupid. Plenty of things are. Doesn’t make lying about them smarter.”
That was the right answer.
It felt like dragging barbed wire out of his own throat.
Dylan finally looked at him. “Easy for you to say.”
Noah took that one standing up. “Actually,” he said, “not especially.”
The room stilled around the edge again, sensing shape under tone.
He stood and crossed to the center table, grabbed the water bottle someone had abandoned there, and took a drink mostly because he could feel too many eyes on him.
Public face. Steady one. Smiling heartbeat of the locker room.
The version of him on posters and alumni emails and local pregame segments.
He set the bottle down. “We still have practice in twelve minutes. We still have St. Brendan on the schedule in this universe. We still have to play hockey well enough that nobody gets to say the only reason North Lake wins is because somebody held hands through English composition.” He looked from Dylan to Cole to the rest of them.
“So if you need to be scared, be scared after bag skate.”
That got them. A real laugh this time, rough and reluctant.
Dylan shook his head. “You’re a psycho.”
“Alternate captain,” Noah corrected.
“Same thing.”
“Depends who’s writing the feature.”
The room loosened by a degree. Enough.
Coach walked in two seconds later like he had been waiting outside for the exact moment the room stopped sounding like a support group.
Cold air came with him from the tunnel, carrying the raw clean smell of the rink.
He wore his usual black quarter-zip and expression like a weather front nobody enjoyed but everybody respected.
His eyes landed on the brownie tin. “Mercer.”
“Coach.”
“That your attempt at team nutrition?”
“It’s morale.”
“Morale should have protein.”
“It does if you believe in eggs.”
Coach’s mouth twitched and then thought better of it. “Get dressed.”
Yes, sir moved through the room in overlapping mutters.
Stalls clattered into motion again. Pads, shells, gloves, helmets.
Noah sat and started wrapping his left thumb, the tape whispering over skin in the same old spiral.
Anchor at the base. Across the joint. Around again.
Tight enough to stabilize, not so tight it killed movement.
He did it one-handed now without looking, because if he looked at the thumb too long he’d think about trainers, and if he thought about trainers he’d think about reports, and if he thought about reports he’d think about how many things right now felt one bad document away from exploding.
Coach stopped by his stall while everyone else was busy pretending not to listen.
“Need you good today,” he said quietly.
Noah kept winding tape. “Always trying to impress you.”
“Don’t start.”
Noah glanced up. Coach’s face was set, but the strain was there. Deep around the eyes. Behind the clipped irritation. The whole program was carrying itself too carefully, like one wrong shift and the ice would crack under all of them.
Noah said, “They’re rattled.”
“I know.”
“Media’s already in the hallway.”
“I know that too.”
Noah pressed the tape down and flexed his thumb once. “Then maybe somebody higher than me should tell them what’s actually happening.”
Coach’s gaze sharpened. “What’s happening is we play hockey and let administration sort administration.”
There it was. The official line. Thin as paper and just as useful.
Noah held his stare for a beat, then looked back to his hand. “That’s not exactly calming anybody.”
“Your job,” Coach said, low and flat, “is to keep this room on the ice and out of rumor. Younger guys look at you and decide whether to spin out. Don’t let them.”
Noah almost laughed.
Not because it was funny. Because of course that was the ask. Hold the line. Again. Smile. Settle everybody. Take the noise, filter it, hand back something they could skate on.
Take care of your people first.
He nodded once. “Got it.”
Coach lingered half a second. “And Mercer?”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t have to answer every question anybody asks in a hallway.”
That one was less about strategy than Coach probably intended.
Noah thought of Talia in Halcyon Academic, back straight, cold coffee in hand, looking at him like she saw through every version of himself he’d ever found useful.
Then of the reporter yesterday snapping toward him like a dog hearing a can opener.
“No danger of that,” Noah said.
Coach moved on.
Noah finished dressing and rose with the rest of the room. He touched the top of Dylan’s helmet in passing, a quick knock. “Feet moving today.”
Dylan rolled his eyes. “You ever say hello like a normal person?”
“That was hello.”
Cole caught his sleeve as they turned toward the tunnel. “Mercer.”
Noah looked down.
Cole’s face had gone bloodless again. “If they ask whether a tutor ever, like, changed wording on my paper…”