Chapter 6
Blue
Seven months ago, a kid in a red jersey took a high stick to Percy’s mask after a whistle in the third period and grinned about it on his way to the bench.
Tonight, he’s two stalls down from me on the matchup grid.
His name has been up on the whiteboard at the front of the visitors’ room since morning skate.
Fuller drew the grid in red marker at breakfast and tapped it once with the cap, which is what Fuller does when he wants you to remember a name.
I haven’t needed help remembering this one.
I’ve been ready for this game since the lines posted on Wednesday.
I’ve been ready for this game since June.
I sit in my stall in the visiting room, and I tape the blade of my stick.
The tape is the wrong color. White, when our away jerseys are black, when the tape on every other guy’s stick in this room is black.
I had a fresh roll of black in my bedroom, but Benson swore up and down that I needed to try this one, so I’m just rolling with it.
I’ve been wrapping it for ten minutes. My hands need a job tonight.
If my hands stop having a job, they’re going to do something I’m going to have to explain to the trainer in the morning, and I am not in the mood to explain anything to anybody in the morning.
I keep my head down and wrap.
Across the room, Stanley laughs at something Rowan said. Percy is at the end of the bench in his pads with his mask off, doing the slow staring-at-the-floor thing he does ninety minutes before a puck drop. Benson is two stalls down from me pulling his Under Armour over his head.
He’s been watching me since I walked in. He hasn’t said anything. He pulls the shirt down and picks up his shin pad.
“Golding.” Stanley drops onto the bench next to me.
He’s already in his pads. He’s bouncing his leg, and he smells like the Old Spice he sprays in lieu of showering when we’ve been on a bus for four hours.
He’s grinning at me like he’s about to say something I’m not going to like. “What’s the wrap count on that stick?”
“What?”
“The blade.” He nods at it. “You’ve been wrapping it since I sat down. I sat down ten minutes ago. How many wraps you got going there, Bluey?”
“I’m taping my stick, Stan.”
“You’re embalming your stick.”
I don’t answer.
He bumps his shoulder against my left side. Stanley has known about the shoulder since Monday morning, when he saw me wince while putting on my hoodie and made a joke about it and then dropped it for the rest of the week.
“You good?”
“I’m fine.”
He looks at me for two seconds longer than Stanley ever looks at anybody. Then his face changes. The bit comes back.
“All right,” he says, standing up. “You look beautiful tonight, by the way. Like a man about to commit a felony. Very handsome.” He walks off.
Benson catches me in the hallway on the way out of the room. He puts a hand on my good shoulder as he passes and says, without looking at me, “Don’t make me have to talk to you tonight.”
I keep walking. “Heard you, cap.”
He goes past. The tunnel mouth opens onto the ice, and the sound hits me — the rink hum, the canned music, the announcer working the crowd, the scrape of skates already cutting up the corner. I pull my helmet onto my head. I take the bench rail with my glove. I push through the door onto the ice.
The kid is at the far blue line stretching with his stick across the back of his shoulders. I do my warmup loop and find him on the third lap. He smirks at me like a little bastard. He’s been waiting for this game too.
Good. I think it loud. Good. He’s been waiting too. This is fair. So this is two guys who have something to settle and tonight we settle it.
The story I am telling myself feels good. It feels right. It fits. I lap him again. He doesn’t look at me the second time.
I stand on the blue line with my helmet under my arm, my eyes on the flag, and I feel the thing in my chest that has been there since Saturday tighten one more degree, and I tell it not yet, not yet, not yet. The anthem ends. The crowd does its thing. We tap our helmets back on. We line up.
First shift, I’m out with Benson and Stanley.
Lowell wins the draw clean. The puck swings to the kid at the point, and I close on him at the half-wall faster than he’s expecting.
I don’t hit him. I brush him. Shoulder to shoulder, just enough to put his head into the glass, just enough to tell him I’m here.
He says something on the way past that I don’t catch. I skate back to the bench.
Stanley, on the bench, leans into my good shoulder without looking at me. “Golding.”
“What?”
His eyes meet mine, and he’s being serious. “Easy.”
“I am easy,” I shoot back.
He shakes his head. “That wasn’t easy. That was a love letter.”
Benson, two seats down, eyes on his visor, wiping it with his thumb. “Cool it, Blue.”
My eyes snap to his. “Heard you earlier, cap.”
He replies, “Heard isn’t doing it.”
I look forward. “I’m cooling it.” I breathe through my nose, and the breath is coming back too hot. Stanley bumps my shoulder a second time without looking at me, harder, with the back of his elbow, and I know what that means.
Knock it off, Golding.
Late in the first period, I take a tripping call.
I want to be honest in my own head because there’s no point being a liar when you’re alone in a penalty box.
I didn’t earn the call on the play the ref saw.
I earned the call on the play before, when I cross-checked the kid in the back on a battle along the boards that the ref didn’t have eyes on.
The next time the ref looked at me, he was going to find a reason. I gave him one.
I take the call standing up. I skate to the box. I don’t look at the ref.
The kid is on the power play.
They set up. He gets the puck at the top of the umbrella. He doesn’t shoot — fakes the shot, draws the killer down, slides the puck low to a winger, the winger slings it across the slot, a forward I don’t know the name of buries it.
Lowell up 1-0.
The kid skates his celebration loop with his arms up.
He comes past the glass of my box and slows. He looks at me through the plexiglass and grins.
I sit on the bench inside the box with my stick across my thighs, and I look back at him through the glass. I have two periods to make you remember this game for the rest of your life.
The box door opens. I stand up and skate to the bench. I sit down next to Benson. He looks at me and holds our eye contact. I look away first.
The kid is going to keep his head up for the next twenty minutes.
He’s going to chirp from the safety of the bench and play his angles in his own zone.
It’s what I would do. It’s what I am doing — playing my game, moving pucks, making the safe pass to Stanley, blocking a shot in the second with my left shin that I am going to feel in the morning.
I take a clean hit on a kid who isn’t number twenty-two, and I take it well.
The kid groans on his way back to the bench and Stanley laughs about it from the box.
I wait.
The kid’s patient. So am I.
He gets sloppy in the middle of the second.
A faceoff in the Lowell zone, low circle to the right of Percy.
The kid is on the wall to my left. I’m at the net front.
The puck is dropped, and it does what loose pucks do, which is bounce in a way nobody at the dot expects, and it comes squirting out toward the boards into the no-man’s land between him and me.
I get there first.
He gets there second.
I cross-check him.
Hard.
The kind of cross-check the ref sees from the moon. The kind that says this is for March, you piece of shit. The kind he feels in the small of his back for the next ninety minutes.
He turns. His gloves are coming off before he’s all the way around.
We go.
He gets one in on my chin I don’t feel. I get two in on his jaw I feel through my whole arm — my hand is going to be a problem tomorrow, the third knuckle on my right hand specifically — but my hand isn’t my problem right now. The third punch I throw opens his lip.
The linesmen come in.
They peel us apart.
The kid is yelling something at me with blood on his teeth, and I’m not yelling anything back because I am not breathing right. My chest is moving, but the air isn’t going where it needs to go.
Five for fighting. Two for instigating.
Seven minutes.
I skate to the box.
Across the ice, the kid is in his own box, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his head down. The Lowell trainer is at his glass with a towel, trying to get at the lip. The kid is waving the trainer off.
He looks up.
He looks across the ice at me.
He isn’t grinning anymore.
Good.
I let the breath out of my chest. I let myself feel the fist in my ribs loosen for the first time since Friday night when Melly Sorcha walked into my house with another man.
I think I’m okay now. This is what I needed.
My shoulder is on fire. My hand is throbbing in three separate places. I haven’t moved either of them since I sat down. I place my stick across my thighs, and I tell myself that I did that for Percy.
I look up, and across the ice, in his crease, Percy has lifted his mask onto the top of his head. He’s leaning his stick against his pad and is looking at me.
He’s been watching the whole thing. He isn’t grateful. I can’t quite read him through the cage and across two hundred feet of ice, but I know what I’m not seeing. He doesn’t nod at me. He doesn’t tap his pad. He just looks. Then he pulls his mask down and turns back toward his net.
The thing in my chest, the one I just told myself had loosened, tightens right back up. I look down at my stick. I don’t think anything for a second. Then I think, he knows. They all fucking know.
I shove the thought down before it can get under my feet. I breathe through my nose and count down the seven minutes on the scoreboard above the kid’s box, and I don’t look at Percy for the rest of the period.