11. Chapter Eleven
Percy
I stare at our text messages longer than I mean to. I’ve read it enough times that I could write it from memory.
She didn’t come to the party. I stood in that house for four hours with the noise going and the front door opening and closing nonstop.
Every time it opened, I was looking at it before I could stop myself, and she never came through it.
Around midnight, I stopped watching the door and went upstairs.
Now, it’s ten in the morning, and I’m in new boots because Blue came home and needed his back.
I put them on and decide it’s time to break them in.
I walk to the store and walking out here in the cold reminds me of Mike Deveroux.
He’d swear at me in French if I complained about how cold I was, so I practiced not saying a word.
Once I reach the store, I walk to the produce. I think I’ve been in this section maybe five times in my whole life. The recipe I’m following says to use mango, and I have no idea what it even looks like.
The recipe is simple. I need strawberries, mangoes, mango nectar, sugar, limes, and vodka.
I find the strawberries easily and double-take at how much one container costs.
I look at it long enough that a man reaches around me for the raspberries and says excuse me.
Forget the price. I put two containers of strawberries in my cart.
Then I search the rest of the store for mango nectar.
Rowan’s on the couch when I get back, which means I’ll have a witness in the house. I was hoping for some privacy. I head straight for the kitchen and put everything on the counter. I pull out the blender, the cutting board, and a knife.
I don’t know how to cook to save my life, so this is all new to me.
I cut the mangoes badly the first time, but better on the second.
I set them aside and start on the strawberries.
I blend it all until it’s a puree like the instructions call for.
It wants me to strain the seeds and the pulp out, but honestly, who cares.
I pour it into the pitcher and leave the vodka in the freezer so I can taste the thing without it.
It looks like a smoothie, not a juice. Shit.
So I strain it. Every batch. Push it through with the back of a spoon.
Then I do it again. More strawberries. Rowan’s sugar, and then less of it.
Ice, then no ice, then ice at the end. And I add the lime last, a little, and that’s the thing that pulls it together — the lime cuts the sweet and suddenly it’s clean and cold.
I taste it, adjust it, taste it, adjust it.
It’s the same thing as ten thousand pad drops in the rink — you keep doing it until you get it right.
I don’t know any other way to learn something.
The vodka goes in at the end. I’ve got no idea how much, so I pour what looks like a little and stir it and taste it, and I can’t find it at all.
This is what Penelope meant. Something with mango and strawberry and one drop of liquor, so it tastes like juice, and you don’t even feel it coming.
Rowan comes in around batch four for water.
He stops at the counter, looking at my mess. “What are you doing?”
“Making something,” I murmur.
He glances at the vodka bottle and says, “Huh.” He makes his cup of water and goes.
I pour it into the big pitcher Stanley uses for beer pong, which I wash first. Then I put it in the back of the fridge behind the milk, where nobody will move it, and I go get my bag because we have a game tonight.
Hutch is sick.
I find out when I walk into the room and my sweater’s hanging in the second stall instead of the third, and Coach Fuller is talking to Cole in the corner. Hutch isn’t anywhere. Somebody says he’s sick with the flu. He’s been throwing up since last night. He has fevers and body aches.
I feel bad for the guy, but I straighten when I learn that makes me the backup tonight.
Which means I dress. I sit down in front of my stall and my hands do the gear the way they’ve done it ten thousand times, and my heart’s going so hard I can feel it in my throat.
I’m not playing. Backups don’t play. But I’ll be on the bench in full pads for a real game with a real crowd.
Four months ago, I was third string at the bad end of the ice watching this happen to other people.
I tape my stick slower than I need to.
Coach Fuller stops beside me on his way past. “Good, you’re dressed. Be ready.”
I keep my head down. I’m not thinking about playing. I’m thinking about not embarrassing my team.
Benson scores in the first on a rebound.
Stanley scores in the second and celebrates like the building’s on fire, and then does something with his stick on the way back to the bench that gets him yelled at by two different coaches and does not stop him.
The crowd’s loud, and it stays loud. Two sophomores on the first line, and both of them scored.
These guys are good. That doesn’t happen.
It’s five to nothing before the second period’s half over.
And I’m six feet from Cole for all of it.
I’ve watched him from the far end of the ice since I got here, but I’ve never watched him from here.
I see him talk to himself between whistles.
I see him bang his stick on both posts before every faceoff in his zone, the same order, left then right, every time.
I see him track a puck through four bodies without moving his head, just his eyes, and I see the exact moment he decides where it’s going and sets his depth for it half a second before the shooter even has it.
I take note on all of it. Same as always. I don’t relax for one second of two full periods, because if this game turns, I go in. It doesn’t turn. Between periods, Coach comes down the bench and leans over me.
“You’ve got the third.”
I look at him.
That’s all he says. He’s already walking off.
Cole gets his blocker off and comes past me and stops. He’s got a potential pro career and a bad knee and a coach who just saved him twenty minutes.
“They’ll shoot from everywhere. Nothing to lose.” He taps my pad with his stick. “Don’t chase it.”
Then the door’s open and I’m stepping onto the ice.
The lights come down on me, and the crowd is a sound with no shape. I skate to the net at the far end, my net to protect, and I stop in the blue paint and look up once.
They’ll pay you to stand right there. I have to swallow twice before I can get my chest to work right because this is it. This is what I worked for. Then I bang my stick on both posts. Left, then right. I have twenty minutes out here, and I’m going to make it count.
Cole was right. They shoot from everywhere. We’re down five with twenty to go, there’s nothing left to do but throw pucks at the freshman and see if he’s soft.
The first real one comes at six minutes in.
A wrist shot from the top of the circle through traffic, and I lose it behind their winger, find it late, and get a pad on it with my leg going the wrong way.
It bounces off my thigh and out to the corner.
Benson buries it into the boards and looks back at me and nods once.
The second one’s a two-on-one, and everything in me wants to slide across early with the pass.
Don’t chase it. I stay. Stay. I stay, and when the puck comes across, I’m already there.
It hits my chest and drops. Rowan clears it, and it’s the first time in my whole life a man’s voice in my head has been worth more than my own instinct.
The third one is a high glove side. It comes off a defenseman’s stick at the blue line and it’s rising the whole way, chest, shoulder, head, exactly where I have flinched since I was nine years old and a river stone caught me above the eye — my body knows that height, and every single time in my life I have blinked, or turned, or given the smallest fraction of an inch away from it.
I hear Mike’s voice yelling in French, telling me to take it like a man. I don’t move.
My glove comes up, and the puck slams into the pocket and stays there, and the sound of it goes up my arm and into my temples.
I hold my hand up in the air with the puck in it, and I don’t understand what just happened in my chest. The ref blows the whistle.
Somebody in the crowd is screaming. Stanley skates past and cross-checks me in the pads hard enough to move me.
I don’t flinch. I don’t know what to do with that, so I set my feet and wait for the next one.
Seven shots. Eight. Ten by the horn, and nothing gets past me.
And I know exactly what it’s worth. We were up five.
Their guys quit in the first. They were throwing pucks at me from forty feet with no traffic and no urgency, and nobody in that building thinks a period of garbage time is a test of anything.
I know all of that. And my heart is going anyway. I can’t make it stop.
The room is a riot. They come at me before I’ve got my mask off.
Stanley gets there first, both hands on my helmet, shaking my whole head, screaming something with no words in it.
Somebody’s got my shoulders. Somebody hits me across the back with a stick and it doesn’t hurt.
Rowan is saying ten shots, ten shots like it’s a number that means something.
“DEVEROUX.” Stanley, at a volume the building can’t hold. “DEVEROUX. DE-VER-OUX.”
And they take it up. Six or seven of them, my last name, out loud, in a room full of grown men, and my body doesn’t know what to do with this many hands on it — everything in me wants to get my back to a wall — and I stand there and let them do it.
Something in my throat is hot, and I keep my head down so nobody can see my face.
Benson comes through them, unties my mask strap because I haven’t managed it, and pulls it off my head for me. That’s it. That’s all he does.
He looks at Stanley and says, “I think you’re right, Ermington.”
“Of course, I am, Reeve. I’m telling you, man. If not next year, senior year!”
I have no idea what they’re talking about.
Cole waits until it’s dying down. He’s dressed already, hair wet, bag over his shoulder. He stops in front of my stall and looks at the puck sitting on the bench beside me, the one I caught, the one nobody told me I could keep and took anyway.
“That glove hand,” he says.
I look up.
“That can’t be taught. That’s yours, Deveroux.” He knocks his knuckles once on the top of my stall, and he’s gone.
I sit there in soaked pads in a loud room with a puck in my hand.
Hawthorne House detonates by ten. I’ve never seen the house like this. Every light on, every room full, people I’ve never met on the porch in January with no coats. Stanley’s on the coffee table inside the first hour, arms waving, belting out the song, talking shit to everyone he sees.
I go to the fridge and get the pitcher out from behind the milk. I set it on the counter with a stack of cups, and I stand where I always stand.
“What’s this?” Stanley asks when he walks in and notices it. “Who brought this?”
Rowan walks in behind him. “One of our own.”
Stanley pours a cup and takes a sip. “Holy hell. Reeve! Where’s Reeve?”
Benson comes bouncing in. Blue looks up from the table.
Stanley passes him a cup and says, “Taste this.”
Benson sips it. He makes a face and then takes another sip. “Is there alcohol in this?”
Rowan looks at me. Stanley and Benson notice.
“Did you make this juice?” Stanley asks.
I nod.
Stanley laughs. “No fucking way, man.”
“Christ,” Benson smirks. “Where the hell did you come from, kid?”
“Is there alcohol in it?” Stanley asks.
I nod. “Vodka.”
Stanley opens the freezer and grabs a bottle. He opens it and pours it into the pitcher. “Next time, add more.”
The pitcher is gone in an hour. Stanley and Benson don’t need to convince anyone with their words. They complimented it, and now the entire party wants a taste.
“Goalie juice!” Stanley shouts, finishing off his cup.
Stanley throws an arm around my neck and tells the entire kitchen that from this day forward, Hawthorne House will have this concoction at every party.
“Goalie juice!” Stanley shouts.
The upperclassmen in the living room start howling.
Stanley leans in and says, “When we run the team, and Benson becomes captain, we’re not doing the howling thing.” He nods like he’s serious.
Rowan agrees, “It’s cliché.”
Stanley leans back and shouts, “But until then? Howl!”
He howls so loud that my ears start to ring. Benson says something dry that I don’t catch. Blue doesn’t join in on the howling. Neither do I. Everybody laughs.
And I keep looking at the door.
Ivory’s here. I saw her earlier with Drew’s arm around her shoulders, laughing at something by the stairs. Which means she could have come with her roommate.
I don’t ask. I don’t go through the house looking. I don’t text. I stay where I am and watch the crowd get drunker because of my juice.
Near midnight, Ivory walks into the kitchen and sees the empty pitcher. She tells Drew, “Aw, the juice is all gone.”
Drew says, “We can take a shot.”
“No. The juice was so good.”
Drew points at me and says, “Make more next time.”
I glare at him, and then they walk out.
The house is still going at two when I start cleaning the kitchen, because somebody has to.
Tonight was different than most. More people came, which means the mess is worse.
I stack the cups. I wipe the counter down.
I wash the pitcher. Behind me, Stanley is telling a story to four people about a game from last year.
It’s warm in here and loud, and somebody says my name in the other room and laughs.
This was the best night of my life. I had my first minutes in a real game. Ten shots and none of them got by me. Cole looked at my glove hand and told me it was mine. There was a room full of men shouting my name like I was someone.
My phone buzzes on the counter with wet hands in the sink.
It’s Josh.
Josh: Saw you played. Attaboy, kid.
I dry my hands and look at it for a long time.
I don’t text him back.
I set the pitcher upside down in the rack to dry, and I go up to bed.
The puck’s in the side pocket of my bag, where I put it. I don’t take it out. I just think about it for the rest of the night.