33. Chapter Thirty-Three
Percy
I didn’t sleep, and it wasn’t because of the game.
I had a whole weekend of nothing. I made it nothing myself, and now it’s Monday, and I’ve spent two nights lying in the dark with a phone I can’t stop turning over in my hand.
That’s good. That’s the last thing that crossed between us.
Two words, from me, on purpose. Then she went quiet on the other side of it, and I told myself that was what I wanted.
But it isn’t what I wanted. I don’t actually know what I wanted, but I know it wasn’t this.
I hate that I don’t know where I stand. She smiled at me at the game, up in the stands, and I looked away because I’m a coward.
And now I don’t know if it was for me or for the guy on the ice she came to watch, and I can’t ask, because it’s not my place.
So I’m just here. In the maybe. And I can take almost anything — I’ve taken almost everything in my life — but this is different.
I’d rather know I’m out than not know. That’s the sick part.
I would rather she told me flat that it’s Theo, that Sunday was nothing, than lie here one more night not knowing which it is.
Practice is at eight, and I’m the first one on the ice.
Nobody can beat the man who gets here at five.
I go hard because the heaviness in my chest won’t fucking settle.
Josh used to push me through drills when I had an attitude problem, and to this day, it stuck.
This is where the nonsense in my head ends. This is all I’ve got.
I run drills like I’m a forward, not a fucking tendy.
Her smile rings in my head, and Theo follows that thought immediately.
When the rest of the team files on, Coach Fuller gives us the lowdown on who we’re playing this weekend, and then practice begins.
Theo’s at the boards near my net, water bottle up, talking to Walker Owens.
“Nah, she’ll come around,” he’s saying. “She always does. Runs hot and cold, that one, but she came to the party on Saturday. Drew’s got her roommate handled.” He squirts the water into his mouth, unbothered.
Owens says something I don’t hear.
“I give it two weeks.” Theo caps the bottle, bored with it already. “She’ll be back before the Wisconsin trip. She always comes back.” And something in me goes very still.
“Deveroux.” Stanley skates up. “You’re not blocking shit. You’ve been staring at the same spot on the glass for a minute. You having a stroke?”
“Put me in the rush drill,” I say.
He stops. “What?”
“The forwards. Next rep. Put me in.”
Stanley laughs, delighted, because it’s the kind of dumb thing that makes his whole day — the goalie wants to skate out, take a rep like a forward, it’s a joke, it’s a laugh, guys do it at the end of a loose practice. “Fuller’s not looking. Yeah. Yeah, get in there. I can’t wait to see this.”
I skate out to the blue line and take a spot on the wing, in pads, which is stupid, but I don’t care, because for the length of one rep I’m not standing in a net hearing Theo talk about her. I’m moving. I’ve got something to do with my body.
The rep runs, so I go into the corner after the puck, and Theo’s the one on it.
I take him off it harder than the drill calls for.
A lot harder. Shoulder and stick and all of the weight I’ve been carrying since Friday, into him.
He goes into the boards with a bang that isn’t necessary, and his head comes around fast.
“What the fuck—”
I don’t say anything, turning my back on him to skate after the puck.
Stanley’s laugh dies in the air. “Whoa— okay—”
Theo shoves off the boards, chirping, half a grin because he doesn’t know it’s real. “Somebody feed the goalie. Christ.” He’s fine. It’s nothing to him.
And across the ice, at the bench, Benson’s stopped. He’s just watching me the way Blue watches me, the way the people who actually see me watch me. And he’s not laughing. I can see him not liking what he’s seeing.
The whistle goes hard, three sharp ones.
“Deveroux!” Fuller’s voice comes across the ice like a slapshot. “Get off my ice. Now.”
The whole practice has stopped. Twenty guys standing around watching the backup goalie who just ran a teammate through the boards.
I skate off and don’t look at anyone.
“Get changed,” Fuller says. “My office. Ten minutes.”
He turns back to the ice, blows the whistle, and practice starts up again behind me like nothing happened. I go down the tunnel alone with my gear still on and my heart going.
I shower and dress, then I’m outside his door at the ten-minute mark because you don’t make Coach Fuller wait.
He storms in, still in his practice gear, and doesn’t say anything as he passes me and pushes the door open.
He drops his clipboard on the desk hard enough that it echoes.
He lets the quiet sit there for a second too long, the way he does when he wants you sweating before he’s said anything at all.
“You want to tell me what that was?” he finally says, crossing his arms and looking down at me intently.
I sit in the chair across his desk and don’t say anything.
“A goalie does not leave his crease to run a forward in a no-contact rep. A goalie does not do that.” He’s got both hands flat on the desk.
“I have watched you get on my ice at six in the morning every day for a month. I told you to stay on it. I’ve been watching you climb.
And you just skated out and put Marsh into the boards like you wanted to hurt him, in practice, and I want to know what is going on in your head. ”
I have a real answer. The girl, the rules, the house, the parties, a night nobody knows about, and I can’t give him one piece of it without giving him all of it. It would cost me the net and Hawthorne. I would never open my mouth.
“It won’t happen again,” I reassure him by meeting his eye.
Coach Fuller looks at me for a long moment, waiting for the rest, but I won’t budge.
“I’ve got a drafted freshman and a senior ahead of you,” he says.
“You know what separates a third guy who moves up from a third guy who stays third? It’s not the glove hand.
Yours is fine. It’s whether I can trust you in the room.
And you just gave me a real good reason to wonder.
” He straightens. “Sit the rest of practice. Think about whether you want this.”
Whether I want this.
I want it more than I’ve wanted anything in my life.
I can’t tell him that either.
I sit in the room by myself while they finish on the ice.
I can hear it through the wall — the pucks, the whistle, Stanley yelling something, the ordinary sound of a practice I got thrown out of. The rage is gone. It burned down fast the second Fuller shut that door, and what’s under it is shitty.
The net’s further away than it was on Friday. And I finally know where I stand with her, and it’s the worst place there is.