Twenty #2
Goalie stance. Tall. Narrow shoulders. Mask pushed back on his head, hair damp, a smile that doesn’t quite hit his eyes. He stands half off to the side like he drifted there after the photographer started counting down. A number peeks out where another player’s arm doesn’t cover it.
82.
Delilah’s voice drops. “That’s him. Paisley.”
My fingers go numb on the armrest.
“He wasn’t on their regular roster,” I say, my voice coming out hoarse.
Delilah’s eyes narrow. She opens another tab and types. Clicks. A tournament stats page loads—one consolidated table, all players, all positions, same page.
“Tournament Team Stats,” she says. “Both of them. Right here.” She scrolls until both lines are visible. Finger tracing the screen, she reads: “Hicks, Braxton. Four games played for a whopping forty-seven minutes. His save percentage is… seven forty-seven.”
I stare.
She turns to me. “How the hell does a goalie with a .747 make any tournament roster?”
I don’t answer. Instead, my eyes drag up to the stat line the page was built for.
CASTELLANO, GAbrIEL (F) — 7 GP, 9 G, 10 A, 19 PTS, 4 PIM, 4 PPG
One boy everyone notices. One boy nobody does.
The contrast hits harder than the numbers because it’s the whole world in two lines. Suddenly, the office drops away.
Sticky bar top under my forearms. Neon Molson sign buzzing overhead. Too-loud country music tangling with boys yelling over a pool game somewhere behind me. My throat was raw from screaming through the third period. The weight of a tournament medal on my collarbone.
“You’re the captain, right? For the girls’ squad,” asks a voice beside me.
I turn. He’s wearing a team polo with the Ottawa U18 AAA logo, taking a swig from his pint of beer. Ready to congratulate him on his win, I tip my chin up to look at him, but I don’t recognize him.
“Yeah.” My younger voice, brighter. “Ivy,” I offer my name like it matters, proud to have led the Blades to our first Esso Cup.
“Brax,” he says without looking away from me with a husky-like intensity. “Vodka cran?”
“I don’t drink,” I say, but he’s already ordered one.
His cologne punches through, cheap and heavy. It catches in the back of my throat.
“You were good out there,” he goes on. “That second goal? Lateral movement like that from a girl…”
He laughs, loud and obnoxious.
From a girl?
Fighting a cringe, I play it off with a shrug. “We all played hard.”
He leans in, his forearm brushing mine on the bar top. I shift a half-step away. Then, spotting two of my teammates standing in the bar lineup, I wave, but they don’t see me.
“You going CHL or college?” he asks, as if my future is a line on a betting slip.
“Haven’t decided yet.” I keep my body angled towards the girls, but not wanting to be rude, I ask, “You?”
“Goalies don’t go in the first rounds. We’re depth. Insurance. You know how it is.” He flashes a grin, but bitterness sours his words.
The drink I didn’t want appears in front of me.
“So,” he says, smile turning sharp, “you only into captains? Or just anyone good with a stick?”
He winks.
I laugh it off because that’s what girls do when a guy makes them uncomfortable. I fight the sick little flutter in my gut and push it down somewhere small.
“I appreciate players who can keep up,” I shoot back.
His eyes go flat. Just for a second. Then the smile comes back, strained wide. Brax opens his mouth to reply but clamps his lips together; I sense a different presence behind me. Bigger, warmer.
“Filthy edge work on that third-period penalty kill.” New voice. Deep.
I turn around.
Gabriel Castellano’s forearm brackets my space along the edge of the bar, his cheeks still flushed from the win. I inhale his scent of ice, sweat, and expensive aftershave.
He watched me play?
I arch my brow in mock challenge, but I can’t help the stupid little spark of excitement. The quiver in my gut shifts away from the nausea, and I nearly breathe a sigh of relief.
“That fake on the goalie? She’s gonna see that in her sleep.”
I blink. “Uh. Thanks.”
Beside me, Braxton straightens, his lanky form going rigid. “We were talking.”
Gabriel’s glance cuts to him, distracted, then slides past him, returning to my face.
“You’re Hayes, right? Blades.” He nods at my medal. “Hell of a game.”
Braxton’s hand tightens around his beer.
“I should—” He throws it back and slams the empty bottle down too hard. “Enjoy your captain, I guess.”
He stalks away with stiff shoulders, never looking back.
I remember thinking: sore loser. Then Gabriel asked about my shot, and I forgot Braxton Hicks existed.
But Braxton Hicks did not forget me.
Back in the office, my nails are digging into my thighs hard enough to sting. I force my hands open.
“I remember him.” The words scrape out.
Delilah’s hands stop moving. Then, carefully: “From… Calgary?”
I look at her, my lips parting. “How did you—?”
“Ivy.” She says it gently. “I’ve worked here for two years.
I’ve looked at that tournament photo on the wall probably three hundred times.
” She tips her chin toward the bar. “It’s you.
Younger, different hair, but it’s your jaw, your stance—I’ve been staring at it since the day you hired me.
” A beat. “And… I may have done some digging after the viral hashtag Beer Gate thing. Found a Reddit thread. I didn’t know how to bring it up. ”
My chest tightens. I nod once, something releasing.
“I remember he bought me a drink I didn’t want. Got weird when Gabriel showed up and we started talking. Like I’d broken some deal I didn’t know I’d agreed to.” My throat works. “Gabriel barely saw him. Just talked hockey with me like Braxton wasn’t even there.”
“So Braxton Hicks, the fill-in goalie you weren’t into, was there. On Gabriel’s team. At that same event in Calgary.” She says it like she’s testing the weight of it. “And… after you snubbed him, a Reddit thread blows your career up—am I getting that right?”
“Posted by Gabriel,” I scoff. Probably a drunken dare after I left.
Back then, the tournament had a ProspectTalk forum for players, billets, and scouts to keep up with each other after Nationals.
I’d seen Gabriel post on it before—clips, stats, dumb arguments about goalies like he owned the internet too.
So when that Reddit thread showed up with his username, I never questioned it.
Delilah’s fingers fly across the keys as if she’s been waiting to do this.
She retrieves the original thread through the Internet archives, Reddit having shut down the thread without commentary.
Not that it mattered for me by then anyway—people had shown their true colors, and Dad needed me more than I needed to chase a dream.
I don’t need to read the body to know what it’ll show me.
The image is forever burned in my mind after that first humiliating week.
The meme with my face cropped out of my Elite Prospects photo, the definition underneath it sending a coil of nausea through my gut.
Brass Bunny (n.): A so-called elite prospect who gets scouts’ eyes on her by servicing league executives behind closed doors.
Example: Ivy Hayes wouldn’t even be on a scout’s radar if she wasn’t a Brass Bunny.
Seventeen and searchable, but not because of what I worked so hard for.
At the top, the username: u/HockeyGOD93.
Delilah stares at it. Her head tilts.
“Hang on.”
“How long have you been looking at this?”
She doesn’t look up. “Since Howloween.”
Delilah opens a second tab, types something I can’t see from my angle, hits enter. A cached profile page loads. She reads, then turns the screen to face me.
A different profile. Same platform. Different account.
u/HockeyG0D93.
“This one,” Delilah says, pointing at the second profile, “is Gabriel’s actual handle. Registered 2012. Ottawa. Posts about hockey stats, road trip playlists, one very passionate argument about Carey Price.” She taps the screen. “Last active January 2018. Over a year before the tournament.”
She pulls the original thread back up beside it.
u/HockeyGOD93.
“But this account,” she says, “was created May 2019. It’s only made one post: the thread about you. Then nothing.”
We both look at the two usernames side by side.
One with a zero; the other with a letter.
“Someone made a fake account,” I say. The words come out flat and strange in my mouth.
“Someone made a fake account,” Delilah confirms, “that was close enough to fool anyone who glanced at it. Anyone who was angry, or scared, or seventeen and trying to figure out if a story about her was real.”
My chest caves in, very quietly.
She clicks back to the fake account profile. Scrolls to the signature line at the bottom.
#82 between the pipes. You’ll remember me.
I don’t blink.
“Eighty-two,” I say.
Neither of us speaks.
I look between the fake username and the roster still open in its own tab. HICKS, brAXTON (G), #82.
Same number. Same pathetic little declaration.
“It’s him,” I state.
Delilah sits back, slow. “Yeah.”
“Gabriel didn’t write this.” The sentence comes out flat.