9. Beau
Beau
The transition is supposed to come at the blue line. Mine comes two strides late, and Walsh sees it, and so does everyone else.
“Sorensen.” O’Grady’s voice carries across the ice the way it always does, flat and unhurried, which is worse than yelling.
O’Grady yelling means you’re part of a group failure.
O’Grady saying your name like that, just the name, means he’s looking at you specifically.
“You want to join us, or you running your own practice over there?”
“On it, Coach.”
“You’re a step behind on everything today.”
“Yes, Coach.”
He skates off to ride someone else, and I reset at the dot and try to put my head back where it’s supposed to be, which is the problem.
My head is not where it’s supposed to be.
My head has been somewhere else since Tuesday, and the somewhere else has a name, and tomorrow at the exhibition game she’s going to give me an answer, which means I’ve got about twenty-six hours of not knowing left and apparently my body has decided to spend all of them two strides late.
This isn’t like me.
That’s the part that’s bothering me almost as much as the actual lateness.
I don’t carry things onto the ice. The ice is the one place in my life that’s never required performance, because you can’t perform a transition — you either make it or you don’t, the puck either goes where you sent it or it doesn’t, and there’s no version of Beau-being-who-everyone-needs that helps you win a faceoff.
It’s just the work. It’s the cleanest thing I have.
And right now I’m fouling it up because a theater major hasn’t texted me back, which she also has no reason to do, because I never gave her my number, which is its own separate problem I haven’t solved.
We run the drill again. I’m better. Not good. Better.
Cash flies past me on the backcheck and bumps my shoulder, the bad one, not knowing it’s the bad one, and I eat the flare of it and keep my face still. “Wake up, Cap,” he says, grinning, already gone.
I take a knee at the boards on the next whistle to retie a skate that doesn’t need retying, just to get thirty seconds, and that’s when Wyatt coasts over and stops beside me in a soft spray of ice.
“Hey.” He doesn’t crowd it. Wyatt never crowds anything. He just stands there, stick across his thighs, looking out at the rink like we’re both watching the same thing. “Where are you?”
“I’m here.”
“You’re not here. You’ve been somewhere else all morning.” He says it without any edge, which is the thing about Wyatt — there’s no trap in it, no angle, he’s just asking. “Coach has noticed. The freshmen have noticed. You okay?”
I could tell him. That’s the strange part. Of the three of them, Wyatt’s the one I could hand the whole thing to and trust it to stay handed — he wouldn’t make it a joke the way Cash would, wouldn’t file it for leverage the way Theo files everything. He’d just hold it.
But the plan with Sloane only works if it looks like the realest thing in the world, and it can’t look like that if four guys in a locker room know it’s staged. I’ve thought about this. The fewer people who know it’s a performance, the better the performance plays. So I don’t hand it to him.
“I’m just in my head,” I say.
Which isn’t a lie. That’s the thing. It’s the most honest sentence I’ve said all day.
Wyatt looks at me a second longer, reading it, and then he nods — accepting it, or at least accepting that it’s all he’s getting.
“Okay. Well. Get it out of your head and into the rink.” He taps my pad with his stick.
“It’s an exhibition, I know. Doesn’t count for anything.
But we want this season, Beau. All of us. Last year still tastes like it tastes.”
It does. We don’t talk about the Harvard final much, but it’s in the room with us all the time, the way a loss like that gets into the walls — up two goals in the third and we let it go, watched it slip in the last eight minutes, stood on the blue line for the handshake line with our season ending in someone else’s celebration.
I’ve replayed the last eight minutes more times than I’d admit.
We all have. The whole program’s been hungry since June in a way that has a flavor.
“I know,” I say.
“So.” Wyatt pushes off. “Head in the rink, Cap.”
I get my head in the rink.
It holds for the rest of practice, mostly.
O’Grady runs us hard — line rushes, then a brutal set of suicides that he frames as “conditioning” and we all understand as punishment for an exhibition team that played a step slow — and somewhere in the burn of the third sprint I lose the Sloane of it and become only a body doing work, which is the thing the ice does for me, the thing it has always done.
By the time Coach blows the whistle and tells us to hit the showers, my shoulder’s screaming and my lungs are raw and my head is, finally, quiet.
It stays quiet for exactly as long as it takes to get to the locker room.
The room’s loud, the way it gets after a hard skate — guys peeling out of pads, somebody’s speaker going, the freshmen too gassed to do more than sit and breathe.
I’m at my stall working my left arm out of the shoulder pad slow, careful, in the small private way I’ve gotten good at, when Theo drops onto the bench next to me.
Theo doesn’t sprawl. He sits the way he does everything, contained, taking up exactly the space he needs and not an inch more. He doesn’t say anything for a second. Then:
“You good?”
“I’m fine.” I get the pad off, set it down. “Just a little distracted.”
Theo gives me a look.
It’s a specific look. He holds it on me a beat, and then his eyes go — deliberate, like he’s making sure I see him do it — from me to Wyatt, who’s two stalls down, to Cash, who’s holding court near the showers about something, and back to me.
“You haven’t seen it,” he says. “Have you.”
I frown. “Seen what?”
Theo says, quietly, with feeling, “Fuck.”
He pulls his phone out. Thumbs at it. Turns it so I can see, and it’s the Whitmore U page, the campus account that posts everything — game schedules and dining hall outrages and whatever students send in that’s deemed shareable — and it’s a video, paused, and the thumbnail is Bella.
He hits play.
It’s short. Phone-shot, vertical, somebody’s apartment behind her, the lighting bad.
Bella’s holding a drink and she’s loose with it, the looseness of a person a few past their limit who has been handed a microphone in the form of a friend’s camera and is performing for it. And she’s talking about me.
I’m not going to catalogue the whole thing.
The gist is that I’m a douche — established — and that I think I’m God’s gift, and that the puck bunnies who chase me are chasing a marketing campaign, and then she leans in toward the camera with the air of someone delivering a punchline and says I’m “not even that good in the sack,” and the people off-screen laugh, and that’s where it cuts.
The video’s got a number under it that means a lot of people have already watched it.
I hand the phone back.
I’m aware of the room having gone a little quieter around me. Not silent — guys are pretending to do other things — but quieter, the way a room goes when everyone in it has already seen the thing you’re just now seeing and is waiting to find out how you’ll take it.
My jaw’s tight. I let it be tight for a second. Then I let it go.
“Ignore her,” I say.
Theo raises an eyebrow.
“I mean it.” I reach for my undershirt. “Ignore her. That’s the whole play.
She wants a reaction — she wants me to post something, or text her, or send Cash to talk to whoever filmed it, anything that says she got to me.
She doesn’t get any of that.” I pull the shirt over my head, careful with the shoulder. “Ignore her. That’s my plan.”
Cash has drifted over by now, because Cash can smell a situation from across a room. “That’s a bad plan,” he says. “My plan involves finding out whose apartment that is.”
“Your plan always involves finding out whose apartment that is.”
“And it’s always a good plan.”
“It’s never a good plan.” I stand, grab my towel. “Ignore it. All of you. She’s loud, she’ll be loud for a few days, and then she’ll find a new thing to be loud about. Don’t feed it.”
Theo’s watching me with the flat, assessing look he gets, the one that means he’s adding something up. “You’re very calm about this,” he says.
“I’m a calm guy.”
“You’re a guy who’s been two strides late all morning and now you’re zen about your ex telling a lot of people you’re bad in bed.” He pockets the phone. “Those don’t go together.”
He’s not wrong. They don’t go together. But the reason they don’t go together is the one thing I’m not putting in this room, so I just shrug — one shoulder, the good one — and head for the showers, and let Theo think whatever Theo’s going to think, which he’ll do regardless of what I do.
The thing is, the video changes the math. Not a lot. But some.
Because Bella running her mouth in public is exactly the kind of thing that keeps her in the picture — keeps people talking about her and me in the same breath, keeps the will-they-won’t-they-again thing alive, which is the thing she wants alive.
And the cleanest way to kill it isn’t to fight her.
It’s to make the question irrelevant. You can’t run a will-they-get-back-together story about a guy who’s visibly, obviously with someone else.
Which is the plan.
Which is the plan I pitched to a girl on a sidewalk two days ago, who’s going to give me an answer tomorrow, and who I have spent all morning being two strides late over.
I stand under the hot water and let it hit the shoulder and I think about Sloane Beckett, which I’ve apparently decided to just let myself do now, since the not-doing-it isn’t working.
It follows me out of the building.