14
Totally Normal Hockey Behavior
Nash
I wake up at five on Monday and lie in the dark for ten minutes, and by the time my alarm goes off, I’ve decided I’m done.
Not with hockey, not with the spot, not with sitting at that table twice a week with my name on a clipboard.
I’m done letting a guy walk up on me in hallways and tunnels and say whatever he wants, because every person in my life has told me the same thing: take the number, skate away, don’t give him what he wants.
Coach said it. My dad has said it. Rafe dressed it up in a plan and made it sound clever.
And all of it works right up until you watch somebody sit down on a cold step in a stairwell and put her face in her hands.
I get up and go lift.
The captain’s skate is at three, after classes, and I take Rafe’s advice.
I’m the nicest person in the building. I hold the door for Mathers on the way into the locker room.
I ask Pennock about his knee and listen to the whole answer, including the part about the physio he doesn’t like.
When Dannebrog reads the lines off his phone and puts me back with Barnes and Waleska, I say, “Thanks, Cap,” and mean it so convincingly that Rafe turns his head.
When Greeley walks past my stall with his bag over his shoulder, I say, “What’s up, Dec?”
He stops. Half the room stops with him. Mathers has one skate on. Somebody’s speaker is still going. Greeley looks at me a second longer than he means to, and then he puts on the good version of himself like a jacket. “What’s up, Kennebeck?”
“How was your weekend?”
“It was great.” He’s smiling now, not missing a beat. “Yours?”
“Real quiet.”
From two stalls down, Koda says, “How was your weekend, Dec,” in a falsetto, loud enough for the whole room, and then, in his own voice, “Jesus Christ, Kennebeck, who got to you?” A couple of the juniors laugh. Rafe doesn’t. He catches my eye and nods once.
The skate is the best one I’ve had since I got to this school, and not because I’m dominant.
Because I’m clean. I win eleven of fourteen draws.
I don’t take a single extra stride after a whistle.
When Greeley and I end up in the same corner in a battle drill, I win the puck, move it and skate away without looking back at him once.
“Good, Kennebeck,” Dannebrog says out loud, in front of everybody.
Forty minutes in, Greeley comes off the bench late and ends up next to me at the boards waiting for a whistle, and he leans in, friendly. “Haven’t seen your friend around.”
I don’t say anything.
“She stopped texting me.” He tips his head. “Weird. Everything was great Friday.”
Sixteen feet away, Dannebrog is drawing something on a whiteboard for the D.
“Hm,” I say.
“Nothing to say about that?”
“Sounds like her business.”
He looks at me sideways. “You know what she told me at the rink? That she doesn’t know you at all. Who said I’m friends with Nash? That’s what she said.”
On Friday, she hated my guts, so it isn’t even a lie. But she saw right through him anyway, and he thinks he’s got one on me, which is funny.
The whistle goes. “Good drill,” I tell him, and skate away, and it takes everything I have.
After the skate, the locker room empties out slowly, and I take my time. I untape, I shower, I sit and do my laces, and I watch Greeley out of the corner of my eye the whole time. Koda leaves with Pennock.
Rafe says, “You coming?”
“Two minutes.”
He looks at me for a second too long and goes.
Greeley takes his time too. I catch him watching me from the corner of his eye, so he knows.
He talks loudly to everybody on the way out.
He’s the last guy out of the room in every building he’s ever been in, because being last means everybody who left before you saw you.
I had a plan for when he finally walked out. I’d been building it since five this morning. Then he stops in the doorway on his way out, turns around, and waits, in front of Weber and two freshmen and a trainer with a bucket of pucks, for me to do something.
And I get it, standing there with one skate lace in my hand. He can only do this in front of people. Every time, there’s a room. The party, the diner, the boards with Dannebrog at the whiteboard sixteen feet away. It’s all he’s got.
So I finish tying my lace. “Night, Dec.”
He looks at me for a long second, and then he laughs, a little, and goes.
Rafe is waiting by the doors to the lot. He looks at my face, then back at the rink. “What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“You sat in there for twenty minutes.”
“I tied my skates.”
He looks at me like he doesn’t believe a word of it, and then, slowly, like he does. “Huh,” he says.
We walk back to Corvin without saying anything else. Halfway there, he takes out his phone and starts texting somebody, and I don’t ask who. The whole way, my hands won’t stop wanting to be fists.
When I come out of the stairwell on three, Kylie is stepping off the elevator with a basket of laundry on her hip and a blank expression. When she sees me, the last two nights disappear off her face.
“You,” she says, like she’s annoyed.
I know better now.
Rafe looks at me as he walks past and goes into our room. I keep walking, and she follows me with her laundry.
“You’re mad,” she says, observing me. “You’re really mad. I thought you said you’re back on the ice.”
“I am.”
“That should make you happy, right?” She looks at me. “You’re doing the walk.”
“What walk?”
She sets her basket down on the carpet and does an impression of me: head tipped back, jaw hard, walking like every step weighs something.
“I don’t walk like that.”
She drops the act. “You absolutely walk like that.”
“What are you even doing out here?”
She looks at me like I’m stupid. “I live here,” she gasps, “and I’m doing laundry.”
I look at her basket. “Right.”
She picks the basket back up and doesn’t go anywhere.
“Am I dismissed, Your Majesty?” I say.
“No.” She steps in closer, right into the two feet in front of me, tilts her head, and looks at my face. “You look like you want to hit something.”
I don’t say anything.
“Did something happen?”
I don’t answer that either. She’s so close now that I can see how blue her eyes really are. I was never sure, and now I definitely am.
“Do you fight for fun?” she asks seriously.
She has no idea.
She says, “You shouldn’t resort to violence.”
“Violence,” I repeat, quietly. “Do you watch hockey?”
She shakes her head.
“Maybe you should.”
Somebody comes into the hall, and whatever that was breaks. I go into my room and close the door behind me. Rafe is watching me with that look on his face. I ignore him and pull out my laptop.
My phone buzzes two minutes later.
Kylie: Should I Google hockey fights?
I scroll back to last season, a game in December, and send her the clip without a word: me and a guy in a different jersey going in circles on skates, gloves off, the linesman standing right there letting it happen.
Kylie: That is not what I expected.
Kylie: So it’s normal?
Me: Yeah.
Kylie: Wow. Okay.