18
One Day
Nash
Rafe is at his desk with a coffee when I come out of the bathroom.
“Anything?” I ask.
“Nothing.” He scrolls. “Not in the chat. Nothing.”
My back is stiff in a line from shoulder to shoulder, and my hands have locked up overnight into two things that don’t want to close. It’s the same as any morning after a game. You wake up, take inventory, and go on with your life anyway. Every guy in this sport has done it a thousand times.
“Let me see it,” Rafe says.
I turn around and pull my shirt off over my head, and he comes around behind me.
“It’s coming up. It’s about this wide.” He draws a line in the air behind me with two fingers. “Purple in the middle now, yellow at the ends.” He touches it. “Does it hurt?”
I put my shirt back on. “It’s fine.”
The shirt Greeley tore goes in the trash. The one Kylie gave me off her own back has a smear of my blood inside the collar and another at the hem where I wiped my hands without thinking. It smells like her. I put it in my laundry bag.
My phone goes off while I’m finding shoes: a group text with four people in it. Me, Rafe, Koda, and Mathers.
Mathers: Is your back ok?
That’s all. No explanation for why he’s put himself in a thread with the three of us at 9:12 in the morning. Koda answers in about four seconds.
Koda: Why do you care?
Mathers: Just asking.
Koda: You were standing right there.
Mathers: Yeah.
Koda: Did you enjoy the show? Or did it remind you of your breakaway?
Then nothing.
I sit on the edge of my bed and read it twice.
Mathers has been Greeley’s guy since he got here.
He eats with them and sits with them on the bus, and he was in that kitchen with his phone out while a guy took a stick off a rack.
And this morning, he put his own name in a thread with the three people Greeley has decided are the problem, where anybody could screenshot it.
“He’s scared,” Rafe says, reading over my shoulder.
“He’s not scared.”
“He’s covering.”
“Either he’s covering,” I say, “or he’s not sleeping.”
Rafe doesn’t answer that.
Koda comes over an hour later, and he’s already decided what we’re doing about it. “Croft drives a truck,” he says, sitting on my bed without being asked. “It’s parked behind Delancey all day, every day.”
“Nobody’s truck is getting fucked up, Barnes.”
“Fine. Then we go get him. Not at his house. Somewhere with no phones and no audience, which was the whole problem Tuesday. And this time, I’d like to be the one recording it. I want the leverage.”
“You said go,” says Rafe.
“I said go because three of us were going. That’s different from what happened, which is six guys standing in a kitchen watching while one of them put a stick across Nash’s back, and now we’re all supposed to eat breakfast around it.”
“We’re not touching his truck,” I say.
“Why not?”
“Because then it’s a police thing instead of a hockey thing. And because that’s what he wants. He wants us doing something off the ice where he gets to be the one who didn’t.”
Rafe leans back in his chair with his coffee. “He’s right.”
“So what, we wait?”
“We play,” Rafe says.
I point at him. “That, Koda.”
Koda looks at both of us like we’ve disappointed him, and then he nods.
Thursday’s captain’s skate is at noon. Berwyn is in the hallway outside the locker room when I come in, leaning on the wall by the whiteboard with a mug, which is where he’s allowed to be.
Greeley is already there, dressed and taping his stick, with his eyebrow taped and the whole side of his face gone yellow and purple.
Berwyn looks at Greeley’s face for a long time. Then he looks at my lip and my knuckles.
“Walk into a door, Greeley?”
“Something like that, Coach.”
“You too, Kennebeck?”
“Yes, Coach.”
Berwyn takes a sip of his coffee. “Lot of doors in this town,” he says, and walks back into his office and shuts it. That’s all. Two weeks before he can run a practice, with a second-line spot open and two centers wearing the same week on their faces, he looks at us and decides not to ask.
The locker room is quiet when I walk in. Greeley’s stall is three down from mine. He says something to Weber, and Weber laughs. Nobody says a word to me about Tuesday. Not one guy.
Koda drops onto the bench beside me and starts on his skates like he’s alone in the room. Rafe takes the stall on my other side. Dannebrog comes in with his gloves under his arm and reads the lines off his phone, and when he gets to the second one, he says, “Barnes, Kennebeck, Waleska.”
Koda says, “Yes,” out loud to nobody, and Rafe smiles at the floor.
I don’t know how to explain what happens with the three of us out there, except that it starts working on the second shift and doesn’t stop.
Koda is fast and mean in the corners and never stops moving his feet, which is the one thing Greeley ever got right about him.
Rafe can beat anybody in this building one-on-one and has spent five weeks proving it instead of using it, and today, for whatever reason, he uses it.
He draws two guys to the wall and moves the puck, over and over, and every time he does, the ice opens in front of me like somebody pulled a curtain.
I win twelve draws and lose two. On the sixth or seventh shift, I come in low the way my dad taught me at twelve, Koda chips it past the D without looking, Rafe is already gone, and the three of us are through the neutral zone side by side before anybody’s turned.
Rafe takes it wide, drags the D with him, and puts it back across the slot, and I one-time it under the bar. The whole rink makes a noise.
We do it again ten minutes later, different entry, same idea. Then a third time, off a turnover. Koda strips somebody at our own blue line and hits me in stride, and I feed Rafe on the back door. He buries it and turns and points his stick at Koda, not me, all the way back to the bench.
Dannebrog blows it dead. “That’s a line,” he says to the whole ice. “That’s what it looks like.”
Greeley’s group doesn’t score once in the scrimmage.
He’s good, and he plays hard, and he gets nothing, because the third time down the ice, he’s the one backchecking and he can’t catch any of us.
On the last shift, he catches me at the boards and puts his shoulder into me.
It’s clean, and it hurts like hell across my back, and I take it and move the puck up to Koda.
He says something as we both turn. I honestly don’t hear it.
Somebody’s yelling for the puck and my ears are full of my own breathing.
By the time I’ve thought about whether to care, I’m forty feet away.
In the room afterward, Pennock taps my shin pad with his stick on his way past. “That was good.”
I nod. It’s the first thing anybody outside the three of us has said to me since Tuesday. Koda has his jersey half off and he’s grinning. Rafe is unlacing his skates with his head down, lit up from the inside, which he does not do in this room.
Dannebrog comes over. “Kennebeck. My office.”
The noise drops about thirty percent.
“Now?”
“When you’re dressed.”
Dannebrog’s office isn’t an office. It’s a converted supply room off the hallway with a desk, a whiteboard, two chairs, and about nine years of team photos taped to the wall. He sits on the edge of the desk instead of behind it, which tells me something before he opens his mouth.
“Shut the door. Sit or don’t.”
I don’t.
He picks up a puck off the desk and turns it over in his hands. “People are talking.”
Here it is. “About what?”
“You and Greeley.” He looks up. “Three separate guys have mentioned it to me this week, and not one of them said anything specific. It’s all something’s going on with your centers, and then they shut up and look at the floor.
And this morning Berwyn stopped me on the stairs and said, and I quote, Find out if there’s something I need to know before I have to.
” He turns the puck over again. “He’s got a face like a car wreck.
You’ve got a lip. And on Tuesday night, both of you were, apparently, nowhere near each other. ”
“That’s right.”
“That’s right?”
“Yeah.”
“Is there something I need to know?”
It’s right on the tip of my tongue. He invited me to his house with six of his guys in it.
He talked at me for an hour. He hit me across the back with a stick while I was walking out the door.
There’s a video that starts after that, and he wants my spot for it, and Mathers knows, and it’s eating Mathers alive.
Dannebrog would believe me. Then it goes to Berwyn, and Berwyn has two players telling different stories about a fight at a house party in September, with a video of exactly one of us on top of the other one, and six guys who were in that kitchen, all of whom eat lunch with Declan Greeley.
It’d be he said, he said, about a night I shouldn’t have been at, three weeks after I put the same guy into the boards at a captain’s skate, with my name in Berwyn’s office twice already.
So I say the thing that saves my ass. “No.”
Dannebrog looks at me for a long moment. “You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Because this is the time to say it.”
“There’s nothing to say.”
He sets the puck down. “Okay. Sit down. I’m going to tell you something.”
I sit.
“You know what I did last spring after the season? I sat in this room with Berwyn and the assistants for two days, and we went through the recruit list. Every guy. What he does well, what he doesn’t, whether he can play here.
When we got to you, it took about sixty seconds.
There was nothing to argue about. You can play.
You’ve been able to play since you were fifteen, and anybody with eyes can see it.
” He leans forward on his knees. “So let me say it plainly, because I don’t think anybody has, and you’re walking around like this is about points.
It’s not. You’ve got the spot on talent.
You’ve had it since the third day of captain’s skates, and everybody in that room knows it. ”
I don’t say anything.
“The only question anybody has about you,” Dannebrog says, “is whether I can put you on the ice in the third period of a one-goal game on the road when the other team has figured out what gets to you. Because they will. That’s not a maybe.
Every league you’ll ever play in, somebody on the other bench gets paid to find out what makes you stupid, and then they do it to you for sixty minutes, and the good ones do it with a smile so the refs love them.
” He shrugs. “That’s the job. That’s literally the job at your position. ”
“I know.”
“You don’t. Not yet.” He stands up. “Here’s the only thing I need from you between now and October.
When somebody’s working you, I need to be able to look down my bench and put you over the boards without thinking about it.
That’s the whole competition. Greeley’s not beating you on skill, and he’s not going to.
He’s betting that at some point somebody gets to you and you hand it to him. Has anybody? Gotten to you?”
Something in my chest goes very still. “No.”
“Okay,” Dannebrog says. “Then we’re fine.” He opens the door, and as I’m going past him, he says, “That line today. You, Barnes, Waleska. Keep it.”
Rafe and Koda are waiting in the hallway by the vending machine, and they both come off the wall when I come out.
“What?” says Koda.
“People are talking.” I pick my bag up off the floor. “Berwyn sent him to ask if there’s something he should know.”
Rafe’s eyes narrow. “And?”
“I said no.”
Koda processes that.
“It’s not protecting him,” I say, before he gets there. “If I say it, it’s my word against six guys and a video that starts in the wrong place. And then I’m a freshman who’s been in Berwyn’s office twice and told on somebody.”
“So we do nothing,” says Koda.
“We beat him. On the ice. Our line. In October, in front of everybody.”
Koda thinks about it for about three seconds. “That’s so slow.”
“Yeah.”
“I want blood.”
That lightens my mood more than it should. Rafe pushes off the wall and slings his bag over his shoulder, and as he goes past me, he says, “Then don’t let him get to you.”
We come out into the parking lot, and it’s clear.
Greeley is at his car with the trunk open and two guys with him, and he looks up when the three of us come out the doors.
He doesn’t say anything. I walk past him at about fifteen feet, close enough that either of us could say something, and neither of us does.
I get to the end of the row before I hear his trunk close.
“One day,” Koda says.
“One day,” I say, and we keep walking.