22
The Hallway Is Too Short
Nash
Greeley stops talking to me the Monday after the party, and he doesn’t start again.
Not in the locker room, not at study hall, not in the hallway outside Dannebrog’s office.
He says good morning to everybody else. He laughs at Weber’s jokes, helps carry the pucks in, and asks Pennock about his knee.
He’s four feet from me twice a day for nine days and has stopped acknowledging that I exist. I prefer it.
No act, no show, not a single glance in my direction.
Rafe thinks it means he’s planning something.
I think it means he’s holding it for the day it’s worth the most. Either way, my guard is up.
Coach Berwyn comes through at two-fifty with a clipboard and two assistants, says nothing to any of us, and shuts himself in his office. Koda taps his stick against my shin pad. “Ready?”
“You?”
“Fuck yeah.” He hits my ass with his stick on the way out.
Berwyn’s practice is nothing like Dannebrog’s.
It’s the same ice and the same guys, and it doesn’t resemble anything we’ve done in five weeks.
Everything is timed and on a whistle. There’s no standing around while somebody sets up pucks, because an assistant is already at the next station with the pucks set up.
Twenty seconds between drills. The whole thing runs like a train, and Coach is everywhere, skating, correcting, writing things down.
“Barnes. Feet.”
“Waleska, that’s one touch. One.”
“Kennebeck, you’re talking. Keep talking.”
Forty minutes in, my legs are gone, and my lungs are on fire, and I’ve never been happier in my whole fucking life.
At four-twenty, he stops everything. “Centers. Down here. Everybody else, water.”
There are five of us: me, Greeley, Layous, who’s really a winger, a sophomore named Orr, and a freshman nobody’s seen much of. Berwyn sets up two pylons, a net, and an assistant at the half wall with a bucket.
“Low entry,” he says. “You swing low, the puck goes to the wall, you come back through the middle. I want you at the hash marks, not the top of the circle. Two defenders. You’ve got one read.”
I know this drill. I’ve done a version of it since I was eleven, in a driveway, then in a garage the winter I was fourteen, then in three different rinks. My dad told me on the phone a month ago that I’ve been coming in too high on it.
“Kennebeck. Greeley. You two first. Alternating.”
Same drill, same defenders, same rep, back-to-back, in front of the entire staff and twenty-two guys standing at the boards with water bottles. Nobody says anything.
Greeley goes first, and he’s good. He comes in low, gets the puck flat off the wall, and hits Koda coming across, clean. The assistant says, “Yep.”
Then me. I hold at the hash marks. The defenseman has to commit before I do, and he does, and the lane opens exactly where my dad said it would, and I put it through on the tape.
“Again,” says Berwyn.
Six reps each, alternating, and by the fourth, there’s no sound in the building except skates and the puck and Coach saying one word after each rep.
On my fifth, Greeley is on the defensive side, and he comes across on my hands with a short, hard chop right onto my gloves as the puck arrives, on the same knuckles that spent last week scabbing over. The puck skips past me.
“Reset,” the assistant says.
I skate back to the line with my right hand singing, and for about a second the floor of me comes up, the way it did in his kitchen and on his front walk, and I know exactly where he is on the ice without looking.
Every league you’ll ever play in, somebody on the other bench gets paid to find out what makes you stupid. I flex my hand twice inside the glove.
“Kennebeck,” says Berwyn. “Again.”
I get four more, and so does he, and on two of mine, he’s on me. The second time, he gets his stick between my legs on the entry, and I have to fight through it and get the puck to Koda a half second late.
“Late,” Berwyn says.
“Yes, Coach.”
And I don’t miss the next one. I come low. The puck goes flat off the wall. I hold at the hash marks with every muscle in my legs screaming to go early, let the defenseman commit, and I’m through the middle with Greeley two strides behind me the whole way to the net, and I go top corner.
“Yeah,” somebody says at the boards. I think it’s Koda. Coach says nothing. We do it four more times, and the last three are mine.
Practice runs until five-fifty, because Berwyn doesn’t care what the sheet says.
At the end, everybody’s bent over at the boards, and a guy at the far end actually throws up.
Berwyn skates to center with his clipboard under his arm and reads the lines.
He reads four forward lines and three D pairs off a clipboard.
“Second line. Barnes. Kennebeck. Waleska.”
Koda makes a noise into his glove.
“Third. Orr. Greeley. Weber.”
That’s it. He keeps reading, says something about Friday and the exhibition, and then, “That’s it. Get off my ice,” and skates for the tunnel.
I stand at the boards with my hands on my knees and my chest heaving. Rafe skates past and hits the back of my shin with his stick, hard, and doesn’t say a word. Koda puts me into the boards.
Greeley doesn’t say anything. I watch for it in the room, because I’ve been braced for whatever it’s going to be since Dannebrog read our names in the locker room two weeks ago.
He sits in his stall and takes his skates off.
He drinks his water. When Weber says something, he answers and laughs a normal laugh.
He gets up and goes to the shower with his towel and walks past me on the way without looking, without slowing down, without congrats or enjoy it or we’ll see.
Pennock hits my shoulder. “About time.”
Two stalls down, Mathers says, “Kennebeck,” and tips his chin.
I sit there in my gear with my elbows on my knees. I got everything I wanted, and nobody told me it was over, because it isn’t.
My phone is in my bag. There are messages in the team chat about the lines, one from my academic advisor, which means somebody called him within about four minutes of Berwyn reading that list, and one from my dad at 5:31 that says How’d it go?
because he knows exactly what today is. I don’t open any of them.
I get dressed. Koda wants to go eat, and I tell him I’ll catch up.
Rafe looks at me a second longer than he needs to and doesn’t ask.
Then I walk back to Corvin with my hair still sweaty and my hand still singing, go up three flights, and knock on a door that isn’t mine.
Kylie opens it in a hoodie and shorts with her hair up. “You?”
“Blondie.”
She rolls her eyes and looks at my bag. “Are you just getting back?”
“Yeah. Practice ran long.”
“Okay. So?” she says slowly. “Why are you at my door?”
I open my mouth, and nothing comes out, because I haven’t thought about this at all. I walked off that ice, got dressed, and walked here, and at no point did I plan a sentence.
“I got the line,” I say.
She blinks. “The what?”
“Second line. Center. Coach read it at the end of practice.” I shift my bag. “It’s official now. It’s not a captain’s skate thing anymore. It’s the real list.”
“Is that—” She stops. “Okay, I don’t know what that means.”
“It means I’ve got it.”
She steps out into the hallway and pulls her door most of the way shut behind her. “Okay, explain it to me like I’ve never seen a hockey game, because I haven’t. I have no idea what that means.”
I look down at her curious face, and I hate how much I like it.
“There are twenty-some guys on a roster,” I say.
“Twelve play forward. You put them in groups of three, and that’s a line.
There are four lines. First line plays the most. Second plays almost as much.
Third and fourth play less, and it drops off fast. By the fourth line, you’re out there not to lose the game, not to win it. ”
She leans against the wall with her arms crossed. “Okay.”
“Each line has a center and two wingers. The wingers go up and down the sides. The center’s in the middle.”
“That’s why it’s called a center.”
“That’s why it’s called a center.”
“Wow,” she deadpans.
“Do you want the rest or not?”
“I want the rest.” She rolls her eyes. “God.”
“The center takes the draws. Faceoffs. Every time play stops, two guys line up in a circle, somebody drops the puck between them, and whoever wins it, their team has it. I take those. That’s my job.”
“How many of those are there in a game?”
“Sixty. Seventy, sometimes.”
She blinks. “You have to win seventy little fights?”
“You don’t have to win all of them.”
“How many do you have to win?”
“More than the other guy,” I say, and she makes a noise that means I’m unbearable.
“And the center runs the line. The wingers stay on their sides. I’m in the middle, so I cover the whole width of the ice, and I’m supposed to know where both of them are at all times without looking.
If one of them’s in the wrong place, it’s on me, because I’m supposed to be telling him where to be.
If the other team scores, it’s on me too, because I’m the one who’s supposed to see it coming. ”
“So it’s the position where everything’s your fault.”
My eyes drop to her mouth. “Basically.”
“And you like that?”
I look back up and nod. “Wingers score goals. Centers decide where the puck goes.”
“I knew you were a control freak.”
I grin.
She looks at my chest. “So when you say you got the spot, you mean between you and Declan?”
“Yeah.”
“So he’s—”
“Third line.”
Her whole face changes. “He’s third? That’s two worse.”
“It’s one worse.”
“It’s two lines worse, Nash. You literally just told me there’s a first, a second, a third—”
“It’s one spot down from mine. Second to third.”
“Wow,” she says. “Oh, he’s plotting his revenge right now.” She pushes off the wall. “Okay, one more question.”
“I think that’s enough for tonight.”
Her lips part. “You’ve loved every second of my questions. You’ve been explaining hockey to an idiot who’s going to forget it all in ten minutes.”
“You better not.”