30 #3
Ridgemont comes out hard and dumb, which is what everybody does in the first one.
Dad’s right about the first ten minutes.
Everybody on both benches is skating like the building’s on fire, chasing hits that aren’t there.
Our first line goes out, runs around for forty-five seconds, and comes back with nothing.
Our first shift is fine. I win the draw on my strong side, we get it deep, Rafe works it low, Koda is wide where he’s supposed to be for once.
Nothing happens, but nothing bad happens.
Second shift, the crowd is into it, the building is actually loud, and my legs feel unbelievable.
Third shift, I come off and drop onto the bench and grab a bottle. Greeley is two spots down toward the door with his helmet up on his head.
“Big crowd,” he says to the ice. I drink my water. “Your friend came,” he says. He doesn’t look at me when he says it, and he doesn’t say her name.
His line goes over the boards, and he wins the draw, and I sit there with my hands around the bottle with my ears ringing.
Six minutes into the second, there’s a whistle for a puck over the glass in their end.
I’m at the dot with my glove off, shaking out my hand, and I look up across the ice for no reason.
Dad isn’t in his seat. It takes me a second to find him, and when I do, he’s all the way around on our side, in the aisle four rows up behind our bench with his jacket over his arm, bent down with his hand on the seat in front of him, talking to Kylie.
She’s turned all the way around with her knees up on her seat and the popcorn in her lap, and she’s laughing.
Paige’s laughing. Dad says something with his hands, and Kylie throws her head back and covers her mouth, and then she says something back, and Dad laughs so hard he has to straighten up to do it.
I stand on the dot in a stopped building and watch my father charm a girl who told him ninety minutes ago, without one second of hesitation, without so much as a glance at me, that she lives down the hall and borrows my shit.
Fuck. Me.
The linesman is saying something to me about the faceoff. I glance at our bench. Greeley is at the door end with his helmet tipped back and a bottle in his hand, looking up into the stands at exactly the spot I was looking at, and then he looks at me, and he smiles.
My hands go hot inside my gloves. The heat crawls up the back of my neck into my ears, and my jaw locks so hard my back teeth grind, and the building goes strange and far away, all that noise dropping to nothing like somebody put a hand over it.
The only things left in the world are this dot, this stick, these gloves, and how much room there is between me and everybody else.
The puck drops, and I lose the draw. I don’t remember it happening.
Their nineteen has been on me all night.
He’s the talker, with his mouth going constantly at me, at Rafe, at the goalie, and he’s been running me every chance he gets.
About forty seconds later, I chip a puck off the wall and get rid of it clean, and he comes in late and finishes me anyway, forearm up under my chin, into the glass.
It’s nothing. It’s a hockey play. He says something into the side of my helmet, and I don’t hear it.
What I hear is the glass rattling and my own breath in my cage and the blood going in my ears like a faucet.
What I want, standing with my back against the boards in front of a thousand people, is him on the ice.
Not a hit, not a scrap. His helmet off and his head back, meeting my fist over and over.
That sound you can’t get any other way. I want it so badly my hands shake on my stick and my mouth fills with spit, and my whole body is screaming go, like something in me has its hand on the back of my head, pushing.
And I have him. He’s already turned away, half laughing, feet stopped dead, eleven inches between his numbers and the glass.
My stick is in tight under his arm. The linesman is at the far hash marks with his back to us, watching a scrum in front of the net.
The ref behind the goal line is screened by their own D.
Two seconds. One shove, everything I have, through him and into that glass.
From twenty feet away, it would look like a hockey play.
Nobody in the building would call it. He’d get up slow, or he wouldn’t get up.
That’s the one I’m holding in my hands, and I want it so much I can taste metal.
What I actually do, because apparently I’m a fucking child, is get both hands on my stick and cross-check him square in the back after the whistle, in the open, in the middle of the ice, four feet in front of a referee with nothing in his way at all.
He goes down on one knee and comes up so fast, rushing me, and we’re throwing at each other.
I’m saying something with my shoulder in him and his glove in my face.
Somebody has my jersey from behind, and the linesman is between us with his arm across my chest, big guy, older guy.
“Hey. Hey. Done. You’re done.”
The arm’s already up. Their nineteen gets up grinning with his arms spread, turning to the crowd, playing to the whole building, because he just got a power play out of me for free, and we both know it.
Our bench is quiet. Twenty guys, and not one of them says a word to me on my way past. Berwyn doesn’t yell. He doesn’t move. He just watches me go to the box with both hands flat on the boards.
The door shuts behind me. It’s loud in there, right on top of the crowd, with a guy in a striped shirt beside me with his arms crossed and somebody behind the glass banging on it with a flat hand.
My chest is going like I sprinted the length of the building twice.
I’ve got my helmet off, my hair is dripping, and I can feel my pulse in my teeth.
I put my stick across my knees and look at my own gloves.
Two minutes for cross-checking. There are two places in this building I could look right now. I keep my eyes on the ice.
They score fourteen seconds in. A point shot through traffic, a tip, in. The horn goes off over my head and their bench dumps over the boards to celebrate, and I have to sit there and watch.
One-nothing.
I come out when the gate opens, and I’m barely on the bench before Berwyn has a fistful of my jersey at the shoulder and his face four inches from my cage.
“You just did his job for him,” he says. That’s all. He lets go and looks down the bench. “Greeley, Barnes, Wyatt.”
They go over the boards, and I sit down at the end next to the door.
I sit there for eight minutes. My legs go cold.
My hands stop shaking somewhere around the fourth minute, and I pick at the tape on the knob of my stick with my thumbnail until a strip of it is hanging off, and then I tear it off and ball it up and hold it.
Four rows up behind me, she’s watching me sit here.
And I wonder what my dad is telling her.
Then Berwyn says, “Kennebeck,” and sends me out for a defensive-zone draw. I get my hands low. I win it clean off the wall back to Mathers, and Mathers moves it quick up to Koda, and I’m already gone up the middle.
After that, I don’t give them anything. I don’t touch a guy after a whistle. I don’t open my mouth. I don’t look at their nineteen once for the rest of the night, not on the ice, not on a change, not when he skates past our bench, and I know exactly how loud that is.
Eight minutes into the third, he takes a pass low on the wall and puts his head down to look for the next one, and I step into him.
Feet under me, shoulder through his chest, puck-side, on time, the way you’re taught at ten years old, and it’s clean.
He comes off his feet and goes down on his back, and his helmet comes half off, and the whole building makes that low ohhh that rises into a roar, and there’s no arm up anywhere, because there’s nothing to call.
The puck stays, and I take it. Rafe is coming through the middle with his stick on the ice screaming for it, because Rafe always wants it, and their D is already stepping toward him.
So I put it flat and early to Koda on the far side instead.
Koda catches it in stride and one-touches it back into the middle, and Rafe is coming off the D-man’s shoulder into all that empty ice, and he doesn’t even look at the net.
One-one.
Rafe comes off the glass with both arms up and grabs the back of my helmet. “That’s mine,” he says into my cage. “That’s all me. I made that.”
“You didn’t have the puck.”
“I drew two guys.”
Koda arrives and jumps on both of us. “Suck my dick, Waleska.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Rafe says.
I’m laughing, and my jaw still hurts from clenching it.