38
Absolutely Not Dressing Up
Nash
She’s on top of me when I wake up, which is how I wake up now. Her face is on my chest, one leg over both of mine, her hand where it’s been all night, flat and warm on my left side with her fingers still laced through mine.
I lie there in the gray and think about last night.
I told her. The brush pile. The gas can.
The burn unit. Everything I’ve never said out loud to another person in my life, I said it to her in this room, in this bed, about eight hours ago, to a girl who was kissing my scar like she could take the pain out of it.
I look down at her. She’s asleep with her mouth open and her hair all over my arm, and there’s nothing on her face but sleep.
She wakes up about twenty minutes later the way she always does, in stages, with a noise first. “It’s freezing in here.”
I pull her closer.
“I think I can see my breath.”
“You can’t.”
“Nash, I can—” and she’s already climbing over me to the window in nothing but my T-shirt.
She slams it down and stands in front of it with her arms crossed.
Then she comes back and gets in and puts her feet on my leg, the coldest things I’ve ever felt, and on the way down, she kisses my side.
Not anywhere in particular. Wherever her mouth lands on the way past.
“What time’s skate?” she says into my ribs.
“Four.”
“Okay.” She lies all the way on top of me with her head on my chest. “I’m going back to sleep now.”
Suspended doesn’t mean excused, so I’m on the ice at four with everybody else, in my line between Rafe and Koda, running the same pre-scout stuff we’ll run tomorrow in a game I’m not dressing for. Video. Lift. And Berwyn’s harder on me than on anybody.
Third rep of the neutral-zone work, he blows it dead. “Kennebeck, you’re late.” I wasn’t late. I don’t say that. Ten minutes later, I put a guy into the boards in the corner, clean, on the puck, but harder than a Thursday calls for, and the whistle goes before the guy’s feet are back under him.
“Kennebeck.”
I put my hand up and skate back to the line. He’s not wrong. It sits in my throat all afternoon. I know exactly what I was doing in that corner, and so does he, and so does everybody else on this ice.
Greeley’s out here too. He practices. He just can’t dress, same as me.
He isn’t centering the third line. Layous has had it since Monday, and Greeley’s been rotating in wherever they need a body: wing on the fourth, draws for the PK unit I’m not on this week, the back of the line.
Nobody’s said one word about it in the room.
He wins a draw off Layous on one of the last reps, clean, and puts it on a plate for Barnes, and nobody says anything about that either. I don’t smile about any of it.
Berwyn catches me in the hallway after, when I’m half dressed with my skates over my shoulder. “Kennebeck. Two minutes.”
I follow him into his office. He doesn’t sit, so I don’t either.
“Montreal called,” he says.
Everything in me stops.
“They’ve seen it. Obviously. They’ve also seen what we sent them, which is everything: the whole thing, the medical from that night, the statements, the discipline. They’re not taking you off their list. They asked what happened.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“The truth.” He leans back against the edge of his desk.
“And when one of them gets you on the phone, or in a room, or in a hallway in January, which they will, you do the same thing. You hear me? You tell them you hit him. You tell them what he did first, because that’s a fact and not an excuse, and then you tell them you were wrong. ”
“I was.”
He looks at me for a second. “And then you tell them about Sunday.”
“Sunday?”
“You walked to his house with two guys and came back without touching him.” He shrugs. “That’s the same kid making a different decision five weeks later. They can do what they want with it. But you don’t hide it, and you don’t sell it. You just say it.”
I stand there in an office that smells like the hallway, with my skates on my shoulder. “Yes, Coach.”
“Go home. Eat something. You look like hell.”
Thursday night, Rafe’s here, and so is Kylie, and all three of us are doing completely separate things.
Rafe’s at his desk with a calculator. I’m on my bed with Brennan State film on my laptop, watching their D pinch, because apparently I’m going to prepare thoroughly for a game I’m going to watch in a tie.
Kylie’s got her laptop on her knees and her feet shoved under my leg, because they’re always cold and she’s decided my thigh is a radiator.
I keep looking at her, and I don’t know what I’m waiting for.
Some version of her being careful with me, the voice people use, the pause before they ask something, the look.
It doesn’t come. She argues with me about chips.
She shoves her cold feet further under my leg.
She reads a sentence of her paper out loud in a stupid voice and asks Rafe if it’s stupid, and Rafe says yes.
She catches me on about the sixth look. She sets her laptop aside and crawls on top of me. Rafe makes a noise, and she ignores him and stares right back at me.
“Hey, you,” she says.
I stare back.
It’s game day when I wake up, and I’m still pissed I’m missing our first game on home ice.
I peel Kylie off me and eat eggs and oatmeal, and by eleven, I’m at the window with nothing to do, my legs already going, that thing where your quads feel loaded and light at the same time and you spend the whole day waiting for six o’clock so you can use them.
I nap at noon. I lie there for forty minutes with my eyes shut and don’t sleep one second of it. Chicken and rice at three-thirty. I put the tie on at four-fifteen. It’s the same suit from the road trip. I stand in front of the mirror on the back of the closet door and do the knot twice.
Rafe comes in and looks at me. “You look stupid.”
“You’re wearing the same thing.”
“I look good. You look like somebody’s accountant.”
Koda meets us on our floor, and we walk over together at four-thirty. The lot’s already filling. Two kids in Woodbury jerseys are throwing a ball against the wall by the loading door, and one of them stops and stares and elbows the other one, and then they both stare.
Inside, the room has first-home-game energy.
Tape going, somebody’s speaker, trainers moving through, Wyatt on the floor with his legs up the wall, Barnes doing his thing with two balls against the wall.
The smell of it. The sticks in the rack.
The sheets taped to the door with the matchups and the starts.
I stand in the middle of it in my jacket.
I’ve got a stall in here. My name’s on it.
My gear’s hanging in it, all of it, because that’s where it lives.
I stand in front of it, and there’s nothing in this building for me to do with my hands.
At five-fifty, Berwyn comes through and says what he says, and then it’s the noise, twenty-six guys and sticks on the floor and somebody yelling, and the door opens onto the tunnel.
Koda stops in front of me on his way past with his helmet under his arm. “You look stupid.”
“Fuck you.”
“Told you,” Rafe says from behind him, and taps my shin with his stick on the way by, the way you’d do it to a guy on the bench.
Then they go. I stand in the doorway of the room and watch my line walk down the tunnel without me: Rafe in front, Koda behind him, hitting the wall twice with his glove for no reason.
The noise comes up the tunnel when they hit the ice, that low roar with the horn under it, and then the door swings shut on it, and I’m standing in a hallway in dress shoes.
I did this. I beat the shit out of a teammate in his kitchen, and it took four guys to pull me off him. Nobody made me do the part where I hit him. I fell into every single trap Greeley set for me. Not anymore. I’m done.
I go find my seat.
They put us in the last two rows of section 114, up behind our bench where the concrete comes over your head, with one of the video guys a few seats down.
Us meaning me and Greeley. He’s at the far end of the row in a gray suit with his elbows on his knees.
Neither of us says anything. There’s about fifteen feet of empty seat between us, and that’s how it’s going to stay.
Four minutes before puck drop, Kylie comes up the stairs. She’s got a ticket in the student section, where her friends are sitting, and she comes all the way up here in a Woodbury shirt with her hair down and sits in the seat next to mine like it’s assigned to her.
She looks over at me and gives me a once-over. “You again?”
I watch her roll her eyes. The attitude on this girl drives me crazy.
“And you,” I say.
She scowls at me, playfully.
“You don’t have to sit up here,” I say.
“There’s no other seat in this place.” She throws her arms out. “It’s booked. This was the only one available.”
I know what she’s doing.
She puts her bag under her seat and nods down the row at Greeley. “They should’ve sat him for ten.”
I put my hand on her thigh and squeeze.
The horn goes. The lights do their thing. And I sit in a plastic seat in my tie and watch somebody else take my draw.
Orr’s a sophomore, and he’s my replacement tonight. He’s fine. He’s better than fine on the wall, and he’s got a decent stick in our end. He’s just never played between Koda and Rafe.
First shift, he loses the draw, they get it deep, and he has to go get it, and the shift dies on the wall. Second one, he wins it clean and nobody’s moving yet, because Koda doesn’t leave until he knows where the middle is going.
From up here, I can see everything. Koda comes up the wall in the first with speed and cuts in, and the far side is wide open, and Orr’s reading the puck instead of going to the middle, and by the time Koda gets his head up, there’s nobody to give it to.
“He’s got to be inside,” I say.
“What?” Kylie says.
“Orr. Koda’s driving, and there’s nobody behind him—”
Brennan scores on a shot off the rush, and their whole bench stands up. One-nothing.
In the second we get one back, Rafe on the power play, off a rebound, from a foot out, the kind he buries every practice, and the building goes up.
Kylie’s screaming, and I’m on my feet, and for about four seconds it’s great.
Then they get one back nine minutes later on a broken play, and it’s 2–1, and I sit there doing math about our D-zone draws that I already know the answer to.
We’re getting killed in the middle of the ice.
Our first line’s fine, and Layous’s line is fine, and my line spends every shift arriving at the blue line flat with nothing behind it.
Rafe holds it a beat longer than he needs to because he’s waiting for a middle lane that isn’t coming.
Koda keeps hunting pucks low, the way he does when he doesn’t trust what’s behind him.
Orr’s doing what a center’s supposed to do everywhere except where these two actually are.
I stand up at some point without deciding to. Kylie takes a fistful of the back of my jacket and pulls. “Sit down, Coach.”
I shake my head. “Don’t call me that.”
“You said support him out loud. Twice.”
“Because nobody’s supporting him.”
She hands me half a pretzel without looking away from the game.
At the second intermission, Kylie goes down to the concourse for drinks with Kenzie, who has texted her nine times from the student section about the fact that she’s sitting up here. So it’s me and Greeley and fifteen feet of empty plastic and a Zamboni. He doesn’t look over.
“They’re losing the middle,” he says.
I look at the ice. He’s right. It’s been the whole game since the first shift.
“Yeah,” I say.
Neither of us says anything else. He goes back to his phone, and my eyes go back to the ice, and it’s the first honest thing either of us has said to the other since September.
Kylie comes back up with two drinks and sits down.
Rafe ties it in the third, and the building comes apart, and Kylie stands on her seat.
Then Brennan scores with 2:11 left off a draw in our end that Orr loses clean, and their guy walks out of the corner and puts it far side.
3–2. We pull the goalie with 1:40 and get one shot.
The horn goes, and their bench empties over the boards, and our guys stand around at our blue line with their hands on their knees. Nobody up here says anything.
Would we have won if I’d played? I don’t know. Nobody knows that. Orr went about eight for nineteen, and Koda missed a net from six feet in the second. I still think I’d have helped.
“That’s it,” I say. “I’m done.”
Kylie looks over. “Done?”
“That was the game. That was my one.”
“So you’re officially unsuspended.”
“Yeah.”
“Congratulations.” She smirks at me. “I’m getting you a cake.”
I smile.
“When do you play again?”
“Tuesday. Home.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll be there.”
She runs down to meet her friends, and I go down.
I wait outside the room, and they come out in twos and threes. Koda’s furious. He’s got his bag on his shoulder and his jaw set, and he looks like he wants to go back out and play the whole thing again right now.
“I had the middle open four times,” he says to me. “Four.”
“I watched it.”
“You watched it,” he says, disgusted, like I was up there eating popcorn on purpose. Then he shifts his bag. “It’s not on Orr. He played fine. It’s—”
“Yeah.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.”
“So win a draw next week,” Koda says.
“Maybe learn to get into a zone without me.”
“Fuck you,” he says, and goes.
Rafe comes out after him, wrecked, with his tie in his hand instead of on. He looks at me. “Next game.”
“Yeah.”
Nobody mentions how I fucked up, and I’m glad I can put it behind me.
Kylie waits for me by the doors, and we walk back across campus in the cold. I’m still going about the third period, and she lets me bitch for about four blocks. Then she bumps my arm.
“I told Dorothy about you at bingo yesterday.”
“Who’s Dorothy?”
“The eighty-six-year-old who runs the bingo cards. I told her my boyfriend’s suspended for a game.” She’s grinning. “She said good. She said it builds character, and she’d like to meet you.”
“I’m not going to bingo.”
“You’re absolutely going to bingo.”
There’s a flyer taped to the inside of the door at Corvin.
It’s orange, with a pumpkin on it, about something at the student center.
There’s another one on the stairwell door, and a third on the bulletin board on our floor with tabs cut into the bottom.
Kylie stops in the hallway with her phone out and her face lit up by whatever’s happening in the group chat, and I get about four steps past her.
“It’s almost Halloween, Nash,” she says.
“No.”
She looks up. “Oh, we’re dressing up.”
“No, we’re not.”
She wraps her arm around me and puts her cold hand in the pocket of my dress pants, which is a large pocket, and reaches for my cock.
I shake my head at her.
She’s smiling up at me.
We get in the elevator, and I kiss her until we reach the third floor, and she grins at me like I’ve just agreed to something.