Chapter Eight
SAINT
Away games have a sound. Home games hum at you; away games lean. Forty minutes before puck drop the glass seats fill with people who paid extra to be close enough to work on you, and a goalie learns early to file the noise the way you file weather. It’s there. It isn’t information.
Junie worked warmups from the bench camera-side, per the routine we’d built without ever calling it a routine.
She filmed line rushes. She filmed Pickle attempting a between-the-legs move he had no legal right to.
She wore a Chupacabras hoodie and the hubcap sunglasses pushed up in her hair, and the section behind our net had already clocked her, because by February everyone clocked her, she was half the show.
Most buildings, that meant kids waving and grown men holding up signs asking her to rate their tacos.
She waved back at all of it. She was better at crowds than anyone I’d ever shared ice with, and I include the mascots.
I heard the phone before I understood it.
Some context about what a goalie hears: everything, in slices.
You track the puck with your eyes and the building with your ears, and the ears run about a half second behind, sorting.
So I heard it as noise first, a man’s voice, tinny, amplified through a phone speaker pressed to the glass, and my ears filed it as radio, somebody’s stream, nothing.
Then the sorting caught up, because the voice was laughing, podcast-laughing, that specific FM chuckle of a man performing relaxation, and it was saying, loud enough to carry to the bench, loud enough to be aimed:
“…a lot. Like, a LOT.”
Then again. He’d looped it. A guy maybe thirty, glass seats, jersey of his team over a button-down, phone flat against the plexi like a badge, pointed at her.
Playing it. Rewinding. Playing it. His buddies laughing at the bit.
The bit was: he had recognized the internet’s girlfriend, and he had done his homework, and his homework was eleven seconds of a man she used to love describing her to an audience, and he had brought it to the rink the way you bring a sign.
I watched her hear it.
Here is what four million people know about Junie Bloom: she is sunshine.
Here is what I knew by February, from a bench, from a diner, from a document with a load-bearing rule in it: sunshine is a discipline.
She heard the clip and her face did not fall.
It locked. The smile stayed exactly where it was, and everything behind it left the building, the way a town evacuates in an orderly fashion, and she turned her phone on Pickle’s warmup drill and filmed twelve more seconds of footage I would later learn was unusable because her hands had not gotten the evacuation notice.
Nobody else caught it. The building was loud, the clip was eleven seconds, the guy got bored when she didn’t react and went back to heckling our defense about their mothers.
The whole event was under a minute. She filmed warmups.
She waved at a kid in a homemade SUNSHINE 00 jersey, the kid had traveled, the kid was always somewhere, and her wave was flawless.
I skated to my crease and I did not look at the man again, because looking is currency and he was owed none, and I had a hockey game to be a wall for, and this is the part where I tell you what I did with it, because I did do something with it, in the only place I had.
I put it where the pucks go.
A goalie’s whole profession is taking a thing flying at somebody and making it stop with your body.
It’s not complicated. People make it mystical, the position attracts mystics, I’m one of them, but at the bottom of all of it is one instinct, older than any of Olle’s arithmetic: that gets through if I move, so I don’t move, so it doesn’t get through.
I heard a man play that clip at her, and everything in me organized around it the way I organize around a screened point shot, and then the anthem happened, and then the game happened.
I stopped forty-one shots. It was, the analytics people said later, the best road game of my career.
I remember maybe six saves. What I remember is the sorting: every whistle, finding her in my peripheral, up in the press gondola where road games put her, headset on, working.
Present. Locked, still. Performing fine at altitude.
We won 3 to 0. A road shutout against the second-best team in the conference, in their barn, and the handshakes and the helmet taps happened, and Mason gave the game puck to a kid over the glass, and then there was the scrum.
Visiting scrums after a shutout are mandatory.
The league insists, the team insists, and lately even I could not argue the math, because every syllable I produced on camera was worth attendance, and attendance was worth Hartford’s tombstone, and Hartford’s tombstone was worth Theo’s Thursday tacos and his Saturday sign-outs and his mother’s good cardigan staying in a closet six hundred miles from Connecticut.
So I stood at my stall, half out of my gear, and the cameras made their semicircle, and a row of phones came up like a small sunrise, and the first reporter asked the first question, which is always the same question wearing different clothes:
“Lars, forty-one saves, a shutout on the road. What was working for you tonight?”
The honest answer was long. The honest answer involved a man with a phone against the glass, and a woman whose smile had locked, and a clip I had listened to exactly once for eleven seconds and then gone and taken shooters for two hours on my day off.
The honest answer involved rule 9, which she had never asked about, which I had never explained, which existed because I had watched a locked smile once already, in a taco line, when she thought no one was filing details.
I am not good at long answers. I am good at knowing what has to be protected and standing in front of it.
“Junie Bloom is the best thing here,” I said.
Seven words. Then I turned back to my gear, and the scrum made the sound a scrum makes when a mascot falls down, and somebody asked a follow-up about the penalty kill that I answered in Swedish by accident, which is a thing I do when I’m done being in English, and the media relations woman ended it, laughing, and that was the whole event.
I want to be precise about what happened next, because the numbers stopped being numbers.
The clip hit nine million views in a day.
Nine million. It beat the wrist tape. It beat the tortilla.
The internet, which had shipped us as a bit, took the seven words and did something to them I had not authorized and could not stop, which was: believe them.
Fan accounts froze the frame where I said “best” and studied my face like game film.
A lip-reading account confirmed I had not smiled, which they cited as evidence of sincerity, “he says it like a stat.” Somebody found the heckler’s own posted video, timestamped it against warmups, and put it together, the clip, her locked smile, my forty-one saves, my seven words, and the internet held its little tribunal and returned its verdict in about four hours, and the verdict was a hashtag I won’t repeat and a wave of something aimed at a podcast in Dallas that I will call weather.
Junie found me at the bus. The players filed past us with headphones on, pretending magnificently to be deaf, all except Mason, who pointed two fingers at his own eyes and then at me, which from Mason constitutes a formal ceremony.
She had her work face still on, but the town was back behind it. She held up her phone with the scrum clip.
“Seven words,” she said. “You gave a scrum seven words and broke my entire analytics dashboard. There are metrics I track that have just stopped meaning anything. The engagement rate has a slope like a ski jump. I’m going to have to build new charts, Lindell. By hand. Like a pioneer.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I didn’t say thank you.”
“You were going to.”
She laughed, one real one, up and out, unperformed, the laugh from the diner parking lot, and the sound did the thing it does to a building, made it and me quieter. Then she stopped laughing and looked at me, direct, over the top of the sunglasses she had no solar excuse for at 10:40 p.m.
“You heard it,” she said. “During warmups. You heard it and you didn’t say anything and then you said THAT.”
I could have said: heard what. She’d have let me. It was right there, the coat of paint, and both of us were licensed painters.
“The scale only goes to ten because nothing’s earned it,” I said instead. “He had you at a lot. He was off by the whole scale.”
She stood extremely still, on a curb, in the cold, in a visiting city, holding a phone full of numbers with my seven words detonating inside it, and her mouth opened, and the volley loaded, and for the second time in our acquaintance she closed it and didn’t send.
She got on the bus. She sat next to me without asking, which was not per any terms, and put her headphones on and watched the shutout highlights, and somewhere over the state line her head arrived on my shoulder, asleep, unscheduled, no cameras anywhere, and I sat there for four hours not moving, a professional at last in my true discipline.
The phone in my hand was open to the shared document. I hadn’t planned that either. The screen glowed in the dark bus over the rows of sleeping millionaires, scrolled to the bottom, past her rules, past the gap where 8 held the door open, down to the one line in the file I’d authored:
Rule 9: Nobody makes Junie feel like a lot.
I looked at it for one second. Then I turned the phone face down, and let the bus carry us home in the dark, forty-one for forty-one, except for the one that had gotten past me in a taco line in January and was, per a different document I kept nowhere, going five-hole through my whole defense every single day.