Chapter Thirty
SAINT
Game day liturgy, season three, home opener, banner night. Entered into the record entire, because Olle taught me that a ritual you can’t say out loud is a superstition, and a ritual you can is an inheritance.
I found her laugh.
You can always find it. It cuts through crowd noise on a frequency I could pick out of a cup final, and it came from up the tunnel mouth where the staff stand, where she stood with a headset crooked and a clipboard she was not reading, laughing at something Gus had said, and the laugh went through sixteen thousand people and found me at the front of a tunnel, the way it had found me every game night for two seasons, the last item on a dead man’s checklist and the first item on mine.
I tapped the glass as we passed. Twice. Left, then right.
Junie
Banner night ran on my rundown, which meant I had planned every second of it and still stood behind Beyoncé the Second with my whole chest doing unscheduled content.
16,412. The number came up on the board with the word that follows it now, SOLD OUT, and section 118 stood up in their sunflower shirts, and the kid in the SUNSHINE 00 jersey, a size bigger this year, held up a sign he had clearly made himself, and Rich cried at a ceremony, on schedule, bless him forever.
Two years ago I begged strangers to care about ice in Texas. Tonight the fire marshal had opinions.
The banner went up into the rafters with the building roaring, ATTENDANCE RECORD, SEASON TWO, which is the least romantic sentence ever printed on fabric, and the most romantic thing I have ever seen, because I know what it cost. I know every number in it.
I posted one photo, no caption. It did not need one.
Down on the ice, the man in the crease turned, found the booth, fifty feet up and to the left, and pointed his stick at it like a salute, like a knock, like a man tapping a post that holds his whole roof up.
I pressed my hand flat to the glass, on the record, in front of everyone, and gave the wall my whole face.
END OF BOOK ONE
MASON AND NOA’S STORY CONTINUES IN THE REBOUND RULEBOOK