Chapter Three #2
Howie looked down at the monitor on his bike. Chris wondered what his heart rate was doing. “Yeah,” Howie muttered.
“Thanks for telling me,” Chris said. Ever since the last time this had happened to him, he’d been researching the right things to say. So far, the kids at the Pot of Gold shelter had told him a lot of wrong things. “Thank you for telling me” was the only one they agreed on being right.
“You’re not…I don’t know…mad I said the thing to Luca last year and then…this?”
Chris scratched his head. He hadn’t forgotten Howie calling Luca “queer” in the locker room fight that caused Hayes and Vanderbilt to split off from the team the way they had.
It was the whole reason he’d suggested working with a charity, out of which the team’s sponsorship program with the shelter had emerged.
He had assumed everyone had gotten over it when Howie apologized.
Apparently, Howie hadn’t.
“Was it a trick to make sure no one figured you out?”
Howie snorted. “Really? I can’t cook pasta, and you think I’m out here double bluffing? I hadn’t figured myself out yet.”
Chris blinked. “You kept it a secret from yourself? I thought you just, like, knew.”
“If you try hard enough, you can be a dumbass about everything. Trust me.”
Having been a dumbass about everything for his entire life, Chris nodded sagely. “Well, do you feel better about it now?”
A little smile stole across Howie’s face, self-satisfied and kind of sleazy, which meant he’d gotten laid. Ew. Not that Chris thought gay sex was gross, only Howie having it.
“Um, yeah,” he said.
“I’m glad,” Chris told him, and he forced himself to mean it.
So what if four guys on the team—or three, with Phil coaching—were into other dudes?
So what if the media would eat them alive for it?
So what if Hayes and Vanderbilt would hop on the first trade train out of San Francisco if they found out?
Chris forced himself to breathe. Howie was his friend, and this made him happy. He wanted his friends to be happy.
“You’re still doing the shelter thing, right?” Howie asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe I’ll come and help out more this year?”
Chris gave him a real smile, wide and beaming. The kids could always use more help and more role models who weren’t Chris. “Awesome! Hey, I’m headed over there after this. Wanna come?”
He liked having someone tag along. Chris hated driving alone.
It was always better to have a friend to chat with, even if Howie called his music selection “a tragedy” and put on some pop singer Chris had never heard of who sang demented cheerleader chants.
Better yet, when they got there, they found Mooney hanging out with the kids in the multipurpose courtyard Jax had gotten landscaped over the summer.
“You weren’t scheduled today.” Chris gave him a backslapping hug.
Mooney grinned bashfully. “Nah, I’m waiting on Mara. We’re going out later.”
“Ooooh!” Jayden, a fourteen-year-old with an attitude twice the size of his very impressive Afro, crowed.
“Jayden,” Chris admonished. “Don’t make fun of them for being super gross and in love.”
Mooney punched at Chris’s arm, but he was too slow, and Chris ducked away.
“Who’s up for some street hockey?” Chris asked so loudly anyone milling around could hear him. Within a few minutes, he had two teams of five complaining about the shade of orange on the vests he’d brought.
“We didn’t have any other colors at the rink,” he told them, which did absolutely nothing to stop them.
He blew his whistle loudly, which was one of the best parts of playing with kids. As an adult, you got to whistle. “Who wants to be goalie?”
Silence answered the question.
Finally, someone called, “Our only decent goalie’s not here.”
“Well, I’m not doing it,” Chris told them.
Jayden pouted. “C’mon, man. You get to play hockey for a living. You can sacrifice yourself for one game.”
Two minutes later, Chris passed off his whistle to Howie, and he and Mooney took their places in opposing goals.
“You are a massive pushover,” Howie told him in an undertone. “You’re going to ruin your own kids.”
“Thanks,” Chris muttered. “Do you know how to do this?”
“What, ref a game of street hockey? Yeah, man, just make sure no one dies. I’m not gonna be calling offsides or anything.”
Chris started to protest. How would the kids learn the rules if Howie didn’t enforce them, even in a casual setting? But it was too late. Howie whistled, and the kids took off, and then Chris had to use all of his concentration to block goals.
He managed to block six out of ten, which gave him a worse save rate than the team’s emergency backup goalie had in his beer league.
He was also sweating bullets, and most of the kids had run out of steam.
The game ended with a draw when an interruption came, which Chris also disapproved of. They hadn’t managed a full period.
“Snack time,” Mara called from the side door of the house. “I got the weird vegan fruit leather for you, Hanna.”
One of the girls immediately stripped off her orange vest and left the field, though Howie hadn’t blown the whistle to signal the end of the game.
Mooney, distractedly waving to his girlfriend like a dope, gave Chris’s team the opportunity to score on him twice in quick succession. That disappointment signaled the end of the game for the no-orange-vests team, and three minutes later, they lost everyone except Jayden.
“Brutal,” Howie commented. “Hey, d’you know if we can get in on the fruit leather?”
Chris gestured toward the shelter, and Howie took off.
“He’s cool,” Jayden said.
“Really?” Chris asked. “Him?” He’d admit Howie did a decent job reffing. He hadn’t taken any shit, not even from Jayden, and he never committed Chris’s usual error of getting involved in debates about the rules with kids.
“Yeah, man, way cooler than you.”
Chris passed him the bag to grab all the pucks left on the field. Jayden rolled his eyes but started picking up.
“Hey,” Mooney called. “You mind if I…” He jerked his head toward Mara, who was talking to a tall boy in the doorway.
“Go ahead.” Chris had learned at Phil’s barbecue that he hadn’t a chance in hell of holding Mooney’s attention when she was around.
“Couples,” he muttered to himself. Why were people so obsessed when they got together?
Totally wrapped up in each other and unable to see the rest of the world anymore?
It had been unbearable being around Tom and Jax for most of the winter because they kept making eyes at each other and somehow thought no one noticed.
“You still single, big man?” Jayden asked, passing off the bag full of pucks again.
“You don’t have to rub it in.”
“Aww, is someone jealous of his teammate?”
“What? No! I don’t want to date Mara.”
Jayden crossed his arms and frowned. “What’s wrong with Mara? She’s awesome.”
“Okay, but she’s Mooney’s girlfriend. I don’t want to—”
“Oh, so you think she’d cheat on him with you, huh?”
Chris could have screamed in frustration. Every conversation he had with this kid was a minefield. He gritted his teeth instead and said, very calmly, “I’m not interested in Mara romantically. I’m happy for them.”
“You don’t look happy.”
“Don’t you want a snack?”
Jayden made a face. “Vegan fruit leather’s worse than real fruit leather. Tastes healthy. Blech.”
“Okay, well, if you’re staying out here, you have to stop making fun of me. Those are the rules.”
“But it’s so easy!”
Chris elected to take the path of least resistance and not talk at all while they finished cleaning up.
Inside, Mooney and Mara supervised snack time while Howie chatted with the kids. He sat cross-legged on the floor and had already made friends with several teens—who had never deigned to speak to Chris—by complimenting their outfits, which, to Chris, looked like ordinary jeans and T-shirts.
It must be the gay thing, he figured. They could recognize a member of the group at a hundred paces, and Chris wasn’t one of them.
He was straight and white, two of the worst things a man could be.
He didn’t disagree, but he also didn’t enjoy being made aware of it.
Watching Mooney hand Mara whatever she needed without her having to ask made Chris more aware of how superfluous he was.
The only time Chris had ever been that in sync with another person was with Luca on the ice.
He was going to die alone.
Usually, going to the shelter made him feel good, as though he’d done something helpful for the world despite getting teased by teenagers and pelted with pucks.
Today, Chris left more aware than ever he wasn’t as good with the kids as Jax and Phil and Tom and Howie.
To top it all off, his friends had reached the age where they had serious partners.
Soon, Chris would be the last single one, not even by choice but by a second worse thing: being terrible enough at dating that a fourteen-year-old had called him out on it.
Still more upsetting was the thought of trying again; it made everything in him clench up in misery.
But it wouldn’t do to get lost in self-pity. When Chris got home, he took out the notepad and the set of sparkly gel pens he kept in the kitchen junk drawer for when he had to write stuff. Maybe trying to do therapy right would fix him. He settled on the couch and started thinking.
He should get a snack for this.
A brief perusal of the fridge revealed nothing unhealthy enough to be a satisfactory snack.
He sat on the couch again and stared at the empty page.