13. Finn O’Connell
Finn O’Connell
I am standing in the crease, digging the edges of my skates into the fresh ice and tapping my posts with a rhythm that usually anchors me. Tap, tap, left. Tap, tap, right. It’s an old ritual, a way to find my center before the world turns into a blur of black rubber and flashing lights.
Today, though, my center is about forty feet away, leaning against the players’ bench and looking like a ghost wrapped in a black leather jacket.
Scottie hasn’t said ten words to me since we cleared out of the motel.
She didn’t touch breakfast at the diner down the road, and she didn’t even drink her coffee—which, for Scottie, is the behavioral equivalent of a normal human being simply choosing to stop their own heart.
Instead, she’s been buried in her phone, her thumb flying across the glass screen in a blur of frantic energy, her face set in a mask of professional detachment so frigid it makes the rink look like a sauna.
The locker room door bangs open, echoing in the empty arena, and Herb “The Wall” Ganz shuffles out onto the rubber matting.
Herb is at minimum seventy years old, wearing a faded nylon tracksuit and carrying a battered plastic bucket of pucks like they’re his own grandchildren.
He was the best goalie coach in the league before he abruptly walked away from the money, retiring to the middle of nowhere to grow heirloom tomatoes and ignore the hockey world entirely.
“O’Connell,” Herb grunts. “You look like you’ve been sleeping in a dumpster behind a dive bar.”
“Good to see you too, Herb,” I say, pushing off the goal line and skating out to meet him at the hash marks.
“Don’t try to sweet-talk me, kid. I’m only here because your agent is a goddamn bulldog.
” He cuts his eyes toward the bench, gesturing with his chin.
“She called my house eighteen times, Finnian. Eighteen. I told her explicitly that I was retired. She told me I wasn’t retired, I was just bored.
Then she had a courier deliver a wooden crate of Italian wine to my front porch with a typed note that just said See you Tuesday. ”
I look over at Scottie. She doesn’t smile, nor does she offer a wave.
“You’re burning daylight, Herb,” she calls out, her voice echoing perfectly across the ice. “The ice is paid for until exactly eight o’clock. Let’s get to work.”
Herb chuckles, a dry, raspy sound that turns into a brief coughing fit. “Scary woman. I like her style. Get back in the net, boy. Let’s see how much of an absolute mess you’ve made of your glove hand while you’ve been feeling sorry for yourself.”
The next two hours are a living hell.
Herb doesn’t believe in modern, fancy European skating drills or sports psychology. He believes in brutal, unyielding repetition until your groin muscles scream for mercy and your brain shuts off from exhaustion.
He’s got the local college kid we hired—a lanky defenseman named Miller who can hit a dime from the blue line—drilling heavy wrist shots repeatedly at my lower left side.
“Again!” Herb barks, slamming his stick against the ice.
Thwack.
The puck explodes off Miller’s blade and hits my leg pad. I drop into a tight butterfly to smother the rebound, but a sharp, biting twinge shoots directly through my reconstructed shoulder. I flinch, just a fraction of a second, but Herb catches it instantly.
“Again! You’re cheating the movement! Stop overthinking the damn injury and start playing the puck!”
I’m sweating profusely through my layers of gear, my breath coming in desperate gasps that instantly fog up the plastic cage of my mask.
Every single time I reset my stance and scrape the snow away from the crease, my eyes involuntarily dart toward the bench.
Scottie is there, but she isn’t really there.
She’s watching every play, taking rapid notes on a tablet, but every time I manage to catch her eye, she looks down or checks her phone.
She’s hovering right on the edge of the glass, her posture so rigid and tense it looks like she’s ready to bolt for the exit if I step even a foot too close to her side of the ice.
“O’Connell! Eyes on the shooter, not on the girl!” Herb yells.
Miller lets another one fly without warning. It’s an absolute ripper, tracking hard toward the top shelf on my stick side. I snap my glove hand up, catching the puck purely on raw instinct. The sting in my palm radiates up my forearm, and for the first time all day, it feels good. It feels real.
“Better,” Herb grunts. “Take five. My knees hurt just watching you move around out here.”
I skate over to the bench, my legs feeling like columns of solid lead. I pull my mask off, letting it hang from my blocker hand, my sweat-soaked hair plastered flat against my forehead.
I grab my green plastic water bottle, squeezing a stream into my mouth, silently waiting for Scottie to give me her usual post-skate rundown.
She doesn’t even look up from the glowing screen of her tablet.
“Herb says your lateral movement is improving, but you’re still leaning too heavy on the right skate when you push off,” she says, her tone perfectly flat, as if reading a grocery list.
“Scottie.”
“Miller’s ready for the next shooting set as soon as you are,” she says, looking up to meet my eyes for a fleeting second. Her gaze is guarded, her expression carefully neutral. “Don’t waste the ice time, Cash.”
Before I can even open my mouth to respond, she turns on her heel and starts talking to Herb, her tone shifting seamlessly into that high-gear, aggressive agent mode. She begins discussing insurance riders, rink liability waivers, and travel stipends as if last night had never happened at all.
As if I hadn’t seen her break down.
As if I hadn’t spent an hour sitting in a squeaky wooden chair in a terrible motel, listening to her cry her heart out in the shower.
It pisses me off. Not because she’s being professional—I respect her hustle—but because she’s treating me like a complete stranger.
The remainder of the practice passes in a dizzying blur of dull pain and biting cold. By the time we clear off the ice, my shoulder is a steady, roaring ache and my head is spinning from dehydration.
Herb claps me hard on the shoulder pads, tells me I’m “considerably less of a disaster than when I arrived,” and disappears into the warmth of the coaches’ locker room.
When I look up, Scottie is already standing by the arena’s glass exit doors, her leather jacket zipped up to her chin and her bag slung tightly over her shoulder.
“I’ll meet you out at the van,” she calls out, not looking back as she pushes the door open. “I need to make a few calls to Boston.”
“Scottie, wait up a second.”
She doesn’t wait. She’s already halfway down the concrete hallway before I can even bend down to unlace my skates.
I strip off my chest protector and pads in record time, throwing them into my hockey bag without bothering to take a shower. I pull on a dry gray hoodie and jeans, hoist the massive bag over my shoulder, and jog out into the crisp air of the gravel parking lot.
Scottie is leaning back against the passenger door of our van, motionless, staring blankly at a dense row of pine trees bordering the property.
“Hey,” I say, walking up to the side of the vehicle.
“We’re twenty minutes behind schedule,” she says instantly, her hand immediately reaching behind her for the door handle.
Without thinking, I reach out and catch her wrist.
I don’t grab it hard—it’s just a light, cautious touch to stop her from disappearing into the front seat and shutting me out again—but she still flinches, pulling her arm back as if she’d been burned.
I freeze instantly, my hand still hanging awkwardly in the empty air between us. The guilt that hits me in that exact moment is a sickening lurch right in the pit of my stomach.
I’m not a stupid guy. I’ve lived enough life and been in enough locker rooms to know that a visceral, defensive reaction like that doesn’t just come out of nowhere.
I don’t know the specific details of her past—and right now, looking at the panic in her eyes, I don’t think I have the right to know—but I recognize the unmistakable shape of the shadow she’s carrying around.
“I’m sorry,” I say, my voice dropping to a quiet whisper. I immediately step back, deliberately giving her a wide berth of three full feet. I shove both of my hands deep into my hoodie pockets. “I’m sorry, Scottie. I really didn’t mean to startle you.”
“It’s fine,” she says quickly, though her breathing is uneven. “I’m just… I’m jumpy today. Lack of sleep, that’s all.”
“Right. Jumpy.”
She climbs quickly into the passenger seat and slams the door shut between us.
I stand there on the gravel for a long second, looking at the faded paint of the orange van.
I could easily let it go.
I could get into the van, drive for hours in absolute silence, and let her walls stay exactly where they are.
It would be the safe, easy, professional thing to do.
But I’ve never been particularly good at following the rules.
I get into the driver’s seat, but I don’t slide the key into the ignition. I just sit there in the quiet cabin, staring straight ahead through the windshield.
“Cash?” she asks after a moment of silence, her voice distinctly wary.
I don’t answer her. Instead, I reach into the cluttered back, rummaging around until I grab a crumpled-up brown paper bag from our late-night stop at a gas station yesterday.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
I reach into the bag and pull out a pair of giant, ridiculous plastic googly-eye glasses that I’d bought for two dollars at the checkout counter purely because they made me laugh. I slide them onto my face.
They are absolutely massive, featuring bright green glitter frames and oversized plastic pupils that bounce frantically on metal springs every single time I tilt my head.
I turn toward her, keeping my face completely stone-faced and serious.
“I’ve been giving some serious thought to the overall brand identity, Scottie,” I say.
“I think the whole ‘Cash’ nickname is played out. I think we need a bold new aesthetic for the comeback. Something that says to the fans: I see the puck, but I also see the deep, terrifying secrets of the universe.”
I shake my head hard, and the giant plastic eyes go into an absolute frenzy, boing-ing back and forth violently.
Scottie just stares at me. “Cash, take those ridiculous things off. You look like an absolute moron.”
“A moron? Or a marketing visionary?” I lean a few inches closer. “I’m thinking I should wear these during the post-game press conferences. Imagine the media coverage. O’Connell Sees All. The endorsement deals will print themselves.”
“Finnian, I am seriously not in the mood for this right now.”
“I spy with my little eye… a very grumpy hockey agent who desperately needs a laugh.”
I reach down into the center console and grab a small, handheld plastic fan—another two-dollar gas station treasure—and flick the switch. The cheap foam blades spin up, lighting up in flashing patterns of neon red and blue.
I hold it up directly under my chin, letting the weak breeze blow my messy hair back in a dramatic, slow-motion glamour effect.
“I am a high-performance athletic machine, Scottie. I require constant cooling to maintain optimal performance parameters.”
A tiny, almost microscopic twitch happens right at the left corner of her mouth. She tries to suppress it instantly, biting the inside of her cheek and looking down at her lap, but I catch it.
“Is that a smile? No, it can’t be. The Great Shark doesn’t smile at cheap novelty toys. It’s strictly against the bylaws of the corporate agency.”
“It wasn’t a smile,” she mutters, though her voice lacks its previous bite. “It was a muscle spasm born of second-hand embarrassment.”
“Embarrassment is just the gateway drug to joy, Scottie,” I say, shaking my head violently again. This time, one of the plastic pupils gets stuck at a weird, unnatural angle against the rim, making me look cross-eyed. “Look into my soul, Scottie. Tell me what you see.”
“I see a two-dollar plastic mistake,” she says, and this time, a small, genuine huff of a laugh escapes her nose before she can stop it.
“There she is!” I yell. “She lives! The Great Shark returns to the deep!”
“I genuinely hate you,” she says, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling. “You are so incredibly, unbelievably stupid.”
“Stupidly talented,” I correct her, pulling the ridiculous glasses off my face and tossing them onto the dashboard. I look over at her, and the frantic playfulness dies down to something a bit quieter, a bit more grounded. “Better?”
She looks out her side window, her reflection caught in the glass. She doesn’t look at me, but her shoulders have dropped an inch. “Thank you, Finn.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s standard league protocol. Clause 4.2 of our standard representation agreement: Goalie must provide comic relief in the event of an agent meltdown.”
“I don’t recall reading that specific clause in the contract.”
“That’s because I added it in crayon while you weren’t looking.”
I stick the key into the ignition, and I shift into gear and pull out of the empty rink parking lot, the pale morning sun starting to break through the gray clouds overhead.
“Hey, Scottie?”
“Yeah?”
“We’re going to be totally fine. The ice time, the hotels, the… all of it. We’re going to handle it.”
She doesn’t say anything for a long time as we navigate the winding local roads.
She just watches the blurred green pines go by through the passenger window.
But as we finally hit the entrance ramp to the interstate, I catch her reaching up with the back of her hand to quickly wipe a stray tear from her cheek.
“I know,” she says. “Now stop talking and drive. We have a film library to locate in the next town, and you still don’t know the mechanical difference between a standard butterfly slide and a post-to-post flare.”
“Hey! I absolutely know the difference!”
“Prove it during the video review tonight, O’Connell. Otherwise, I’m personally making you wear those googly eyes into the diner for dinner.”
“Deal,” I say. “But only if you agree to wear the light-up fan as a tiara.”
“In your dreams, Cash.”
“Exactly where you’ll be, Sharky. Exactly where you’ll be.”
***
2:43 PM
Me: how’s Greece?
Callie: Sunny. Peaceful. Nobody’s asked me to sign a hockey stick in four days.
Me: living the dream
Callie: Ivy bought six olive oil bottles.