Page 10 of Two for Roughing

“Then you must be a cave troll, eh?”

“Fuck off.”

“Stop reading what idiots think of you, then. You are an all right hockey player.”

“All right, am I?” Damir got to his feet, towel thrown over his shoulder, and pushed his compression leggings off.

Lissy put a hand to his own chest in mock solemnity. “I apologize. You are the best hockey player in the world and the savior of Chicago hockey. Without you, we would be lost.”

Damir threw his gross, damp leggings at Lissy’s head.

He walked off toward the showers, ignoring Lissy’s calls of undying devotion behind him.

Ketchup caught up to him a minute later, taking the next showerhead over. “Lissy’s a goof, but he’s not wrong. You are our best player, no matter what some jerk-offs online think.”

Damir looked up, watching the spray of water from the tiny metal head. The bathrooms at the Alliance Arena needed someone who knew how to clean limescale. It was getting into the nozzle, blocking off some sections and making the water spurt out wildly in others. The all-purpose cleaner Damir bought (because it looked like the one his mother used) did a decent job even if it smelled strange. Maybe he could recommend it to someone.

“My ego is not so fragile,” he said eventually, lying through his teeth. The Firecrackers had drafted him first overall six years ago, and since then, the team had only made the playoffs twice. They’d lost in the first round both times. He understood fans’ disappointment in him because he disappointed himself. “I’m just sick of people calling me a—a terrorist or an ISIS member.”

“Oh, shit.”

Damir glanced over.

Ketchup had frozen halfway through shampooing his floppy dirty-blond hair, right at the part where he shaped it into a Mohawk in the middle of his head. “People say that?”

“All the time.”

“Well…shit. That blows. But you can’t let it get to you.” Ketchup dunked his water under the spray, missing Damir rolling his eyes.

What groundbreaking advice—not letting it get to him. He would take that wisdom into account, alongside such pearls as “get pucks in deep” and “don’t mind the unlucky bounces.” Being a straight white man, not part of any religious or ethnic group that Western media routinely shit on, must be so nice.

Damir finished his shower still grumpy. He should know better than to read his own media, yes, but surely it wasn’t too much to ask for people not to be assholes. And Damir liked Reddit, certainly more than Facebook or Twitter or any of the other million social networking sites he didn’t use. Reddit didn’t like him.

He made it all the way to player parking on a series of nonverbal grunts before Ketchup forced him to talk again.

“Hey, so, Howie didn’t say anything awful, did he?”

“Hm?”

“Howie? Redhead, second-line center for the Sea Lions? The reason you bodied him into the boards as if he was made of rubber last time we played? It wasn’t racist shit, right?”

“Oh.” Damir huffed a laugh. “No, nothing like that.”

“Oh, thank God. ’Cause I know Howie’s not always the most sensitive guy. But everyone on our Bantam team had this phase where we thought slurs were, like, the funniest shit. You hope people grow out of it, or whatever, but you never know.”

Having been in Major Juniors in the USA, Damir was intimately familiar with the “slurs are funny” phase teenage boys went through and, in many cases, never grew out of. Retrospectively, he was extremely thankful for his poor English when he first arrived in the States, meaning he couldn’t convey to his teammates what it meant to be a Russian Tatar as opposed to simply Russian. It took until nearly the end of his Junior career for his teammates to catch on that he was also Muslim. Prior, they had assumed the separate plastic-wrapped plates he got during team meals were due to allergies.

With a pang of sympathy, he thought of Kilian Howard with his curly red hair, button nose, and nonexistent flirting skills. He did not come across as the type of gay man to have had an easy time with the “slurs are funny” phase.

“Howard didn’t say anything rude during the game,” Damir assured Ketchup.

Ketchup got into the passenger seat of Damir’s BMW. “What about last year, then?”

Damir flinched.

“He asked me for your room number after you got in that fight on the ice. It was in December, I think? He said he wanted to apologize, and I thought he was being kind of extra, but you never said anything, and—”

“That’s how he got my room number.” Damir had been wondering for nearly a year.