Page 175 of Slashed Bonds

The building screams.

Not the way a hockey building screams. I’ve stood in tunnels since I was nine and I know that sound, the low male roar that comes up through your skates, beer, testosterone, a thousand fathers who played in high school. This isn’t that. This is higher. Sharper. A pitch that gets into the fillings in your teeth, and when I come out of the dark into the first wash of light I understand why.

Women.

Seventy percent, if I had to put a number on it, and I would, because numbers are how I keep my feet. Women in the lower bowl and women in the upper deck and women pressed against the glass behind the benches with their phones up, and with them everyone they’ve dragged along. Aunties in Blackridge black they must have bought this week. Uncles who look like they lost a bet. Cousins. A baby, somewhere to my left, screaming because everyone else is, held up over a railing like a sacrifice.

Ashford’s building. Ashford’s ice. And Ashford’s crowd is drowned out in its own house by people who came to see us.

The house lights drop.

All at once, a bank at a time, until the only thing lit in the whole arena is a single white spot, and the spot finds Cassian.

He’s first. He’s always first.

Skating out slow, the way he does everything that matters, with his stick across his thighs in both hands and his mask on. Black. Matte. And across it, glowing, two red X’s where the eyes should be and a mouth drawn in red lines that grins wider than any mouth could, a manic slash of a smile lit from inside so it floats in the dark ahead of him like something that’s come up from under the ice to see what the noise is about.

That’s not the mask from the kitchen table. Killian changed the design. When?

It doesn’t matter when. It’s right. The viper was pretty, and pretty was never the point. This is the point. A grin that’s a threat. Eyes that are already crossed out.

The crowd loses whatever it had left.

And we follow.

Me second. That was Cassian’s call, made on the bus in a voice that didn’t invite discussion, and I didn’t argue, because second is where you can see the leader’s back and still feel the ones behind you. Killian third, two strides off my left shoulder, his mask lit the same, red X’s over the eyes he hides from everyone. Nikolai fourth with his pads on and his glove and blocker tucked under one arm and the mask over his face instead of his goalie cage, which he’ll swap at the bench, which he’s done in this order every game of his life.

Then the rest of them, filing out behind us into a line.

Dubois. Okonkwo. Greenie with his green hair stuffed under his helmet and his phone, for once, nowhere. Marchetti, who won’t look at me, which suits me. The twins, who look like one person skating beside a mirror. Pruitt at the back with his own pads, a second goalie nobody’s cheering for, and he knows it, and he skates out anyway.

Twenty-two masks lit red in a dark building.

Christ. Maddie. What did you do.

We stop in a line along the blue line and we stand there.

That’s all. Standing. Letting the crowd do what it came to do, which is lose its collective mind, and the photographers have come down to the glass and are firing into the dark like it’s a crime scene. Flashes off the plexi. Flashes off the masks. I counted them during Ashford’s intro, out of habit, and they took maybe half as many shots of the home team, and the home team’s players saw it and are standing on their own blue line in their own building watching us get the lenses.

Enjoy it, boys. By the third period you’ll be glad nobody’s taking your picture.

I stand tall.

I don’t decide to. My body does it, the spine straightening on its own, the chin coming up behind the mask, and there’s a thing in my chest I haven’t felt in a tunnel since I was eighteen and I’d like to name it so I can keep it.

Energized. That’s close. Lit. Like the mask.

Not fear. I checked for fear on the bus and in the room and in the tunnel and there isn’t any, and I’ve been scared in every building I’ve skated in since Halbrook, so the absence is loud. Not nerves either. My hands are dry inside my gloves. My pulse is where it should be.

Twenty-two red grins and a crowd of women screaming and a man in front of me who said we’d talk about my medication after the game, and I’m not scared. Who am I.

He did say that.

On the bus, with my head against the window and Knox’s leash in my hand even though Knox was at the house with Maddie and a crate he’d refused to enter. After the game, we talk about your medication plan. It needs to change. And I didn’t ask what he meant, which is unlike me, because I was already half gone. Asleep against the glass before Blackridge was behind us.

I napped. Today. In the afternoon, in his arms, like a person with no deadbolts.

We’d come back from the mill with my hair still wet and the smell of two men on me and a third all over my hoodie, which was his, and I’d gone up to my room to change for the bus and found a lounge in it.