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Apparently, “Already Ate” Was Wrong

Nash

Kylie: Rude.

Me: ?

I’m on the end of my bed at noon on a Sunday with my skates still hanging off my bag, and that question mark sits on my screen for four minutes, then eight, and then it’s one-fifteen and she still hasn’t answered it. She asked if I wanted breakfast. I already had breakfast. We were on the ice at six-thirty, and I ate at nine with half the team, like every Sunday.

“What,” Rafe says.

“Nothing.”

“You’ve been looking at that phone like something’s fucking wrong.”

Koda is on the floor against Rafe’s bed with his shoes off. I put the phone face down on my knee. “If somebody asks if you ate, and you already ate, how is that rude?”

There’s a pause.

“Blondie?” Rafe says, shaking his head.

Koda lifts his head off the mattress. “Honestly, this shit is exhausting. Don’t text her back.”

“She beat me to it.”

He grabs my phone, finds it locked, groans, and hands it back. I get my bag, because we have film at two.

Film is in the room with the bad chairs and the projector that takes four minutes to warm up. There are twenty-six guys, a whiteboard, somebody’s bag of chips crinkling the whole time, and Mathers licking his fingers.

Berwyn does the good stuff first, which is how you know the bad stuff is coming. Entries. The forecheck in the second. Mathers’s first pass, three clips in a row. Rafe’s goal, which he makes us watch twice, and the second time, he pauses on Koda’s touch pass and says, “That’s a hockey play,” and Koda nods.

Then he says, “Kennebeck,” without looking away from the screen, and clicks, and there I am. The whistle’s already gone. You can see everybody in the frame standing up out of their stance, their nineteen turning away with his mouth going, and then me, from the corner camera up high, putting two hands of stick into his back. It looks worse than it felt. It looks like a guy losing his mind in front of a referee. Berwyn lets it run. The arm going up, the nineteen’s little arms-out bow to the crowd, and me skating to the box past our bench while twenty-two guys don’t look at me.

Nobody in the room says a word.

“Fourteen seconds later, they score,” Berwyn says. He clicks back ten seconds and runs it again. The stick. The arm. “This guy right here is useless to me. I can’t use this guy.”

I sit with my elbows on my knees and watch it a third time. Then he clicks forward to the third period, the wall, their nineteen with his head down for a pass, and me putting him into the boards. Even on the bad projector, you can see the puck stay and me pick it up.

“Same guy,” Berwyn says. “Same amount of mad. Look at it.” He lets it run all the way through. My head comes up, the flat pass to Koda, Koda’s touch, Rafe in the middle, the net. “This one I can put on the ice with forty-six seconds left in a one-goal game. Same guy, twelve minutes apart. That’s the whole thing, boys. Nobody’s asking anybody to be nice.” Then he moves on to the neutral zone.

I’m three rows back on the end, and I don’t turn around, because there’s no reason to. But Greeley is somewhere behind me in this room, hearing every word of it.

Dad picks me up at three to eat before he drives back. He wants the diner on Route 9 with the laminated menus, because there’s one like it near every town we’ve ever lived in, and he’s never once walked past one. Booth by the window. He orders a patty melt and coffee. I get the double burger and a chocolate shake, and he says, “Get the onion rings,” so I get the onion rings.

He’s in a great mood. “That draw at the end,” he says, for the fourth time since last night. “Forty-six seconds, up one. He could’ve sent anybody.”

“He could’ve sent Greeley.”

“He didn’t send Greeley.” He points a fry at me. “You know what that is? That’s a coach telling the room something.”

The waitress refills his coffee. Somebody’s kid is losing it two booths down, and the mom is doing the bouncing thing. He wants to know how much video they do, and whether the staff gives me clips of my own draws or I have to find them. He tells me about a guy he played juniors with who ended up coaching in the OHL and never ran a proper faceoff drill in his life. He asks whether Ridgemont’s D held or we just wore them out, and it’s a good question, and I answer it, and he nods and eats and says, “That’s what I thought from up there.”

He asks about the girl from the rail.

“Kylie,” I say.