Page 182

Thursday night, Rafe’s here, and so is Kylie, and all three of us are doing completely separate things. Rafe’s at his desk with a calculator. I’m on my bed with Brennan State film on my laptop, watching their D pinch, because apparently I’m going to prepare thoroughly for a game I’m going to watch in a tie. Kylie’s got her laptop on her knees and her feet shoved under my leg, because they’re always cold and she’s decided my thigh is a radiator.

I keep looking at her, and I don’t know what I’m waiting for. Some version of her being careful with me, the voice people use, the pause before they ask something, the look. It doesn’t come. She argues with me about chips. She shoves her cold feet further under my leg. She reads a sentence of her paper out loud in a stupid voice and asks Rafe if it’s stupid, and Rafe says yes.

She catches me on about the sixth look. She sets her laptop aside and crawls on top of me. Rafe makes a noise, and she ignores him and stares right back at me.

“Hey, you,” she says.

I stare back.

It’s game day when I wake up, and I’m still pissed I’m missing our first game on home ice. I peel Kylie off me and eat eggs and oatmeal, and by eleven, I’m at the window with nothing to do, my legs already going, that thing where your quads feel loaded and light at the same time and you spend the whole day waiting for six o’clock so you can use them.

I nap at noon. I lie there for forty minutes with my eyes shut and don’t sleep one second of it. Chicken and rice at three-thirty. I put the tie on at four-fifteen. It’s the same suit from the road trip. I stand in front of the mirror on the back of the closet door and do the knot twice.

Rafe comes in and looks at me. “You look stupid.”

“You’re wearing the same thing.”

“I look good. You look like somebody’s accountant.”

Koda meets us on our floor, and we walk over together at four-thirty. The lot’s already filling. Two kids in Woodbury jerseys are throwing a ball against the wall by the loading door, and one of them stops and stares and elbows the other one, and then they both stare.

Inside, the room has first-home-game energy. Tape going, somebody’s speaker, trainers moving through, Wyatt on the floor with his legs up the wall, Barnes doing his thing with two balls against the wall. The smell of it. The sticks in the rack. The sheets taped to the door with the matchups and the starts. I stand in the middle of it in my jacket. I’ve got a stall in here. My name’s on it. My gear’s hanging in it, all of it, because that’s where it lives. I stand in front of it, and there’s nothing in this building for me to do with my hands.

At five-fifty, Berwyn comes through and says what he says, and then it’s the noise, twenty-six guys and sticks on the floor and somebody yelling, and the door opens onto the tunnel.

Koda stops in front of me on his way past with his helmet under his arm. “You look stupid.”

“Fuck you.”

“Told you,” Rafe says from behind him, and taps my shin with his stick on the way by, the way you’d do it to a guy on the bench.

Then they go. I stand in the doorway of the room and watch my line walk down the tunnel without me: Rafe in front, Koda behind him, hitting the wall twice with his glove for no reason. The noise comes up the tunnel when they hit the ice, that low roar with the horn under it, and then the door swings shut on it, and I’m standing in a hallway in dress shoes.

I did this. I beat the shit out of a teammate in his kitchen, and it took four guys to pull me off him. Nobody made me do the part where I hit him. I fell into every single trap Greeley set for me. Not anymore. I’m done.

I go find my seat.

They put us in the last two rows of section 114, up behind our bench where the concrete comes over your head, with one of the video guys a few seats down. Us meaning me and Greeley. He’s at the far end of the row in a gray suit with his elbows on his knees. Neither of us says anything. There’s about fifteen feet of empty seat between us, and that’s how it’s going to stay.

Four minutes before puck drop, Kylie comes up the stairs. She’s got a ticket in the student section, where her friends are sitting, and she comes all the way up here in a Woodbury shirt with her hair down and sits in the seat next to mine like it’s assigned to her.

She looks over at me and gives me a once-over. “You again?”

I watch her roll her eyes. The attitude on this girl drives me crazy.

“And you,” I say.

She scowls at me, playfully.

“You don’t have to sit up here,” I say.

“There’s no other seat in this place.” She throws her arms out. “It’s booked. This was the only one available.”

I know what she’s doing.

She puts her bag under her seat and nods down the row at Greeley. “They should’ve sat him for ten.”

I put my hand on her thigh and squeeze.