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I don’t.
He picks up a puck off the desk and turns it over in his hands. “People are talking.”
Here it is. “About what?”
“You and Greeley.” He looks up. “Three separate guys have mentioned it to me this week, and not one of them said anything specific. It’s all something’s going on with your centers, and then they shut up and look at the floor. And this morning Berwyn stopped me on the stairs and said, and I quote, Find out if there’s something I need to know before I have to.” He turns the puck over again. “He’s got a face like a car wreck. You’ve got a lip. And on Tuesday night, both of you were, apparently, nowhere near each other.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s right?”
“Yeah.”
“Is there something I need to know?”
It’s right on the tip of my tongue. He invited me to his house with six of his guys in it. He talked at me for an hour. He hit me across the back with a stick while I was walking out the door. There’s a video that starts after that, and he wants my spot for it, and Mathers knows, and it’s eating Mathers alive.
Dannebrog would believe me. Then it goes to Berwyn, and Berwyn has two players telling different stories about a fight at a house party in September, with a video of exactly one of us on top of the other one, and six guys who were in that kitchen, all of whom eat lunch with Declan Greeley. It’d be he said, he said, about a night I shouldn’t have been at, three weeks after I put the same guy into the boards at a captain’s skate, with my name in Berwyn’s office twice already.
So I say the thing that saves my ass. “No.”
Dannebrog looks at me for a long moment. “You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Because this is the time to say it.”
“There’s nothing to say.”
He sets the puck down. “Okay. Sit down. I’m going to tell you something.”
I sit.
“You know what I did last spring after the season? I sat in this room with Berwyn and the assistants for two days, and we went through the recruit list. Every guy. What he does well, what he doesn’t, whether he can play here. When we got to you, it took about sixty seconds. There was nothing to argue about. You can play. You’ve been able to play since you were fifteen, and anybody with eyes can see it.” He leans forward on his knees. “So let me say it plainly, because I don’t think anybody has, and you’re walking around like this is about points. It’s not. You’ve got the spot on talent. You’ve had it since the third day of captain’s skates, and everybody in that room knows it.”
I don’t say anything.
“The only question anybody has about you,” Dannebrog says, “is whether I can put you on the ice in the third period of a one-goal game on the road when the other team has figured out what gets to you. Because they will. That’s not a maybe. Every league you’ll ever play in, somebody on the other bench gets paid to find out what makes you stupid, and then they do it to you for sixty minutes, and the good ones do it with a smile so the refs love them.” He shrugs. “That’s the job. That’s literally the job at your position.”
“I know.”
“You don’t. Not yet.” He stands up. “Here’s the only thing I need from you between now and October. When somebody’s working you, I need to be able to look down my bench and put you over the boards without thinking about it. That’s the whole competition. Greeley’s not beating you on skill, and he’s not going to. He’s betting that at some point somebody gets to you and you hand it to him. Has anybody? Gotten to you?”
Something in my chest goes very still. “No.”
“Okay,” Dannebrog says. “Then we’re fine.” He opens the door, and as I’m going past him, he says, “That line today. You, Barnes, Waleska. Keep it.”
Rafe and Koda are waiting in the hallway by the vending machine, and they both come off the wall when I come out.
“What?” says Koda.
“People are talking.” I pick my bag up off the floor. “Berwyn sent him to ask if there’s something he should know.”
Rafe’s eyes narrow. “And?”
“I said no.”
Koda processes that.
