Page 159
“That’s what you want, right?” Her eyes find mine.
“Yeah,” I answer.
“So what happens?” she says.
I watch the screen and think about how she said the word: passionate.
“If I get picked,” I say, “probably stay at Woodbury another year. Maybe two. The team holds my rights. Then I sign, when they think I’m ready. Or they want me sooner, and I go sooner.”
“Go where?”
“Wherever they are. Or wherever their farm team is. You don’t pick.”
“And then?”
“Camp. Then the minors, probably, for a while. Buses. Bad hotels. Then if you’re good enough, they call you up.”
“And you’re good enough.”
It isn’t a question. She says it like a fact.
“Yeah,” I say.
“You sound really sure.”
“I am.”
She looks at me for a second, and I can see her believe it. She doesn’t argue. She doesn’t say wow or that’s amazing or ask how much money it is. She just believes me and looks back at the TV.
The game goes to commercial. A man selling trucks. A woman selling a phone.
“Do you ever think about what happens if you get exactly what you planned?” she says.
“I play hockey,” I say.
“I know. I mean after.” She’s lightly scratching her legs. “When everything changes. A new city. New people. Everything you had here, you just—don’t have it anymore.”
I’ve never thought about it. So I take five seconds to run through it. The lake at Palinski’s, Barnes being an idiot, and Kennebeck folding his socks. Corvin gone. A city where I don’t know where anything is. Where nobody’s three doors down.
You’ll have to leave her behind anyway.
It comes up out of nowhere in my dad’s voice from the front hall this afternoon. And it’s worse now than it was then. I don’t know why.
I look over at her.
She’s watching the commercial. The phone one. She isn’t looking at me. She doesn’t know what I’m thinking. She just asked a question and is waiting to see if I’ll answer it.
I don’t.
“It must be nice,” she says, after a while. “Knowing where you’re going.”
“You don’t?”
She gives me a look.
“I have no idea what I’m doing, Rafe,” she says.
I don't know what to say.
