Page 10 of Puck the Coach's Son
Dad's whistle cuts the practice.
“Creed.”
Maddox is already standing over me. He doesn't hear Dad. Or he's pretending not to. He bends at the waist and reaches a hand down.
“Up you get, sweetheart.”
I take the hand because he put the hand out and because not taking it would be the worse choice for a room full of men who are already watching. His grip is hot through my glove. Hepulls. I come up fast, faster than I thought I would, and I am close enough to his face that his breath touches my cheek, and he leans in, and he says under the whistle in a voice only I am meant to hear, “Good boy. Up you come.”
A current goes through me I have no language for. It isn't pain. It is the absolute opposite of pain. It is the sensation of being toldgood boyby a man who has just put me flat on my back, and the sensation of my body preferring the flat-on-my-back part. The sensation of preferring it enough that my knees don't want to take my weight back. I make them. He watches me make them.
“Creed.”
“I'm up, Coach. I'm up. Sorry, Coach. Lost an edge.”
He sayssorry, Coachthe way he saidsorry, Coachyesterday. Pleasant. Plausible. His hand lets go of mine a second after it should. His eyes are on me the whole time they let go.
Dad skates over.
“You good?” he asks me.
“Yes, Coach.”
He looks me over like any other player on his ice, with more attention to my posture than my face.
“Walk it off. Stay in.”
“Yes, Coach.”
Dad turns to Maddox and starts talking to him in a voice the bench can't hear and I can't either, because I have drifted three feet away and am pretending to adjust my shin guard while my pulse tries to exit my body through my sternum. Phoenix skates past me on the way to the faceoff dot and says, low, “You okay, kid?”
“Yes.”
He slows just enough for his edges to scrape, not enough to stop.
“You sure?”
“Yes, Cap.”
“Cool.”
He taps my pad and moves on. Phoenix is a good captain. He does not linger on a check. He does not give the room a chance to watch him tending to me.
I take my spot. The drill resumes. Maddox skates past me as he lines up and does not say a word and does not have to, because the line of his shoulder when he passes says it; so does the quarter-beat he holds his head turned in my direction before he faces the faceoff dot.
The rest of practice I cannot tell you about. I ran the drills. I hit the routes. I did not look at him.
But my body knew where he was at every moment, and that has never been a thing my body has done before. If he was in the neutral zone, I knew he was in the neutral zone. If he was on the bench, I knew which spot on the bench. When he skated past me in a drill, I did not see him skate past me but knew anyway because the air moved a different way and because the part of my spine that used to belong to me had decided to belong to a radar instead. I cataloged it along with everything else my body was doing that I did not have language for, and I filed it somewhere I was going to have to come back to.
The locker room after practice is louder than it was yesterday because today the first-line forwards all got their systems clean and so everybody's in a good mood, everybody except me, who is in a state I have no word for.
I sit down at my stall. I start to unhook my gear. I go slowly, piece by piece, the way I always do, because if I do it the way Ialways do I can trust myself to keep doing it even if my hands are not quite my hands right now.
Someone sits down in the stall next to mine and starts pulling his own gear off.
I don't look.
I know who it is. Everyone in this room knows whose stall is whose. He's sitting in a stall that isn't his. He has moved two down from his own assigned stall to sit beside me, and he has done it with enough casualness that no one has called it out, but I can feel the attention of the room come to a soft simmer over my shoulder and stay there.
