Page 126 of Cut Off
The rest is a blur.
Guys mob me, dogpile, Jenkins doing the kind of postgame dance that’ll get him fined on Monday. The coach is screaming something incoherent. I couldn’t even hear it over the thunder in the arena if I tried.
We shake hands with the Seals—respectful-ish, for a team I mostly want to flatten. I get a hard look from their captain, but he gives it back, nods, says, “Nice snipe, Holt.” I say, “Thanks,”, still tasting sweat in my mouth.
Camera teams swarm. Someone says something about playoffs. Someone else says something about legacy.
But every time I come back to breathing, every time I let the adrenaline fade, all I can think about is Zoe.
And how, if she was here, if she saw this—if I could just turn and see her face in the crowd next to his—it would be a kind of perfect I don’t even have words for.
Glass sits under my gloves. Blood’s somewhere in my sock. Eli’s smile burned into retinas.
We won the first game of conference finals.
He’ll never forget it. Neither will I.
Tonight, I was the hero for him.
And if the universe has any sense of balance left, next time, maybe I’ll be the hero for Zoe, too.
That remains to be seen.
35
The Interview
ZOE
The thing about working a Saturday night at W2Beaver is the building has the energy of the wacky cousin who’s got beers and big ideas. Jerry’s in his tie again—he’s always in his tie now—and he keeps poking his head into the edit bay to tell me, gravely, that the Wi-Fi is being weird tonight, and then poking it back in two minutes later to clarify that the Wi-Fi is now fine.
“Jerry,” I say, “go home.”
“I’m leaving.”
“You said that ninety minutes ago.”
He’s not leaving. He’s going to die in this building, and they’re going to bury him under the cartoon beaver out front.
I’m cutting the cold open for next week’sZoe Knows. The segment is a deep dive into the local school board’s apparent inability to count, and, against my own better judgment, I’m having a great time. Two monitors. A chair that doesnot have a name. A succulent that I brought down from Seattle in the passenger seat of the Jeep, buckled in.
On the third monitor—the one we keep on a feed because we’re a news station and that’s what news stations do—the Trout are playing the Seattle Seals. First game of the Western Conference Finals. The kind of stakes that make grown men in Idaho cry into their beer.
I’m watching with one eye. I’m cutting with the other. I’m calm about it.
It goes into overtime.
I’m not normal about it.
I push the chair back from the desk. I set the editing software down. I cross my arms tight across my chest and stand four feet from the monitor like distance will protect me, which, historically, it has not.
The puck drops. Carter wheels. McDavid passes cross-ice. Then Jonah Holt—number four, auburn hair sweat-darkened under the helmet, jaw set the way it gets when he’s about to do something I’ll think about later—glove side, perfect, goes in for the kind of shot you can’t un-see.
The lamp lights.
I make a sound somewhere between a yelp and a hiccup, and I’m not proud of it. Jerry materializes in the doorway.
“Did we win?”
