Page 127 of Cut Off
“They won. Holt’s gotta be MVP.”
“Atta boy,” Jerry says, with feeling, and disappears again.
I stand with my hands pressed to my mouth, watching the Trout pile on him at the boards. Carter slams into him. Jenkins is doing a dance that should be illegal. McDavid is, for the first time in recorded history, smiling. The broadcast cuts to the crowd, and there, third row, Tom Holt is hauling Eli up onto his shoulder, and Eli’s screaming with his wholeface, both fists in the air, the Flash hoodie sleeves bunched at his elbows.
I have to sit down.
I sit. I press the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, which is, apparently, my move now. I breathe through my nose for a count of four. I’m happy for him. So happy for him I might throw up. I’m also—and this is the part I wouldn’t say out loud—sad for me, which is a private wound that hasn’t healed. Not even close.
“Okay,” I say to nobody. “Okay. Back to work.”
I reach for the mouse and focus. The school board. The numbers that don’t add up.
I lose that focus when I look up at the monitor.
The post-game interview has started. Sydney Holt’s on the ice in her good blazer, her hair somehow surviving the humidity that comes off two hundred bodies on frozen water, and she’s holding a microphone up to her brother’s chin.
Sydney. Interviewing Jonah. On the night he won the game.
The universe sometimes gets it right.
I drift to the monitor, not realizing it until I’m standing in front of it with my hand on the top of it.
Jonah is sweat-soaked. Helmet hair. The pad of tape across his cheekbone says somebody caught him with a high stick at some point, but he’s grinning—the one with the mouth closed, because he does not, as a rule, let strangers see his teeth.
Sydney’s saying something. MVP. Game winner. The playoff implications. Jonah’s nodding along and giving good answers in that low, rasped-out voice he gets after sixty minutes of yelling on the ice.
“It wasn’t me,” he says. “It was the team. Every guy. Carter blocked a shot with his thigh that should have ended hisseason. Jenkins ate a penalty in the third for the team. Sawyer—” He clears his throat. “McDavid played that game on, like, four hours of sleep total. We left it all out there. I’m proud of every guy in that room.”
Sydney smiles, and it’s a sister’s smile sneaking in under the reporter’s face. “Anything else you want to say to the folks back home?”
He looks at her. He looks at the camera. “Yeah. Actually.”
I stop breathing in the way you stop breathing when you sense that the next thing you hear is going to rearrange you.
“This win is empty without you, Zoe Lane.”
I make a noise. Jerry, somewhere in the hallway, drops something that sounds like a coffee mug.
Jonah’s still looking at the camera. He’s looking atme. He has the courtesy to look terrified, which—frankly, thank God, because if he’d been smooth about this, I would’ve had to learn to hate him.
“So as soon as I shower,” he says, “Eli and I are heading to the W2Beaver station, because we have a very important question to ask you.”
Sydney’s professional face cracks straight down the middle. She turns to the camera with the wide-eyed grin of a woman who’s been waiting for a brother to get his act together for several months, years actually.
“You heard him, Dickens,” she says. “Stay tuned.”
The screen cuts to a beer commercial.
I stand with my hand on the monitor.
“Jerry,” I say.
“On it,” Jerry says, from down the hall.
“Jerry, what does that mean?”
“I have no idea, Zoe, but I’m calling Priya.”
