Page 6 of 10 Things I Skate About You

Vivaldi on the workshop speaker. Got my freshly brewed coffee waiting for me on the bench. I’m assessing the character of the wood. Checking for cracks, voids, moisture issues. This is a tactile, unhurried process, and I am savoring it. This is when it’s all potential. Like everything leading up to a game.

Once I make that first cut, it’s like a puck drop. Nothing but forward momentum. No going back. Right now…right now we’re both perfect. It’s just me and this beautiful gift from Mother Nature and the foolish hope that neither one of us will fuck everything up.

This right here is my idea of bliss.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. I pull it out to check the notification in case it’s my client or another delivery. I shouldn’t have checked.

It’s my motherfucking asshole teammates in the Icebreakers chat. And it is not a game-related topic of conversation. I have told them and told them to keep this text convo focused on game-related issues only. But do they listen? To me? About anything?

No.

No, they don’t.

DAVE: Yo, Foley. My wife told me to remind you to wear a suit tonight. To the charity auction thing.

COREY: Why does he get to wear a suit and I don’t?

WINSLOW: Nobody told you not to wear a suit, numbnuts.

DAVE: Because Adam might actually look good in a suit and bring in some real money for the children’s hospital.

ME: What does it matter what I look like? I’m donating a coffee table. I printed out photos of the coffee table for tonight—it looks gorgeous.

DAVE: Right. We decided that was boring. So we signed up you, Corey, and Winslow for Valentine’s Day dinner dates.

DAVE: Not with each other. Like, for people to bid on you individually. And you take the winning bidder out. On Valentine’s day.

ME: I’m not doing that.

DAVE: It’s already on the program. So. You’re doing this. You need to be there. Tonight. Look pretty and try not to look like you’re going to beat anyone up.

ME: Fine. I’ll go. But I’m not wearing a suit.

DAVE: Noah Barrett’s on the program too and it would really suck if someone from the Puckups got higher bids than anyone on the Icebreakers…

ME: Fine. I’ll wear a suit. But I’m not going to look like I’m not going to beat anyone up because you guys have ruined my fucking day.

WINSLOW: What else is new?

Well. This is going to fucking blow. At least I don’t have to show up in the team jersey.

4

KATE

Tina and Eunice are my besties. I’ve known Tina since kindergarten, and now we have a small online business together. Rhys had a crush on her ever since she was in high school, I think, but she was too busy kicking ass as a field hockey player to pay attention to boys until senior year. She’s so badass. She can do a Zoom call with one of her sports-nutrition-coaching clients while crushing walnuts with one hand and changing a diaper with the other. That kind of multitasking has, obviously, resulted in some mishaps. But that’s just being a parent, or so she tells me.

My younger brother, Lance, went to college in Vancouver to play hockey and study women. He came back with a degree in medieval studies and Eunice. She is five feet tall, but she texts like a giant. Eunice’s parents moved to Vancouver from Shanghai. As she likes to say, they did everything they could to make her a first-generation cliche nerd, including naming her Eunice, forcing her to take classical piano lessons and after-school enrichment programs for high-performing students. All of that in the hopes she’d become a doctor and wed a banker. She rebelled by moving to a small town, becoming a graphicdesigner, marrying a ginger doofus, and playing the accordion in an irreverent children’s band. She wears sparkly cat-eye glasses and frequently signs autographs as Ali Wong for drunk tourists.

I used to love accompanying The Shrew Crew to their kid-party gigs. I was their unpaid roadie. Their groupie. Their unpaid babysitter. Whether it was an on-again or off-again period in my decade-long relationship with Phoenix, I relished and prioritized time with my girlfriends. Now that the Phoenix thing is finally over, as is my brief flirtation with drinking wine in the shower, which is not nearly as satisfying as drinking wine while taking a bath, I am officially a Shrew.

It’s not that I didn’t want to sing with them before; it’s just that Phoenix had a band of his own and felt that if I sang in a band it would look like I was competing with him. Did he sing to children? No, he did not. Did I realize he was being a manipulative asshole? No, I did not. Did Tina gently suggest that I could do whatever I wanted to do no matter what my boyfriend claimed the optics would be? Yes. Always. Did Eunice tell me to straight-up dump his toxic ass for good and grab a mic for fuck’s sake? In exactly those words, yes. Many times.

We all have our journeys. I’m grateful that mine has led me here, to this riser in the event space of the Kincaid Arena. We, The Shrew Crew, have already performed our crowd favorite, “Five More Minutes,” to great applause. There actually aren’t any kids here tonight, but a lot of moms lost their minds. Now we’re doing a new Valentine’s-themed song.

“Thanks, everyone!” Tina says into her mic. Her acoustic guitar is pink, with a combination of adorable stickers and raging feminist bumper stickers all over it, and it tells people everything we need them to know about our band without saying a word.

Eunice shouts into her boom microphone, which is angled very awkwardly around her accordion. The woman barelyfills out a size-zero petite dress, but her stage energy could overwhelm Madison Square Garden. She says, “Our next and last song’s lyrics were written by our lovely, talented, and very single lead singer, Kate Pogue!”