Page 45 of On His Mind

Rowan’s on the couch when I get back, which means I’ll have a witness in the house. I was hoping for some privacy. I head straight for the kitchen and put everything on the counter. I pull out the blender, the cutting board, and a knife.

I don’t know how to cook to save my life, so this is all new to me. I cut the mangoes badly the first time, but better on the second. I set them aside and start on the strawberries. I blend it all until it’s a puree like the instructions call for. It wants me to strain the seeds and the pulp out, but honestly, who cares. I pour it into the pitcher and leave the vodka in the freezer so I can taste the thing without it. It looks like a smoothie, not a juice. Shit. So I strain it. Every batch. Push it through with the back of a spoon. Then I do it again. More strawberries. Rowan’s sugar, and then less of it. Ice, then no ice, then ice at the end. And I add the lime last, a little, and that’s the thing that pulls it together — the lime cuts the sweet and suddenly it’s clean and cold. I taste it, adjust it, taste it, adjust it. It’s the same thing as ten thousand pad drops in the rink — you keep doing it until you get it right. I don’t know any other way to learn something. The vodka goes in at the end. I’ve got no idea how much, so I pour what looks like a little and stir it and taste it, and I can’t find it at all. This is what Penelope meant. Something with mango and strawberryand one drop of liquor, so it tastes like juice, and you don’t even feel it coming.

Rowan comes in around batch four for water.

He stops at the counter, looking at my mess. “What are you doing?”

“Making something,” I murmur.

He glances at the vodka bottle and says, “Huh.” He makes his cup of water and goes.

I pour it into the big pitcher Stanley uses for beer pong, which I wash first. Then I put it in the back of the fridge behind the milk, where nobody will move it, and I go get my bag because we have a game tonight.

Hutch is sick.

I find out when I walk into the room and my sweater’s hanging in the second stall instead of the third, and Coach Fuller is talking to Cole in the corner. Hutch isn’t anywhere. Somebody says he’s sick with the flu. He’s been throwing up since last night. He has fevers and body aches.

I feel bad for the guy, but I straighten when I learn that makes me the backup tonight. Which means I dress. I sit down in front of my stall and my hands do the gear the way they’ve done it ten thousand times, and my heart’s going so hard I can feel it in my throat. I’m not playing. Backups don’t play. But I’ll be on the bench in full pads for a real game with a real crowd. Four months ago, I was third string at the bad end of the ice watching this happen to other people.

I tape my stick slower than I need to.

Coach Fuller stops beside me on his way past. “Good, you’re dressed. Be ready.”

I keep my head down. I’m not thinking about playing. I’m thinking about not embarrassing my team.

Benson scores in the first on a rebound. Stanley scores in the second and celebrates like the building’s on fire, and then doessomething with his stick on the way back to the bench that gets him yelled at by two different coaches and does not stop him. The crowd’s loud, and it stays loud. Two sophomores on the first line, and both of them scored. These guys are good. That doesn’t happen.

It’s five to nothing before the second period’s half over. And I’m six feet from Cole for all of it. I’ve watched him from the far end of the ice since I got here, but I’ve never watched him from here. I see him talk to himself between whistles. I see him bang his stick on both posts before every faceoff in his zone, the same order, left then right, every time. I see him track a puck through four bodies without moving his head, just his eyes, and I see the exact moment he decides where it’s going and sets his depth for it half a second before the shooter even has it.

I take note on all of it. Same as always. I don’t relax for one second of two full periods, because if this game turns, I go in. It doesn’t turn. Between periods, Coach comes down the bench and leans over me.

“You’ve got the third.”

I look at him.

That’s all he says. He’s already walking off.

Cole gets his blocker off and comes past me and stops. He’s got a potential pro career and a bad knee and a coach who just saved him twenty minutes.

“They’ll shoot from everywhere. Nothing to lose.” He taps my pad with his stick. “Don’t chase it.”

Then the door’s open and I’m stepping onto the ice.

The lights come down on me, and the crowd is a sound with no shape. I skate to the net at the far end, my net to protect, and I stop in the blue paint and look up once.

They’ll pay you to stand right there. I have to swallow twice before I can get my chest to work right because this is it. This is what I worked for. Then I bang my stick on both posts. Left, thenright. I have twenty minutes out here, and I’m going to make it count.

Cole was right. They shoot from everywhere. We’re down five with twenty to go, there’s nothing left to do but throw pucks at the freshman and see if he’s soft.

The first real one comes at six minutes in. A wrist shot from the top of the circle through traffic, and I lose it behind their winger, find it late, and get a pad on it with my leg going the wrong way. It bounces off my thigh and out to the corner. Benson buries it into the boards and looks back at me and nods once.

The second one’s a two-on-one, and everything in me wants to slide across early with the pass. Don’t chase it. I stay.Stay.I stay, and when the puck comes across, I’m already there. It hits my chest and drops. Rowan clears it, and it’s the first time in my whole life a man’s voice in my head has been worth more than my own instinct.

The third one is a high glove side. It comes off a defenseman’s stick at the blue line and it’s rising the whole way, chest, shoulder, head, exactly where I have flinched since I was nine years old and a river stone caught me above the eye — my body knows that height, and every single time in my life I have blinked, or turned, or given the smallest fraction of an inch away from it. I hear Mike’s voice yelling in French, telling me totake it like a man. I don’t move.

My glove comes up, and the puck slams into the pocket and stays there, and the sound of it goes up my arm and into my temples. I hold my hand up in the air with the puck in it, and I don’t understand what just happened in my chest. The ref blows the whistle. Somebody in the crowd is screaming. Stanley skates past and cross-checks me in the pads hard enough to move me. I don’t flinch. I don’t know what to do with that, so I set my feet and wait for the next one.

Seven shots. Eight. Ten by the horn, and nothing gets past me.