Page 58 of Unmanageable

“Stop!” Scottie screams, blowing the whistle again. She leans over the glass, her red hair falling forward into her eyes. “Why did you do that?”

“Do what? Stop the puck?”

“No, you dropped down like a collapsing building. It looked very inefficient. Can’t you just stand there and catch it with the big mitten?”

“The big mitten is on my left hand, Scottie. The shot was on the ice. If I don’t drop, it goes between my legs.”

“Well, don’t let it do that,” she says, waving a hand dismissively. “It looked messy. Do it again, but make it look more… elegant. Like a panther.”

“A panther,” I repeat, resetting in the crease. I catch Miller’s eye. The kid is biting his lip so hard it’s turning white. “Send another one, Miller. Let’s see the panther.”

For the next forty-five minutes, it’s absolute comedy. Scottie has no idea what she’s doing, but she possesses the unshakable, terrifying confidence of a woman who has never lost an argument in her life.

She invents names for drills on the fly.

We do the “Triangle of Doom,” which turns out to just be Miller shooting from three different spots while she counts down from five very loudly. Then we do the “Backseat Driver,” where she stands directly behind the glass of my net and shouts “Left! Right! Up! Down!” while Miller shoots at random.

It’s completely wrong. It violates every modern, data-driven goal tending theory established in the last thirty years.

And it’s the best practice I’ve had in a decade.

Because I’m not overthinking. I’m not anticipating the pull in my shoulder or worrying about whether the scouts think I’m washed up.

I’m just laughing. I’m reacting to the puck purely on instinct while my gorgeous, brilliant, totally hockey-illiterate agent yells at me to “use the stick like a broom.”

“Time out!” she calls.

She walks down to the gate and opens it, stepping onto the ice in her leather boots. She takes three tiny, tentative steps, her arms flailing wildly for balance before she realizes boots and smooth ice don’t mix.

“Whoa, hey, stay there!” I skate over quickly, sliding into a stop and catching her by the waist before her feet can slide out from under her.

She grabs my upper arms, her fingers digging into the thick foam of my chest protector. She’s breathless, her face flushed from the cold and the sheer, unexpected fun of the morning.

“I’m fine,” she gasps, though she doesn’t pull away. “I just wanted to say… your post integration looked weird.”

“You don’t even know what post integration means.”

“Neither do you,” she counters, her eyes sparking with that familiar, competitive fire.

The locker room door bangs open and the next thing I hear is:

“What the hell is going on out there?”

I look up.

Herb Ganz is walking down the bleacher stairs, wearing a massive, bright orange hunting jacket. Behind him is a tiny woman with a cloud of perfectly coiffed white hair, wearing a fur coat and carrying a massive, plaid insulated bag.

“Herb?” Scottie calls out, carefully turning around while keeping her hand firmly on my forearm. “What are you doing here? What about the attic?”

“The attic can bite my ass,” Herb grunts, reaching the glass. “Martha found a box of my old jerseys from the ’74 season and started crying. Then she decided we needed to check on the boy.”

The tiny woman—Martha—steps up to the boards and sets the plaid bag down with a heavy, metallic clunk.

“He means he was throwing a tantrum because he missed the ice, dear. Don’t let him lie to you. He was moping around the kitchen like a dog that lost its bone.”

“I wasn’t moping!” Herb snaps, though his ears turn a slight shade of pink. “Anyway, what is this circus? O’Connell, why are you leaning on your stick like a laundry pole?”

“Coach Scottie’s orders, Herb,” I say, skating over to the boards, guiding Scottie along with me so her boots don’t wipe out on the transition. “We were just finishing up the Panther Drill.”