Page 32 of Five Hole

He wakes and reaches for me and finds the cold, and goes still with his hand still flat on my chest.

“Hey.”

“I have rehab.”

“It’s early.” He is awake all at once. He is never awake all at once. “Cas. What’s happening right now?”

“Nothing is happening.”

“Something’s happening. You’re doing the thing with your face where there’s no face in it.” He props himself up on an elbow. I keep my eyes on the ceiling, because the ceiling is the one object in this room that is not going to ask me for anything. “Talk to me. One sentence. You can pick the sentence, I’m not fussy.”

“I have rehab.”

He sits with that. I can hear him decide not to be funny about it, and the deciding takes him longer than I would have guessed, and costs him more.

“Okay,” he says finally. “That’s the one you picked.”

“Yes.”

“You should know I’m not going to pretend I didn’t hear it.”

“I know.”

I let him understand that the door is closing. I watch it hurt him. And I do it anyway.

That is where it starts to end. I know it even while I am doing it. I do it anyway. The tragedy of a man built like me. I can watch the end coming from a long way off, like you watch weather come down the ridge, and I cannot make myself step inside out of it. Because stepping inside means needing the house, and needing the house is the one thing I swore I would never do.

Chapter 17

Emile

I’m good in his net. That’s the problem. Right there, and there’s no way around it.

I take the games and I win most of them. Not all. Nobody wins all. But most. And I win them the way you win when the building has decided you’re the answer, which is a different way than you win when you’re clawing for a chance. Confidence is a real thing, it’s not nothing. A goalie who believes the net is his plays two inches bigger than a goalie who’s auditioning for it, and I stopped auditioning the Tuesday the leg went. My two inches showed up. My numbers show it. Confidence. The thing every coach won’t shut up about, and it turns out they were right, which is its own small insult.

The student site that ran my name in a bigger font runs it bigger still, and the word changes. That’s what I clock, lying awake. The word. It was a controversy before. Controversy means two guys, one net, an argument that’s live. Now it isn’t a controversy. Now it’s a changing of the guard. The senior went down. And the kid stepped up. Who writes a sad story about a changing of the guard? That’s the hopeful kind, the passing-the-torch kind, the kind that feels good to type. Nobody types the version where the kid would give the whole torch back to see the senior stand up off the ice on a Tuesday. There’s no font for that one. Somebody should invent one. Real small, all lowercase, printed sideways down at the bottom where the leg is.

The scout comes back.

I clock him in the first period, same seat off the near blue line, same still apartness, same notebook, and this time I can feel it. I don’t even have to see the pen move. This time he’s writing about me. The seat that spent my best road game watching an empty crease is spending this one watching me fill it. I got the thing I wanted. I got the eye. It came in the ugliest possible package. And it’s still the thing I’ve wanted since I was a kid. I hate that both of those are true. Two things that shouldn’t fit in one chest at the same time, and here they both are, taking up room, elbowing each other.

I should be on the roof of the world. This is the exact thing, the one I’ve been walking at since before I had a word for it. My mother texts me after the wins now, the wall of it with no periods, so proud, and eat something at the bottom every single time, as if a save percentage has ever once reminded me to eat. I read it. I can’t make myself feel the thing the words are for. She’s watched me dress for other people’s seasons my whole life and now she gets to watch me play mine, and she’s happy, honestly happy. I lie about being happy back. How do you tell your mother the crease came to you off a stretcher?

And every single night I stand in a crease that’s warm from a body that isn’t mine, stopping pucks the way a guy stops pucks when the whole barn has agreed he’s the guy now. I feel like a thief. Not a thief who broke in. Worse. A thief in a house where they left the door standing open on purpose, where the owner’s lying hurt down the hall, where everybody keeps telling the thief how well the house suits him.

“You’ve come into your own, eh,” a freshman says to me in the room, meaning all of it kindly, meaning nothing but the good version.

“Told you he’d be fine,” says a D-man who does not know my name in a hallway.

“How’s it feel, though?” the freshman says. “Honestly. How’s it actually feel?”

“Great,” I say. “It feels great. The coat fits great.”

“The what?”

“Nothing.”

Ostie. What do you say to that? Thanks, the coat fits great, sorry about the leg? You can’t say it isn’t my place, because the guy who lives here is in a brace on the bench. And saying it sounds like a man fishing for people to tell him he earned it. I’m so tired of earning things, me. I could lie down on the ice and not get up. That’s a joke. Mostly. Ask the trainers, they’ll tell you I’m a delight. And I’m easy, me. Feed me, ice me, tell me I look good in the coat, wind me back up and point me at the crease.