Page 40 of Five Hole

The order is intact. I check it in my chest the way I check the shelf. Every piece square. The wall is back up, thicker. Mortared right over the one place he ever got through. I have protected the net and the season and the scout. The door at the end of all of it. The sentence is finished. By every measure the order uses, I have kept it.

I have never in my life felt less like a man who won.

Chapter 21

Emile

I win the net back the next week, and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done on a sheet of ice.

I do it out of spite. Let me be honest about that, since being honest is the whole thing I’ve got left. Not out of hunger. Not out of the clean want I’ve carried my whole life. Out of a heart that got cut open in an equipment room, câlisse, and cauterized on the spot by a man using the flat voice on me like a blade he’d been sharpening all season for exactly that cut.

He accused me of coming for his net. So I go and I take his net.

Clean. In the open. In front of the whole barn, the bad-font internet, the man with the little book.

It’s the best hockey I’ve ever played in my life. And I play it wearing my broken heart like a chest protector, the one piece of armor nobody in the building can see. There’s a thing that happens when you stop caring whether you get hurt. Everybody thinks fear is the enemy of a goalie. It isn’t. The enemy is caring too much about the wrong thing, and tonight I don’t care about a single thing except proving I didn’t need him. I’m a wall he’d be proud of, me, if he weren’t the reason I’m made of brick. I see everything early. And I read the play before it declares. Their top line comes at me in a rush. I’m there, and there, and there, ahead of the puck every time, committed to reads that have no business being right.

Thirty-some shots and I turn away every last one of them. A shutout. The horn at the end is the right horn and it’s mine. And the scout writes so fast his hand must cramp. The room comes off the bench and buries me. A pile of guys, sticks, somebody’s glove shoved in my mouth, all of them chanting the thing they chant, which is my name. You want to know what that sounds like? Exactly like the sound I used to invent for myself on a milk crate, in a town two hours from anywhere, saying it out loud into an empty garage so it would feel real.

In the room they’re loud like a team gets loud when it has decided a thing is settled.

“That’s the guy. That is our guy.”

“Fortin. Hey. Did you even see the one off the far post in the second?”

“I saw it.”

“You did not see it.”

“I’ve got the whole tape in my head. I’ll walk you through it on the bus, frame by frame, with commentary. Bring snacks.”

“Where’s Wrobel?”

Nobody answers that one. It isn’t a hostile nothing. It’s the nothing a room hands a question it’s been carefully not asking for weeks.

Rocco comes down the row and stops in front of my stall and looks at me a beat longer than a captain looks at a goalie who just posted a shutout.

“You all right?”

“I just shut a team out, Cap.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“I’m all right.”

He doesn’t say anything back. He doesn’t move on either, not right away, and the not-moving-on is the whole conversation. I look at my skates until he takes it away with him.

I got everything. That’s the joke of it. I got the whole list, the net for good, the scout’s eye turned all the way to me now with no senior in the way of it. And the door I threw my body against for years, swung so far open it’s off its hinges.

It tastes like ash. You want to know what’s worse than ash? It tastes like nothing at all. I stand in the crease after the horn with my mask shoved up, my teammates skating in from the blue line to bury me again, and I’m holding the whole dream in my two hands. It weighs nothing. It’s a helium thing. It floats up out of my grip and I don’t even reach for it, because the one person on this earth I ever wanted to be picked by is watching from the far end of the bench with a face like a bolted door. From where he’s sitting, it now looks like exactly the thing he said it was.

I look for him before I look for anything, which is the tell I can’t turn off, even buried under my own teammates. I find him at the end of the bench in his gear, dressed and not playing. Not standing, not clapping. Just watching me the way you watch a man wear the coat off your back out into the cold. I want to skate over there, rip my mask the rest of the way off, and say it isn’t what it looks like, none of it is what it looks like. But there’s no version of what I just did on this ice that reads as anything other than what he named in a gray room.

A coup.

That’s what it looks like, read cold, from the outside, with no idea what happens in the dark between two rooms. Want the summary? The backup got into the starter’s head. Then into his bed. Then he took his net, his scout, his last season, his whole future. And he did it all with a smile on his face. There’s no way on the ice or off it for me to prove it was ever anything but that. I’ve got the net now. And having the net is the evidence. The having is the whole case against me. I built it myself, tonight, in a shutout, in the open, for a room full of witnesses who chanted my name while I did it.

I did the thing he accused me of. Not because it was true. I need somebody to hear that, even if it’s only the inside of my own skull. You listening? Not because it was true. Because he made it true by accusing me of it, because he stood in that gray room and turned the softest thing I ever handed a person into evidence. I was hurt enough, gutted enough, to reach for the cruelest available proof that I didn’t need him. And the cruelest available proof, the one thing guaranteed to bury the argument, was his net. So I took it. To show him it didn’t matter. To show him I could walk away from him and be fine, be better than fine, be a shutout, be the changing of the guard. To hurt him back the exact amount he hurt me, which is the stupidest math a person can do. The only way to win it is to lose the person you’re doing it over.