Page 1 of The Reckless Rookie

Chapter one

Finn

Second period and we’re down a goal we didn’t earn.

That’s the part that’s eating me. Not the deficit. The way we got it: a bad bounce off Evan’s skate, a scramble our goalie never had a chance on, two Dallas guys crashing the crease like the whistle’s a suggestion. One-nothing, and the scoreboard’s lying about the game we’re playing.

The left wall is mine. Since the first shift, I have owned it. I’m the first one to the puck.

Number six is the reason.

Their big body on the back end, six-two of a Dallas defenseman, and for a period and a half he hasn’t been able to touch me. So he’s stopped trying to play me and started trying to end me. Every whistle he’s got a word. Every board battle he’s got an elbow riding a half-inch too high.

“Keep your head up, forty-four.”

“Working on it,” I tell him, and let him see the grin.

I could not do that. The grin.

I do it anyway.

Roman slides in for the draw and doesn’t look at me. “You’re feeding him.”

“He’s already hungry.”

“Then quit setting the table.”

Fair. I set it anyway.

The bench is watching me do it. I can feel it without looking, the way you feel weather change. That’s the deal when you’re the rookie; they handed you an actual job before you’d earned the trust that’s supposed to come with it. Everybody keeps one eye on the kid, waiting to see whether the temper that put my name in every scouting report is going to cost us a game tonight. I came up out of the minors this fall with the reputation already built, an enforcer’s name stapled to a body that’s supposed to score, and it walked into this building a shift before I did.

Sully’s watching me from behind the bench. Ryan’s watching from the top of the zone. Even through the cage, even from ninety feet, I can read the look he gives me, and it’s the same one it always is.

Let it go.

I tap my stick on the ice. I’ve got it.

He doesn’t buy it. Ryan buys nothing. He’s seen this one before; he knows exactly how it ends, and there’s not a thing he can do about it from up ice except watch it come.

The puck drops. Ryan wins it back to Evan and we move, and for thirty seconds it’s the good kind, five guys on one string. Zach on the wall. Chip to Colt. Colt drives wide, drags his man, drops it, and I’ve got a step on six.

One step. All I’ve ever needed.

Six quits chasing the play and takes the man instead.

His elbow comes up under my chin and his hip drives through my knee, late, a full beat after the puck’s gone. The knee folds sideways, and the ice comes up and takes my air with it.

No whistle.

Cold through the jersey, first. Then the burn behind the kneecap, deep, a wrongness that isn’t a tear but wants me to think it might be. My mouthguard’s half out. I breathe through it, one count, two, and the rink noise comes back all at once, like someone turned a dial.

I get up. You get good at getting up when you’re my size. You get up so fast nobody clocks what it costs, because the second they see the cost is the second it’s their game and not yours.

Knee holds. Pissed off, not torn.

Six is already skating away. He doesn’t even look back. The hit isn’t what gets me. It’s the boredom of it, a man doing paperwork.

I tuck it into my chest where it keeps; tell myself that’s discipline.