Page 77 of The Faceoff

“I’m good.”

“You came up slow.”

“I came up fine.”

He looks at me a second — Cash and his sharp eyes — and lets it go, because there’s a game on and you don’t push a guy mid-period. But he files it. I watch him file it. Everybody’s filing things about me lately and I’m running out of places to put the things I don’t want filed.

We go into the first intermission scoreless.

Second period, we break it open.

It starts on a faceoff — they always start on a faceoff, the whole game lives and dies on the dot and the dot is mine. I win it back to Theo, Theo holds the line, walks it, and instead of shooting he sends a seam pass that splits their big pair, and I’m already moving, already where the puck’s going to be because I read it two strides ago, and it’s on my tape in the slot with the goalie still sliding across—and I bury it. Top shelf, glove side, the net snapping back.

The Nest comes apart.

I don’t do the big celebration. I never do. I wheel out of the slot and Theo grabs me and Wyatt grabs me and Cash arrives like a freight train, and over the boards the bench is up, and I let myself — one time, one half-second — look two rows up behind it.

She’s on her feet.

Sloane Beckett, who brought a book, who told me to be a professional, who sits composed through everything, is on her feet with the rest of the building, and she’s not lifting a cup an inch this time, she’s clapping, and there’s something on her face she hasn’t decided to put there, the unguarded thing, the studio thing, and our eyes catch for the length of a held breath—and then she catches herself. I watch her catch herself. The composure comes back down like a curtain, and she sits, and picks the cup back up, and goes back to being a woman at a hockey game.

But I saw it.

I file it — grinning into my glove on the way back to center — with all the other things I’m keeping about her, the list that has no system, the growing pile. She forgot herself for a second. Watching me. She forgot.

I know exactly what that’s worth, because I wrote — no. Because I read — the rule she keeps reminding herself of. The one she doesn’t know I’ve seen.

Do not, under any circumstances, forget that this is fake.

She just forgot. In front of nine hundred people. For me.

We score twice more before the period’s out. I get the second one and an assist on the third, and by the time the horn goes for the second intermission we’re up three and the building’s loud and O’Grady actually almost smiles, which for O’Grady is a parade.

I should be thinking about the third period. About closing it out, about not getting complacent, about the conference standings and the big defensive pair and number twenty-two who’s going to be looking to take a piece out of me.

I’m thinking about a woman two rows behind the bench who forgot it was fake.

A beat late, I notice the obvious thing, the thing that should scare me more than it does:

So did I.

I forgot it was fake somewhere around a dark studio yesterday afternoon, and I haven’t remembered since, and I’m not sure I want to.

I pull my helmet back on.

Third period. Close it out. Be the captain.

I can do all of that with the part of me that’s never gotten stupid on the ice.

The rest of me is already up in the seats, and has been since 7:03, and isn’t coming back anytime soon.

Chapter 16

Beau

Third period, UMass comes out like a team that’s been told the truth in their own locker room.

You can see it in the first shift — they’re faster, meaner, throwing bodies, the big pair pinching harder because down three at home against us is the kind of thing that ends up on a highlight reel they don’t want to be on. O’Grady leans over the bench between whistles and says one word, “Smart,” which is O’Grady for don’t get cute, don’t get hurt, close it out the boring way, and I nod once and take it onto the ice.