Page 262 of Across His Line

36

He Doesn’t Need a Militia

Rafe

Tuesday, before my away game, Tess and I had marketing.

I got there first for once. Back row by the door, and my feet up on the end chair. Tess came in at nine fifty-nine with her coffee and her notebook and went straight to the left side by the windows, third row. Like always. Like she has every single class since January.

She didn’t look at me.

My girlfriend. Across the room, like she wants nothing to do with me. It gets me every time.

I still watch her through the duration of the class, and every time she’s already writing, paying no attention to me.

This time, halfway through, I caught her. She was looking at me over her shoulder while the professor talked. I raised an eyebrow.

After class, she came over, took the coffee out of my hand, took a long sip, and said, “I have a thing with Kylie and Paige,” and left.

She has a thing with Kylie and Paige most days now. Or a post office run, or a Goodwill run, or a course. There are stacks of product inside of her dorm. She’s making more every month. She told me last month’s number once in bed and then got up and went to the bathroom like she was embarrassed. I think it’s impressive.

She has a social media account now. She holds up a sweater or a pair of boots, and words come up across the screen, Paid: $4, Sold for: $60, here’s how I knew, and that’s it. You never see her face. You just see her hands. One of them, a pair of loafers she put back on the shelf, got eleven thousand views last week. She told me it was nothing. I watched her check it twelve times during one episode of a show we weren’t watching.

“Influencer,” I said.

She didn’t look up from her phone. “I will hurt you if you say that again.”

I like it. I like that she’s building something, even through the shame. I don’t tell her that. She’d make a face.

There are four scouts at the away game tonight.

I count them in warmups. One in the corner seats by the press box, one two sections over, and two together by the glass at the far end, standing with coffee in their hands, not talking. They don’t clap. They don’t do anything. They just watch.

It’s the second week of March. We’re on the road on a Friday. It’s the last stretch before the conference tournament against a team we beat by four in November and who’ve been waiting all winter to remind us.

Berwyn talks to the two by the glass after warmups. I see him from the bench with his hands in his pockets, nodding. When he comes back to the bench, he doesn’t look at me. He never looks at me after he talks to one of them. That’s how I know it’s about me.

Nobody tells you anything. That’s the part I didn’t expect. I thought it would be like the movies, a guy in a suit shaking your hand after a game and saying son. It isn’t. It’s Berwyn after practice in the hallway with a coffee, saying two more clubs asked for film. It’s Berwyn saying you’re in a good spot and keep playing and there’s interest and nothing matters until June. It’s a list somebody publishes with my name on it somewhere in the forties that I pretend I didn’t look at.

Nobody says you’re going. Nobody says you’re not. Nobody says anything I can hold.

I hate it. I’d rather somebody hit me.

Barnes is off tonight. He’s been wrong for two weeks. Not sad. Barnes doesn’t do sad. Everything about him is a half second sharper than it should be. He took two stupid penalties last weekend, one of them for slashing a guy’s stick out of his hands after the whistle for no reason anybody could see. He doesn’t eat three plates anymore. He eats one. He checks his phone in the locker room between periods, which Berwyn hates, and puts it away fast when anybody looks. And when Kylie said Paige’s name at lunch on Wednesday, he got up and left with half his sandwich still on the tray.

Kennebeck knows something’s wrong. I know something’s wrong. Neither of us knows what. We’re not the kind of guys who ask. We just watch him on the bench and look at each other over his head.

And Greeley won’t shut up.

He’s been on Kennebeck since September. It started with the line, and then something about Kylie, and it never stopped, and now it’s just how practice sounds. A shoulder in the hallway. A comment in the showers. Vandercook let you out tonight? Must be nice having somebody pick out your clothes. Kennebeck takes it for weeks and then doesn’t, and Berwyn has had them in his office twice.

In warmups tonight, Greeley skates by Kennebeck at the blue line and says something I don’t hear, and Kennebeck’s whole back goes stiff.

I’m surrounded by idiots waiting to go off. I know that my patience is thinning, and if Kennebeck needs me to, I’ll put Greeley on his fucking ass. Honestly, I’m sick of him. Sometimes he chirps me, too. Envy is an ugly thing, and Greeley wears it proudly.

The game goes wrong in the second period.

We’re up two to one. It’s ugly. It’s been ugly since the first faceoff, sticks up high, guys getting a little extra after every whistle, the refs letting it go because it’s March and everybody’s tired. Their number twenty-two has been on Barnes all night. Every shift. A crosscheck at the end of the first that nobody called. A face wash in the corner. Something in his ear at every faceoff, mouth going behind the cage.