Page 297 of Across His Line

“Can I do something?” Kylie says.

I think about every time I wanted someone to come and nobody did, and how I learned to say no before anyone could offer, so that at least the no would be mine. I look at Paige, who hasn’t moved. I look at Rafe’s keys in my hand, and the crack between my shoes, and the gray blanket that smells like her dryer sheets.

“I’m okay, Ky,” I say. “Just stay on the phone.”

“Okay,” Kylie says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Paige bumps her shoulder into mine. “You want to go in?”

“Not yet.”

“Okay.”

She doesn’t get up. She doesn’t check the time, or ask if I’m sure, or tell me it’s going to be fine. She just stays. The sun keeps climbing over Wren Street like it doesn’t know anything, and Kylie starts humming something on the phone, badly, and Paige tells her she’s flat, and Kylie tells her to shut up, and I sit there between the two of them with my thumb on my wrist, not feeling any better, not even a little.

42

Did You Make a Fucking Spreadsheet?

Rafe

The kid from Finland beats me wide on the first rep. He’s seventeen. He’s five-ten, maybe, in skates. He has a mustache he’s very proud of that isn’t a mustache yet. And on the first one-on-one rush of the first morning of development camp, he takes the puck down the wall at me, drops his shoulder like he’s going inside and goes outside instead, and he’s past me before my first three steps are finished.

The exact thing. The thing the woman with the binder said in the gray hallway. Your first three steps. She said it without looking up.

He goes in alone and puts it five-hole on the goalie and turns around and grins at me, all teeth.

I stand at the blue line in a Sentinels practice jersey with my name on the back of it. Black and silver, with the tower and the light on the front, so new it’s still stiff.

And I wait to get pissed.

I don’t.

What comes instead is something I haven’t felt in a long time. I want to do it again.

I skate back to the line. I tap the coach’s pads with my stick, the development coach, a guy in his fifties with a gray beard and a whistle he never uses, who’s been watching me since warmups without saying a word.

“Again,” I say.

He looks at me. He looks at the kid from Finland, who’s already back in line, still grinning.

“Again,” the coach says.

The kid beats me again. Not as bad. The third time, he doesn’t.

Camp is a week in the Sentinels’ practice facility, which is two sheets of ice and a weight room bigger than Woodbury’s whole athletic building and a cafeteria where a woman with a clipboard watches what you put on your tray. There are thirty-eight of us. Prospects. Every one of them was the best player somewhere. Nobody here cares that I was the best player at Woodbury. There’s a goalie from a junior team in Quebec who asks me if it’s in Canada.

It’s the hardest room I’ve ever been in.

Everybody’s fast. Everybody’s strong. Everybody reads the play a beat earlier than anybody I played against all year. The coaches stop drills every four minutes to fix something so small I didn’t know it could be wrong. The angle of my top hand on a backhand. Where my eyes go when I’m on the wall. How I turn on my heels. A video coach sits me down at a laptop and shows me twelve seconds of a scrimmage from three angles and asks me where I was supposed to be, and I tell him, and he says yes, and then shows me where I actually was.

I thought getting drafted meant I’d arrived somewhere.

It didn’t. It just got me into a harder room.

I love every fucking second of it. I’m so tired by eight o’clock every night that I fall asleep on top of the hotel comforter in my clothes. My legs feel like the bike in Buffalo every morning when I wake up. And I lie there, sore everywhere, and I can’t stop thinking about the next day. About getting beat, and fixing it, and getting beat a little less.

Tessa and I talk nearly every day. Not a lot. At night, mostly, when she knows I’m done.