Page 298 of Across His Line

Tessa: How was skating?

Me: Got beat by a seventeen year old from Finland.

Tessa: Wow.

Me: Twice.

Me: He has a mustache.

Tessa: At seventeen?

Tessa: Ask him if he wants to buy a guide.

I smile.

She sends me numbers every day. 11 more today. 8. 19, someone posted it in a group. The guide. She sends them like she’s reading off a box score.

Me: Influencer

Tessa: Blocked.

And she asks things. Did they say anything about the contract? When do you know? Does Sato think they’ll offer? When are you back? The 13th still?

I answer all of them. I don’t think about them. They’re the questions I’d ask.

On the fifth day, there’s a scrimmage.

It’s the thing everybody’s been waiting for. Two teams of prospects, white and black, in front of the whole development staff and the GM and Morley and a section of the stands full of people with notebooks. Some fans, too. Families. A few hundred people in a practice rink on a Thursday afternoon in July.

And about ten minutes in, a big defenseman from a college program out west catches me with my head down along the boards. Not dirty. Close. The kind of hit that’s legal at full speed. I go into the glass shoulder first, and my helmet cracks off it, and I go down to one knee. He leans over me on his way past and says something.

I don’t hear what. It doesn’t matter. I know what it is. It’s March. It’s twenty-two leaning over Barnes. It’s every guy who’s ever said something to me on his way past since I was twelve.

I get up. And I feel it come. Here it is. The heat in my neck. My hands wanting something. He’s right there. Ten feet away, skating backward, looking at me, waiting to see what I’ll do. Waiting for me to come after him. It’s what I do. It’s in my file. Temper. It’s the first word.

The puck’s in the corner. And I see it. Their winger is going back for it. Their center is drifting the wrong way too far up because he thinks I’m going after the D. And their D, the big one, the one who hit me is looking at me instead of the puck.

Nobody’s watching the slot.

Fucking loser.

I don’t go after him. I go to the corner instead. I get there a step before their winger. I lift his stick, and the puck’s mine, and I don’t even look. I know where my center is. I put it in the slot, flat, on the tape, and he puts it in.

The big D is still standing there, looking at me.

I skate past him on the way back to the bench and don’t say anything.

On the bench, the development coach with the gray beard, the one with the whistle he never uses, leans down behind me while I’m squirting water in my mouth, and says, low, “That’s the one I wanted to see.”

I didn’t do it to be good. I didn’t do it because I’m cured, or because I’m different, or because I thought about Berwyn, or Morley, or my file. I did it because the puck was in the corner and nobody was in the slot and I wanted to win the shift.

That’s all. I just wanted to win.

Sato finds me in the hallway after, when I’m still in my base layer with my hair wet.

“They want to talk,” she says. “Tomorrow after the morning skate.”

I look at her. “Contract?”