Page 103 of Payback On The Ice

Everybody's there. Dressed. In their stalls. Nobody's talking. They're all looking at me. The TV in the corner is on, muted, showing the press conference. Me at the table with Nico standing next to me.

Nobody says anything.

My stomach drops. I think: it's September again. I think: here we go.

Then Wes picks up his stick.

He lays the blade flat on the rubber floor in front of his stall, and taps it. Once. Twice. Slow.

Tap. Tap.

Petey picks up his. Tap. Tap. Then Okoye. Then Kasper. Then Jace, standing up from his stall in the middle of the room, banging the shaft of his stick on the floor so hard it echoes.

Then it's the whole room. Twenty-four sticks on rubber. Tap, tap, tap, tap, faster and faster, until it's a roar, until it's thunder, until I can feel it in my chest like a heartbeat.

The last one is Gunnar.

He looks at me for a long second from his stall. His face is red. Then he picks up his stick and slams it on the floor, bang, so hard the blade cracks.

"Fine," he says loudly, over the noise. "Fine. I'm sorry about the cross-check, okay? Happy?"

I start laughing. I can't help it. I'm laughing and crying at the same time, standing in the doorway with my bag on my shoulder.

Wes gets up and comes over and takes my bag off my shoulder and carries it to my stall for me. My stall. The one by the showers, with the strip of white tape that says LINDQVIST in Sharpie. Somebody's put a new one over it. Brass. Engraved. Just like the others.

I look around the room for him.

His stall by the door is empty. His pads are on their hooks. His mask is on the shelf.

He's not here.

"Where's Dane?" I say.

The room goes a little quiet.

"Stats final," Jace says. "Two to five. He's excused from skate." He looks at me carefully. "He didn't know?"

I shake my head.

I didn't tell him. I told my mom first, and then Halvorsen, and then thirty reporters and a national hockey website. I didn't tell Dane at all.

I said I'd tell him first. That was the plan. I said it in the stick room, screaming at him. I was going to tell you first.

And I didn't.

I sit down in my stall, under my new brass nameplate, and look at his empty one by the door, at the pressed #4 jersey hanging next to it, and I don't know what that makes me.

28

DANE

Ifind out in a hallway in the math building, at five-oh-five, with a blue exam booklet still in my hand.

My phone has forty-one notifications. I don't look at them. I look at the top one, from Nico, sent at 2:22.

Nico: he did it

Nico: D. he did it. watch it