He was too shy to be intelligible when he was put on the spot, and he was terrified he’d say something about the team or coaches that would be taken out of context and come back to bite him in the ass.Any time he went out in public, he wore a Pirates hat pulled low and kept his head down.If he weren’t 6’5, it might actually work more than it did.
Today he lucked out: he made it out of the airport without anyone noticing him, and he counted that as a win.Thank God for the off-season—it would be next to impossible to sneak around once hockey was back on TV.
The Uber driver who picked him up wasn’t the chatty type, and Evan was left to mindlessly scroll on his phone as they traveled to and then through the city proper to get to his place north of Pittsburgh.There were new messages in the team chat as people updated their arrival status.Evan added his name to the list of Riveters in town, receiving a dozen happy emojis celebrating his return.
Lawson
Drinks tonight?My place @ 8
Should give us time to recover before practice tomorrow
Doyle
Yinz are doing practice??
We still got 2 weeks of freedom and u r voluntarily hanging out with coach?Lame.
Woodward
lmao coach is in the office all day
Mel’s in charge
Besides some of us are captains and need to set an example for the rest of you scrubs
Doyle
u r an alternate captain.Don’t let it go to your head woodsy
Kates
You had me at coach is in the office and lost me at Mel’s in charge
Lawson
Why?Mel’s great
Kates
Her drills are 10x harder than coach’s
Lawson
Fair
Melissa Gamble was their defensive coach.One of the first female coaches in the NHL, she’d worked damn hard to get where she was and twice as hard to stay there.Her father owned the Nevada Scorpions, and even though she’d started her career there, she’d jumped ship as soon as she could: she wasn’t going to be called a nepotism hire.
Evan might dread her drills like the rest of the team—theywerebrutal, and she required perfection before she let them off the hook—but he respected the hell out of her.He’d mostly played wing in the OHL, but the Riveters had shifted him to center his rookie year.It had definitely been an adjustment, since, like most young wingers, the idea of a backcheck was something of a foreign concept.Mel had worked with him a lot his first year to get him up to snuff, and he was eternally grateful for that.
Abernathy
I’m in for drinks tonight
Doyle
Aren’t you like 15??
Just bc it’s legal in Canada doesn’t mean we can give beer to infants
