“Fucking egregious!” she screamed, pushing me onto the bench. “I willkillthat motherfucker.”
Bella kept up her litany of curses while I bent over at the waist, willing myself not to puke through the bars of my helmet grate. I needed to pull myself together, and right away. Even half conscious, I knew I couldn’t afford to look beaten right now.
I pulled myself into a vertical position again. Even as my stomach stopped clenching, the other parts of my body that had gotten slammed began announced their displeasure. My ribs were practically vibrating. And I was going to have a bruise the size of Massachusetts on one hip.
Bella’s worried face was parked right in front of me, and as I rose up, her eyes went wide. “You’re bleeding.”
Now that she mentioned it, I could feel something wet on my jaw.
“Heslashedyourchin.”
Whatever. I was so busy hurting in other places I didn’t even care.
But she unclipped my helmet grate and lifted it. Then she grabbed it with two hands and angled my face toward the ice. “Hey ref!” she shouted. “Look at this shit!”
“Bella,Jesus.” I tried to pull away, but when someone has you by the facemask, that’s pretty much impossible. She swung my mask to follow the ref as he skated by, and I had to grab her wrists and wrench her off of me. “Let go of my fuckinghead.” It was hard to even describe how angry I was in that moment, and how drunk I felt from the pain and the disbelief. If instant death had somehow been offered to me right then, I would have been tempted to accept.
“But slashing you in the face is a disqualifying penalty!”
“Just…” I yanked my glove off and swiped at my face. When I looked at my hand, there was a pretty good smear of blood there. But I’d live.
Somebody had passed Bella the first aid kit, which she was now yanking open. “Let me wipe that off and see how big the cut is.”
“Better glove up,” Big-D said as the buzzer rang for the end of the first period. “You don’t want to get Rikker’s blood on you.”
“Shut your fucking mouth,” Bella snapped as she pulled on a blue latex glove. Because that was the policy. I’d seen her do it many times before.
But it didn’t matter. Big-D’s comment was out there, and I hung my head like a fucking pariah. I’d spent the whole first semester trying to convince my team that I wasn’t scary. And in the span of twenty minutes, Eros had torn away any goodwill that I might have built up.
Fucking Eros.
Fucking Saint B’s.
Fucking reporter.
Fuck my life.
Coach gave a five-minute rant in the locker room before the next period. He was practically spitting fire. “What did wejust fucking talk aboutbefore the game? This isyourrink.Yourice. And you’re letting some prick from a second rate team throw you off your game!FUCKhim! How many shots on goal are you going to let these assholes take before you fight back?”
He threw his clipboard into the wall and stormed out.
There was a moment of utter silence in the room before my teammates — red-faced from both exertion and anger — began filing back out to the bench. I followed them, trying not to wince every time my chest pad moved against my ribs.
“Are you good to play?” Hartley asked me when it was time for the second period to begin.
“Of course,” I snapped. They would have to drag my lifeless body off the ice before I’d give up. But,shit. Two more periods to go. This was already the longest night of my life.
Every second of the next period cost me.
Eros hadn’t attacked me again.Yet. But for the first time in my life, I played scared. When our shifts overlapped, I spent too much time looking out for him, and too little time watching the puck. I missed three passes in a row, and that made me want to puke almost as badly as getting slammed in the guts had done.
And every time Eros got anywhere near my teammates, he kept up the douchey commentary. “I bet you guys like holding each other’s sticks, don’t you?” I heard him say.
Stupid shit, right? But he was just distracting enough to do two things: lose us the game, and remind my teammates that I was a liability.
Meanwhile, Saint B’s offensive line continued to fire a hailstorm at Orson. And in between, Eros taunted our goalie with questions about how often the team showered together.
Orson let in two goals that period. But he saved about a thousand.
