Eli
“I got your jersey back.”
I’ve been sitting on my sofa staring at the wall. I’ve got no desire to do anything else. All I can think of is Emma and the expression on her face when my dad called her a “bunny.” Then there was the fact I did nothing to defend her. “God.” I groan as I run my fingers through my dirty hair. I still haven’t showered.
“Dude. Did you hear me?”
I turn and see Cody standing a few feet away, eating a giant sandwich. “Huh?”
“Here.” Cody steps away but returns, tossing my jersey onto my lap. “She wanted me to make sure you got this back.”
Of course she did. She’s considerate like that. I pick it up and smell it, hoping some of her scent is left, but all I smell is hockey. That’s a thing. Well. To me it is.
“You fucked up.” Cody won’t go away.
“I know.”
“I tried to explain. You know about….” He looks left and right. “Where is he, anyway?”
He’s referring to my father. “He’s in the office, making calls or something.”
I feel the couch move and look over at my best friend who’s still eating his sandwich. With his mouth full of meat and cheese, he asks, “How long’s he staying?” Only it sounds more like “Ow mong’s he faying.” I got what he meant.
“He brought an overnight bag.”
“Fuck,” Cody mutters. This time his pronunciation was spot-on.
“Yep.” I nod. “He’s coming to practice.” Which is gonna happen in less than an hour.
“Aw, fuck. I hate when he does that.”
We all do because when the great Jack Baxter shows up to practice, even the coaches bow to him. For some inexplicable reason, my father feels the need to critique everyone, not just me. It’s fucking humiliating. When he’s done it in the past, the guys were mad at me for days afterward. Take last year, for example, he sat our goalie down after practice and talkedathim for over twenty minutes. The kid was so pissed at me, he hasn’t spoken to me since. Maybe Coach Montross will nip it in the bud. Maybe, for once, he’ll tell Jack Baxter to fuck off.
* * *
Coach Montross is worsethan usual. He seems to have crawled so far up my dad’s ass, it’s fucking embarrassing. Since Coach is from Illinois and he used to be a goalie and because my father is who he is, shit at practice is going downhill pretty fast. One by one, my dad has started picking apart everybody’s game. And my dad doesn’t mince words.
But neither do my teammates, telling me stuff like “You fucking suck, Baxter.” And that’s one of the nicer things said by my fellow players. “You’re dead, fucker” is also popular. But my personal favorite? “I know where you live. You’d better sleep with one eye open, Bax.” That one was said by our captain, a senior goalie from Finland. (If you say that with an angry Finnish accent, you’ll appreciate it more.)
The thing is, my father is hardest on me. Appropriate, I suppose. For one, I’m his kid, and two, I’ve got no energy and also no desire to be at practice. All I want to do is go home and crawl into my bed and sleep for a year. But if I do that, I know my mind will fixate on Emma and what happened this morning. I should ask Cody more about their conversation. If only she’d kept my jersey, I could have used it as an excuse to go over to her place. Hell, why did I do what I did? I like that girl. A lot. I need to do something. I don’t want things to end with her. Not that way. But what can I do? Who can I ask for help?
Suddenly, it’s like a lightbulb has gone off in my head because I know who’ll help… mymom. Relief hits me in the chest. But that’s not the only place I’m hit because it’s at that precise moment, I feel sudden pain in the left side of my head, and everything fades to black.
