A figure emerged from the bench area, skating toward us with careful, slightly stiff motion. He was very aware that everyone was watching.
Heathcliff Donnelly.
Age twenty-one and looked nineteen. Tall, all elbows and angles, like someone had built a hockey player out of pipe cleaners and anxiety. He clamped his mouthguard so hard between his teeth that I could see his jaw muscle twitching from ten feet away.
Oh, I thought.That's what I looked like. First practice, two years ago.
Pure terror plus a desperate need to belong. I believed everyone could see straight through me to all the ways I wasn't enough.
"Donnelly, you're with Piatkowski for drills," Coach said. "Pickle, try not to break him."
Hog, somewhere behind me, muttered: "God help the kid."
I chose to interpret that as a compliment and skated over.
"Hey, Heathcliff." I stopped in front of him, spraying a little ice. "You gothic or just nervous?"
He blinked at me. Up close, I saw freckles scattered across his nose and a tiny scar through one eyebrow.
"Is that... a real question?"
"Both is also an option. Gothic and nervous. Very Victorian. Very consumptive-poet-on-the-moors."
His mouth twitched. Not quite a smile, but the ghost of one.
"Just nervous," he admitted. "Really, really nervous."
"Good. That means you care." I clapped him on the shoulder, the way Hog had done for me a hundred times. "Come on. I'll show you where we're doing passing drills. Try not to trip over anything—that's my job."
Adrian's camera tracked us as I led Heath across the ice.
I didn't preen, but I might have stood a little straighter.
The passing drills were simple. Heath made them look like advanced calculus.
His passes were technically fine, but everything else was a disaster. He second-guessed every motion half a beat before he committed to it, which meant he was always a half-beat behind.
Halfway through the rotation, Heath's pass went wide. Not a little wide—catastrophically wide. The puck skittered across three lanes and clipped Coach's skate.
Coach turned. I knew that turn. That was the turn that preceded the voice, and the voice preceded the skating drills that made rookies cry.
"Hey Coach!" I banged my stick against the boards. "I think the Zamboni blade's off again! The ice feels weird right here, like there's a—"
"Piatkowski, I swear to God—"
"It's a texture thing! A vibe! The puck's not rolling true!"
Coach stared at me with the expression of a man calculating whether prison time was worth it. By the time he finished deciding against homicide, Heath had reset. The drill resumed. Coach's attention stayed on me—where it belonged, where it always belonged.
I didn't think about it. That's just how it worked.
"Loosen your grip," I told Heath during the water break. "You're choking your stick. Let it breathe."
Heath looked down at his white knuckles. "Sorry. Everyone's watching."
"Not really. Desrosiers is watching his own reflection. Hog's mentally composing a new knitting project, and the camera guy's doing his camera thing."
"Is it always like... this?" he whispered. "All of it?"
