For the next week, we spent every night at the curling rink, practicing, perfecting, and hoping we could find an alternate.
Andre was pissed as hell because after the first day of asking around, his cousin, Darby, agreed to register as our alternate. We needed someone, in case Shaw’s fingers got too sore for him to finish the tournament. I think Darby did it just to piss Andre off, and I wasn’t mad about that. It also ensured that Andre wouldn’t fuck up the ice out of spite because he wouldn’t want to risk making Darby look bad. Besides, Darby was a good curler, so as far as I was concerned, it was a win/win for us, and Andre could suck it.
“You should not be so petty,” Darby admonished me one evening when I might have said something to that effect out loud.
“I’ll try not to be not nice to him but only because you’re related to him,” I said.
He squinted at me.
“He means,” Shaw piped up from the sidelines, “that he’ll stop making fun of him because he doesn’t want to hurt your feelings, since he’s your cousin.”
“I can’t help that he’s my cousin,” Darby said. He chose a stone and set up at the hack, waiting while down at the other end of the ice, Perry contemplated the shot he wanted. “And I can’t help that he’s a tiny man in every way. So you can’t hurt my feelings pointing out the obvious. It’s just that I don’t want you putting bad mojo out into the universe. For your sake, not his.”
“Mojo?” It was my turn to squint at him.
“The energy you put out is the energy you get back. So you want to reflect only good things back at yourself, by putting good things out.”
“That doesn’t sound very doctor-y of you.”
“I get a lot of people through my office wondering why the bad luck found them and broke one of their bones. It’s verydifficult not to say something when the bad luck was that the wall they punched was made out of brick. I want to tell them that’s the energy they put out reflecting back on them, but I doubt most of them would take it the way I mean it. But it does get me thinking.”
“That if people don’t put out the kind of energy that makes them want to punch things…”
“Things wouldn’t strike them back. Yes. You see? You get it.”
It made a weird kind of sense, I supposed. We had put out some kind of energy to end up with Darby agreeing to be our alternate, and that was proving to be a good choice. He gelled well with the rest of us. Especially Shaw.
“I think Perry has made up his mind,” Darby said, nodding towards the other end of the rink.
I slid out to position myself ready to sweep if required, and watched as Darby set himself up, swung back, and pushed out to deliver his stone.
Three quarters of the way down the ice, Perry called for us to curl, which we did, stopping again when instructed, and watching as Darby’s rock curled perfectly into the pocket behind the guard.
Perry grinned down the ice at all of us. “You did it!” he called.
“Of course I did it. You didn’t think I was going to agree to this if I didn’t think I could keep up with you all.” Darby stood halfway down the sheet, hands on his hips, his broom sticking out at an odd angle, a grin on his face.
He looked awkward and happy. He was going to be a good fit with the rest of us.
A week later, with Shaw’s middle two fingers taped together, and a determined set to all our shoulders, we entered the house to cheers from our hometown crowd that might, if I was honest, have been almost as loud as the cheers for the Olympic team had been.
CHAPTER 8
PERRY
Hearingthe small crowd that had managed to get tickets to watch the tournament in person cheer for us got my heart racing, and not in a good way. Seeing Evan grin his face off and wave helped a little. He loved people.
One thing I never quite got used to was having randoms standing around the periphery, not part of the game, just there to watch. I sometimes felt like they were trying to see into my head to learn how I did what I did.
Joke was on them, since I had no idea how I did it. It simply happened, and I took advantage of it. My team always said my gift for finding the exact right shot was why we were top of the heap, but if they couldn’t make the shots I saw, my weird skill wouldn’t be worth much.
And make the shots, they did. Almost perfectly, delivering us effortlessly through the first game of the round robin in nine ends. With us up by ten stones, there was no point playing the last end since catching up would be impossible for the other team.
They were young guys, with only half of them over eighteen, and great sports about the defeat. Starstruck at playing in the same rink as the Olympic hopefuls, they were a bit giddy, thoughstill respectful. That didn’t stop the Darren twins from sneering at them and making unkind remarks.
“You don’t have to do that,” Evan said to one of them. “They’re just excited.”
“You’re not special,” the twin replied.
