The whole team was out cold.
Three hours ago, this cabin had been a circus. Kowalski had started a card game that devolved into accusations of cheating within minutes. Someone had smuggled a Bluetooth speaker on board and blasted “We Are the Champions” untilCoach threatened to make everyone do bag skates for a week. Murph had attempted to give Erik a wet willy and nearly lost a finger in the process.
Now?
Silence.
Only the hum of the engines and the occasional snore from somewhere near the back.
I should have been asleep, too. We’d wrapped a twelve-day Western Conference swing: Seattle, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Denver, and Vegas.
Six cities, six games, one loss.
We were sitting at the top of the conference with a four-point cushion, playing the best hockey of the season.
I was exhausted.
Every muscle in my body ached.
And my brain felt like it had been scooped out and replaced with wet sand.
Still, I couldn’t sleep.
Fucking allergy meds.
I’d popped a Zyrtec-D before the flight because something in the Vegas hotel had made my eyes swell up like golf balls. Now, I was paying the price: wide awake and wired while everyone else got to rest.
I shifted in my seat, trying to find a comfortable position, failed, then shifted again.
I was still uncomfortable.
The leather squeaked beneath me, loud in the quiet cabin, and I froze, not wanting to wake anyone.
My phone sat on the armrest, fully charged thanks to the outlet at my seat. I stared at it for a moment, weighing my options. I could watch a movie, but by the quarter point in our season, I’d already seen everything worth watching on an airplane, and nothing that remained sounded appealing. I could read, but I’d left my book in my checked bag like an idiot. I could sit here and stare at the ceiling for the next three hours.
Or . . .
I grabbed my phone and opened Angry Birds.
Don’t judge me.
It was mindless and required zero brain cells, which was about all I had left to spare.
I flung birds at pigs for a solid forty minutes, working my way through levels I’d beaten a hundred times before. The familiar sound effects were comforting in a weird way: the stretch of the slingshot, the squawk of the birds, the crash of collapsing structures.
Then I ran out of lives.
“Shit.”
The word slipped out before I could stop it.
I glanced around, but nobody stirred.
The plane slept on, oblivious to my very important gaming crisis.
I could wait for my lives to regenerate, but that would take, what, thirty minutes? An hour? I didn’t know because I’d never been desperate enough to find out.
Or I could find something else to do.
