Then Matteo, with the unhurried elegance of a winger who has been waiting all season for a permission slip, drops his glove and punches Brennan square in the mouth.
The crack of knuckle against teeth carries down the rink. Brennan’s head snaps to the side. The other three sector-one bodies in the immediate radius register, very slowly, that they have just watched the second-line winger of the better half of their roster start a fight in a Tuesday practice over a chirp.
And then, from the blue line, where I had expected the captain to be skating in to break it up, there is a precise, almost lazyclackof stick against puck, and a puck flies down the ice at a low fast trajectory and connects with the back of Brennan’s helmet with the small undignifiedthunkof a man being scored on by his own captain.
“Oops,” Jude says, expressionless, from the line. “My bad.”
Brennan turns his head, mouth bloody, eyes wild. “You mother?—”
“ENOUGH.”
Coach Declan’s whistle is in his mouth and then it is back out again. He is not raising his voice. He does not have to. The single bark ofenoughlands at center ice with the precise weight of a man who has, in the past nine seconds, calculated exactly how much further this is allowed to escalate and decided the figure is zero.
Brennan, mouth still bloody, fights the urge to spit and loses. He spits. There is a small pink fleck on the white of the ice between his skates. Voss skates up behind him and grabs the back of his elbow, the small physical signal of a teammate intervening before something else gets said.
Coach Whitlock skates out from the visitors’ bench. His helmet is off. His clipboard is tucked under his arm in the small dramatic way of a man preparing a speech.
“See?” He addresses Declan, but his voice carries because he means it to. “This is exactly what happens when you put an Omega on a roster.”
Rémi has been, until this moment, on the far blue line at his usual defensive post. He has, as far as I am aware, said one word in the past forty-five minutes of practice, which was the wordcleancalled to a winger after a back-check.
He skates into the centre of the ice.
He does not hurry. He does not raise his stick. He stops a polite professional distance from Coach Whitlock, plants the toe of his blade in the ice, and lifts the front of his helmet cage a fraction so the man across from him can see his eyes clearly.
“Oh,” Rémi says.
Quiet. Spare. The cadence of a sentence being driven, like a long flat-headed screw, into a piece of clean hardwood.
“You are one ofthose,Coach Whitlock. The type who decides it is acceptable to rape a girl because she was wearing a short dress and asking for it. Did I get that right.”
The rink shuts up.
Not a polite quieting. The total binary on-off shut-up of forty bodies who have, in unison, registered that the defenseman who has not spoken since lunch has just used the verbrapeat center ice in a professional practice and is, with the equanimity of a man laying out a chessboard, waiting for an answer.
Coach Whitlock’s entire face does a thing. “I did not — that was not what I —”
“Because that was the structure of the statement, sir,” Rémi continues, unhurried. “That is exactly what happens when you put an Omega on a roster.An Omega is, in your formulation, the variable responsible for outcomes she has not produced. You moved the blame, in real time, from four sector-one bodies talking shit at a goalie to the goalie’s presence in the building. Which is, in my professional reading of the sentence, the bedrock of the exact framework I named.”
Nobody answers.
“For the record,” Rémi adds, looking past Whitlock now, at the whole assembled gallery of the sector-one line and the other two assistant coaches and the small wide-eyed equipment kid at the gate, “every man on this roster has off days. We have been drilling at six in the morning and seven in the afternoon for the next outbound game for two solid weeks. Sector one, please raise your hand if you have personally done a four-a.m. extra session on top of the official ones. Anyone. No hands. Got it.”
Brennan, still bleeding, lowers his eyes.
“So, instead of being supportive of an athlete who is putting in the extra rotations none of you are putting in,” Rémi continues, in the same flat even tone, “you decided to publicly humiliate her for one missed puck on a day she was off, onthe back of zero comparable workload of your own. Which is, frankly, embarrassing to watch.”
“Go drill your goalies the way she has been drilled, sirs. Two weeks. Four-a.m. extras. Barely a day off. Let us see how the lot of your gentlemen perform under that schedule. Get back to me when you have data.”
Oh.
Oh, my Defenseman D.
Rémi exhales. The huff is small. Then he turns, very deliberately, on the steel toe of his skate, and skates the short distance across the ice to me.
He stops in front of my crease. He points with his stick toward the home tunnel.
“Shower. Now.”
