“My type is people who don’t get introduced to me by their teammates.”
“That’s not a type, that’s a trauma response.”
“Hayes.”
“I’m just saying.” He held up both palms.
“Find somewhere else to be.”
Hayes found somewhere else to be. Someone floated the idea of Rick’s, the bar on Liberty the team used as a default. A general murmur of interest through the room, twenty-two guys deciding they deserved to be somewhere loud with overpriced drinks.
* * *
Finn went to the library instead. The reading room on the second floor had tall windows that looked out over the quad, the glass gone opaque by five, and the old radiators clicked in the cold. Finn sat at a desk near the wall with his headphones on and a textbook open to a page about macroeconomic policy he’d been staring at without absorbing a word. He turned a page. Didn’t read that one either. The next day he did it again. The day after that. The pattern became the week.
* * *
The locker room was mostly empty by eight. Late skate, justa handful of players staying after, and they’d filtered out. The ventilation was louder without voices to compete with, the rubber mats drying in uneven patches where wet feet had tracked across them. Hayes was there when Finn came in from the ice, sitting in his stall with his skates off and his phone face-down on his knee. He’d showered already, his hair damp and pushed off his forehead.
Finn sat down and started on his left skate lace. It had been giving him trouble, the eyelet on the third row sitting wrong, catching when he pulled it tight. The waxed lace snagged and he worked it with his thumbnail, the metal edge biting into the pad of his finger.
“You’re in it with someone.” Hayes said it flat, the way he said things when he’d already decided they were true.
Finn didn’t look up from the lace. “I’m tying my skate.”
“Yeah. You’ve been tying your skate for two weeks.”
The HVAC cycled somewhere in the building, a low hum and then a click. Through the small window above the schedule board, the sky had gone flat.
“Whoever they are,” Hayes said, “they’re an idiot for letting you go.”
Finn’s hands stopped. The lace between his fingers, the eyelet catching, the mat cold under his feet. His ribs compressed.
“Yeah.” He pulled the lace tight. “Well. Their call, not mine.”
Hayes nodded. Picked up his phone. Finn finished the lace, got his skates off, went to the shower. The water ran hot and the tile walls threw the noise at him, and he stood under the spray with his head down until his shoulders loosened and his breathing evened out.
When he came out, Hayes was gone.
His phone rang. Unknown number, Chicago area code.
Finn let it ring once. Answered.
“Finn Holloway?”
“Yeah.”
“Eli Kowalski. Chicago Fury.”
Finn sat up straight. His spine went rigid at the stall. “Holy shit.”
Silence on the line. “Good holy shit or bad holy shit?”
“Good. Definitely good. Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Eli Kowalski was calling his cell phone. Eli Kowalski, whose name was on a plaque outside the rink, whose jersey hung in the corridor Finn walked through every day. “Michigan players are good people.” The voice dropped half a register. “You’ll be fine.”
The call was brief. The voice had been calm, a little dry. Finn held the phone at his thigh, the screen warm, then set it on the shelf.
