The energy level at morning practice is what I’d expect from the Fury in pre-season. We shouldn’t have gone out on a weeknight. Spinner skates onto the ice, singing something off-key. Rookie grumbles about being left out — nobody invited him to the bar, but he was out hunting elk burgers anyway.
"You guys went to a bar without me?" Jason tapes his stick at the bench, looking wounded. "With my sister?"
"We ran into her," Spinner says, which is technically true in the sense that everything is technically something. “She was out with nurse friends. We got drinks. It was chill."
"Who's we?"
"Me, Howie, Mayhem. And Ella's friends." Spinner grins in a way that suggests McKenzie's phone number is saved in his contacts. "One of them is from Kentucky. She does this thing with her…"
"Don't want to hear it," Rookie says.
Coach blows the whistle, and we line up for drills. I feel decent, a little loose from the beer, a little tight from sleeping on the couch, but my legs are under me, and my head is clear. Clearer than it's been in weeks, actually, which is ironic given that my life is a ticking bomb of secrets and desire.
We scrimmage. First unit against second unit, full contact, coaches watching from the bench. I'm on the second line with Spinner, running a cycle play along the boards. The puck dumps into the corner, and I chase it, shoulder down, cutting hard to beat the defenseman to the wall.
What happens next takes about two seconds.
The defender, a rookie named Hargrove who outweighs me by twenty pounds, catches my outside knee with his hip as I cut left. It's not dirty. It's not even hard, really. It's just the wrong angle at the wrong speed, my blade catching a rut in the ice at the exact moment his weight hits my leg.
The pain is instant and specific — a hot, bright flare on the inside of my knee, the kind that makes your vision go white at the edges. I go down. Not dramatically, not with a scream. I just fold, one leg buckling, and hit the ice on my side with my stick clattering away.
The whistle blows. Hargrove skids to a stop and says, "Shit, Howie, I'm sorry—" and I wave him off because it's not his fault, and I can already tell this is bad.
Not catastrophic. I've had catastrophic shoulder surgery and a broken orbital bone. This isn't that. But when I try to put weight on it, the knee says no in a very clear voice. The trainer is already jogging across the ice with that look they get when they're calculating weeks instead of days.
"Don't move," he says. "Let me see."
He bends my knee. Presses on the inside. I grab the boards and squeeze until my knuckles crack.
"MCL," he says. "Almost certainly. We'll get imaging, but I can feel the laxity."
I’m not cramming for an anatomy exam like Ella, but I know that word is no good.
"How long?" I ask.
"Depends on the grade. Could be a week. Could be four.”
I lie back on the ice and stare at the ceiling — the lights, the banners, the rafters — and feel the cold seep through my jersey into my back. The team has three road games this week. A swing through Carolina and Florida.
Spinner appears above me, upside down from my vantage point. "You good?"
"MCL."
"Fuck." He taps my chest with his glove. "That sucks, bruh.”
Mayhem skates up behind Spinner, silent, looming. He looks down at me, and I look up at him, and he says nothing, because Mayhem never says what he doesn't need to. But I see something flicker across his face — not just concern about my knee. Something else. Something that says: you're about to be alone in that apartment with her for a week.
I know, I want to tell him. I know.
Rookie skates over last. "Howie. Shit. You okay?"
"I'll live."
"You need anything? Want me to call Benny?” It’s cute that Rookie thinks my agent would respond to this.
"Nah. I'll deal with it." I let the trainer and Spinner help me up, wobbling on one leg, gripping their shoulders. The knee throbs with every heartbeat, hot and swollen already, and I can feel it stiffening as the adrenaline wears off.
Tucker and Alder Stag skate up behind Spinner, the three of them insisting someone call my agent while I’m getting checked out. I hear them joking about how their agent probably already knows I’m hurt, and I wonder again if this Benny guy my dad found was another terrible decision in my long list.
