1
ZACH
OCTOBER
We’reat the season opener afterparty after beating Calgary 3-1, Luca stopped thirty shots and looked bored doing it. I sat on the bench in full gear for sixty minutes stopping nothing. Which is my job. I suit up, prepare for a disaster that never comes, and then go to whatever bar Rodriguez drags me to. Why? Because the dude will not stop texting me. He sent fourteen messages in three minutes.
Rodriguez’s theory about goalies is that we’re all fucked up. We spend our entire lives waiting for something bad to happen to us and when nothing does, we don’t know what to do with ourselves. He dropped this statement last week in the locker room while I was taping my stick and he was eating a protein bar sideways like a harmonica. I told him it was probably the dumbest thing I’ve heard him say, and he said no, the dumbest thing he’s ever said was telling Coach Barrett the tie he was wearing made him look like a youth pastor. Barrett bag-skated him for twentyminutes, then Rodriguez threw up twice but claimed he still wouldn’t take back his opinion.
He might be onto something though, about the waiting for bad things. Because that’s exactly what I’m currently doing, in the bar the team reserves for events. Standing with my back against the wall, waiting for something bad to happen and considering my life choices, including my friendship with Rodriguez. I’ve been nursing the same beer all night and on my third recount of the ceiling tiles. Rodriguez told me I only had to go for an hour, show my face, and leave. Nothing interesting has happened tonight and so at this point I’d like to leave, except Rodriguez is my ride and now I can’t find him, I’m convinced he forgot I exist.
I watched the veterans filter out over an hour ago—Jack Anderson and his wife with Coach Barrett not far behind. The older guys peeling off until it was just the younger guys and girlfriends and people who know someone who knows someone. Rodriguez disappeared into the crowd twenty minutes ago, probably on his way to make horrible romantic decisions, which is his primary hobby. I could leave and order an Uber. He’d never notice.
I’m halfway to convincing myself when I catch it again. Red hair. A flash of it I’ve been seeing all night, a color that doesn’t match anything else in the room. I’ve been clocking it the way I clock movement on the ice, a peripheral awareness that keeps pulling my attention left even though I’m trying to look straight ahead. The crowd shifts, opening for a moment, and there she is, ten feet away. I can finally see her clearly for the first time with some guy who has his hand around her elbow. I don’t recognize either one of them.
She jerks free and says something I can’t hear over the music. She has it handled. Probably. But he reaches for her again and my feet are moving before the rest of me catches up.
I drop my arm over her shoulders and hold out the beer. “Hey babe. Sorry that took so long.”
She takes it almost automatically but I can feel her body go rigid under my arm for half a second before she leans into my side and smiles up at me. “Not a big deal.”
The guy stares at my arm, then my face. “Who the fuck are you?”
Great. I picked one of these assholes tonight. I straighten up. Planting my feet and taking up space the way I do in my crease when someone crashes the net. “She’s done talking to you, man.”
He mutters something and storms off. She steps out from under my arm and turns around and I get hit with all of it at once. Red hair, light eyes, freckles scattered across her nose that I’m counting before I can stop myself, and she looks pissed off in a way that’s somehow aimed at me. Guess she wasn’t such a damsel in distress after all.
“What the hell was that?” She demands.
“It looked like he was bothering you.”
“He was. But I had it handled.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
“Sorry.” She repeats it slowly, dragging it out. “So you’re just—what? Going back to the Stella you’ve been pacing yourself on all night?”
Wait. She was watching me? My brain files this somewhere in the back because the front is too busy counting her freckles to do anything useful with that information. I scramble for something to say.
“Can I buy you a drink?” It seems like an appropriate thing to offer. I genuinely don’t know what else to do right now.
“No, but you can take me somewhere quieter explain why you did that.”
She leads me through the back hallway, past the bathrooms, through a door propped open with a cinder block. She knowsexactly where she’s going. I suck in a breath of the October air that’s just starting to get chilly at night.
She hops up onto one of the picnic tables, plants her feet on the bench, and wraps her arm around her knees. I lean against the railing across from her under the string lights watching her breath puff out in little clouds, still trying to figure out what just happened to my night.
“I’m Zach, by the way.” I tell her.
“I know who you are.”
Oh, okay then. “So how do you know the team?”
She gives me a look like I just asked her what year it is. “That’s what you’re going to lead with? That’s so boring. Ask me something better.”
“Okay...” I have nothing because my brain has been replaced by static. “What’s something interesting about you?”
“I cried during the third period tonight.”
