Mackie
tragic. Little Puck will never forgive you
I knowwhere she’s sitting at the game that night because she told me but I refuse to turn my head even once because Rodriguez has been watching me since we landed.
I’m on the bench. Luca is in net. This is how it works.
First period is physical and tight. Luca is doing Luca things—a glove save five minutes in where he picks the puck out of the air and the building groans because they know they didn’t score but they also know they should have. I track every shot from the bench the way I always do, reading releases, running saves in my head. Wrister from the top of the circle—I’m going glove side, the angle is narrow and he’s going to try to pick the corner. Luca reads it the same way.
Late in the first there’s a scramble in the crease, bodies everywhere, and Luca goes down hard on his left side. He gets up and plays on. But when he pushes off to reset his post there’s a hitch in his left hip. He doesn’t come out for the second.
Barrett is next to me before the Zamboni is off the ice. “Almardon, you’re up.”
The second period is good. Everything’s tracking—releases coming early, edges where they need to be, and I can feel the crease the way you feel it when it’s yours, when the angles make sense. There’s a breakaway in the first five minutes. I stay big, force the shooter wide, and the bench erupts and I let myself feel it for one second before I reset.
And then my brain serves up the sound she made when I pulled her hair. I can’t let it shake my focus, but it’s playing on a loop in my head. The specific pitch of the noise, how she suckedharder and took me deeper and then how she opened her mouth at the end. Stop. Lock in. Find the puck.
Third period undoes everything.
First goal is a point shot I should have had. I lose the release off the stick, and by the time I pick it up it’s past me. One goal. Recoverable but I let in two more goals and then it’s over. We lose 4-1.
On the bus Rodriguez sits next to Dex instead of me and I love him for it. I stare out the window running the second goal on a loop—the angle, the release, the three inches between my glove and the puck that might as well have been three miles. My phone buzzes.
Mackie
what’s your room number
I look at it for a long time. I should tell her not to come. I should say I need to be alone, that I need to sit with this and run the film and figure out where my positioning broke down. That’s what I should do.
I type my room number and hit send.
20
MACKIE
My phone has beenin my hand since I got back to the room.
I held my breath for what felt like the entire second and third period. And now I’m sitting on the edge of my hotel bed still in my game day outfit staring at my phone waiting for his room number.
My mom comes out of the bathroom with her earrings in and her coat over her arm and looks at me. “Your dad’s on his way back from the arena. We’re going to go grab a late dinner.”
I jump about six inches off the bed.
She looks at my phone. Then at me. Then at my phone again.
“Okay,” I say. “Perfect. I’m going to stay here actually, I’m not feeling great.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I figured.” She picks up her purse from the desk and pauses at the door. “I’ll be back by midnight.”
She looks at me with eyes that have never missed anything in my entire life.
“Make sureyou’reback by midnight.”
The door closes behind her.
So that’s confirmation. My mother knows I’m about to go somewhere in this hotel that isn’t this room and she just gave me a curfew for it. I’m choosing not to think about that right now because if I think about how much my mom knows I will have to think about how much she’s been choosing not to say and that’s a conversation for a day when my boyfriend isn’t sitting somewhere in this building taking himself apart.
Zach
