Page 100 of Slashed Bonds

Ashford runs a 2-3 forecheck, two men deep and three across the blue line, and it’s designed to make you panic on your own breakout and cough the puck up on the wall. It works on teams that hurry.

Roz’s 1-3-1 is the opposite animal. It asks you to wait. It asks the high forward to read the outlet and sit on it.

Cash. The high forward. He’ll take their breakout apart if the rest of us don’t rush.

And the ice.

There’s a bad patch in front of Ashford’s far net where the compressor line runs under the slab, and pucks die on it, and it’s marked on my page with a circle and two words. Shoot early.

I’ve drawn the 1-3-1 twice.

I’ve drawn where I’ll be on the left-side draws.

I’ve written backhand and circled it and then, a minute later, crossed it out, because Cash told me Thursday night that it’s my tell and I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

He’s the first person who’s ever been good enough to notice. That’s either a compliment or a warning, and I’ve decided it’s oddly both.

Like today.

Maddie’s been on her phone for forty minutes and she’s been productive the whole time, which I’d have bet real money against. She made an account, made a unique branding and username, and already posted three things on it.

She’s shown me none of them, and every time I’ve asked she’s held up one pink-nailed finger and said patience, Malice in the voice of a woman who’s never once had any.

She shows me now.

Turns the phone and holds it up and doesn’t hand it over, because she knows I’d scroll.

The account is called slashed. Lowercase. A period at the end, like a sentence that’s finished with you. The profile picture is a puck on black ice, and the first post is Greenie’s eleven seconds.

The stop. The hit. Teller in the air. The puck through the sheet. And under it, the sound she’s chosen, which isn’t music. It’s the sound the ice made when I stopped. The hiss, isolated, slowed down, looped under the whole clip like a blade being drawn.

No caption. No name. No hashtag.

The second post is nine seconds of Knox taking down Cash in the lobby, and the caption says the captain has been informed.

The third is a single black frame with white text: ashford. tuesday. 9am. come see.

Don’t we love open threats.

“Eleven thousand,” she says. “Since seven.”

Well fuck me sideways…

“Views?”

“Followers, bitch. Keep up.”

I don’t have anything to say to that.

I look at the black frame with the white text and something in my chest does the slow, heavy turning-over it did in the lobby when Nikolai said his name.

Come see. Two words. She’s inviting the whole county to watch me skate.

“There’s a comment,” she adds, lighter, in a way that isn’t light. “On the first one. From an account with no picture and no posts.”

She turns the phone back and reads it out.

“Enjoy it while it lasts.“