Page 37 of Slashed Bonds

He saw the gap at the top of the circle.

He kept it in his peripheral through his last three strides, and he waited, and he opened his blade at the exact second he thought I’d committed to the far side.

Except I hadn’t committed to anything.

My pad was already coming across before his stick finished its arc, and the puck hit the shaft of it and went into the corner, and he stood there in the slot with both hands on his head like a man who’d been robbed by somebody wearing his own coat.

Killian skated past me and said nothing whatsoever, which from him is a standing ovation.

Forty shots a night. Give me fifty.

“See you at the rink?” he says.

“Mhmm.”

I’m not listening anymore, and he knows I’m not, because I’m looking at the wall.

It takes up the whole back of the closet, floor to ceiling.

Polaroids. Dozens of them, pinned in a spread that took me eleven months to arrange and which I’d defend with my body. Killian on the bench with blood on his chin. Cash asleep in the video room with a tablet on his face. Killian again, mid-fight, three frames in sequence. The team bus at four in the morning. Roz mid-yell. Killian a third time, because he photographs like a Renaissance saint who’s been arrested.

Between all of them run the strings.

Purple. Red. Teal blue. Stretched pin to pin, crossing and recrossing, mapping every connection I’ve made between the people I’ve decided are mine.

It looks unhinged.

It is unhinged. I’m at peace with it.

And at the center of the whole thing, suspended on a length of teal string, hangs a hockey puck.

Pressed into the black rubber, perfect and sharp and true red, is the print of a mouth.

She left it on a glass in this building nine months ago. Second-to-last thing she touched before she walked out, and I lifted the transfer off the rim with a strip of tape and spent an entire evening getting it onto that puck without smudging it.

The treasure of the collection.

Every string on that wall runs toward the middle.

Every single one of them ends at her.

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” I hum.

Because that’s the thing about the way they threw her out — whoever they are, wherever they are, and I will find out, I have never wanted anything the way I want the answer to that question.

They looked at that woman and saw refuse.

I looked at the same woman and saw the only thing in my life I’d burn down a building to keep.

“Don’t get us kicked out before we get a shot, Niko.”

“Mhmm.”

I’m not listening. He knows it. He hangs up anyway, because he’s the only person alive who lets me be exactly what I am without asking me to be less of it.

The plan is already assembling itself behind my eyes.

The gym. The card with five hundred tucked in it. The invite sitting in Roz’s inbox from a committee that’s spent four years pretending we don’t exist and has now come crawling because they need bodies in seats and blood on the ice.