Page 8

"It was a perfect pass. You looked at me."

"I look at everybody."

"You never look at anybody. You have a face like a closed restaurant."

Webb laughs so hard he has to put his hands on his knees. Hale just skates to the bench. But I saw him look at me before the pass. I know what I saw.

The first time Cody Varga says it is at a faceoff in the third period.

We're lined up in our zone, and he leans into me while the linesman is fixing his sleeve. He's bigger than he was in juniors. Thicker through the neck. Still has that stupid little mustache he thinks makes him look like a hockey card from 1986.

"Cute slide," he says. "You practice that in the mirror?"

"Every night. For you, Cody."

"Save the figure skating for the parade, sweetheart. Nobody here wants to watch you twirl."

"You watched."

"Everybody watched. It's like a car crash." He smiles at me with his mouth only. "Enjoy it. Guys like you don't last in this league. They find out pretty quick nobody wants you in the room."

The puck drops. He crosschecks me in the back so hard I go to one knee, and the ref's looking the other way, and by the time I'm up the play's gone to the other end.

It's not the first time. It's not even the worst. Varga's been saying some version of that to me since I was sixteen and he was nineteen, when I came out and he found out and decided it was the funniest thing that ever happened to him. The only difference is back then I was a kid on a bus in the middle of nowhere, and now I'm in a building with cameras in every corner.

I skate back to the bench. I sit down. I'm breathing too hard for a thirty-second shift.

"What'd he say?" Hale asks.

He's not looking at me. He's looking at Varga.

"Nothing new," I say.

"What'd he say, Castel."

I look at him. He's still watching Varga across the ice, and his jaw's doing something, a muscle jumping under the skin.

"He said I won't last in this league," I tell him. "Because of the gay thing. Nobody wants me in the room."

He watches Varga. Then Moretti calls his line, and he goes over the boards without a word, and I don't know what I was expecting. It's not his job. He's known me nine days.

He lines up at center ice across from Varga, and on the next faceoff he wins the draw so hard the puck goes straight back to our D, and he doesn't chase it. He just stays there, up against Varga, and says something I can't hear.

Whatever it is, Varga stops smiling.

We win four to two. My first game, my first goal, my first win, and a crossbar that everybody on social media is apparently calling the ping heard round the world, which isn't even a good joke, but I'm going to frame it anyway.

The room after is loud for about ten minutes. Music on, guys throwing tape, Sorel trying to get the whole team to do my knee slide on the wet floor in their socks. Webb does it. Webb eats it completely and lies on his back laughing.

Then the reporters get let in, and the mood changes the way the temperature does when someone opens a door in January.

There are more of them in front of my stall than in front of Hale's. That's never happened in this room. I can tell from how the veterans look at the crowd, and then at me, and then away.

"Rémy, what does it mean to score in your debut?"

"It means I get to put the puck on my mom's mantel," I say. "She's been saving the space since I was six. There's a picture of a puck there right now, like a placeholder. Now it's a real one."

They laugh. They like that.