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“Third line.”
Her whole face changes. “He’s third? That’s two worse.”
“It’s one worse.”
“It’s two lines worse, Nash. You literally just told me there’s a first, a second, a third—”
“It’s one spot down from mine. Second to third.”
“Wow,” she says. “Oh, he’s plotting his revenge right now.” She pushes off the wall. “Okay, one more question.”
“I think that’s enough for tonight.”
Her lips part. “You’ve loved every second of my questions. You’ve been explaining hockey to an idiot who’s going to forget it all in ten minutes.”
“You better not.”
“I definitely will, because—” She furrows her brow. “Hockey?”
I nod. “Hockey. Get used to it. You’re coming to my games.”
She crosses her arms as I take a few steps back toward my door. “Oh, am I?”
“And you’re going to cheer for me.”
“But you don’t score.”
“Oh, I’m scoring. You’ll be screaming my name before you know it.”
She rolls her eyes. “Oh my God, Nash.”
“See? You’re already starting.”
“Is this you flirting?” She grabs her doorknob. “Because if it is—”
“You’d know,” I say, reaching for mine. “You wouldn’t have to ask.”
I go in and drop my bag, and when I come back out, the hallway is empty.
I walk past her door to the stairwell, sit on the third step with my back against the wall, and call my dad. He picks up on the first ring.
“Well?”
“Second line.”
There’s nothing for about a second and a half, and then he shouts, “Yes. Hell yes!” I pull the phone an inch from my ear. I can hear my mom say something in the background and a chair scrape across the floor, and then he’s back, louder. “Okay. Tell me.”
“Coach ran the centers head-to-head. Me and Greeley. Alternating reps.”
“What drill?”
“Low entry.”
He laughs once. “The low entry.”
I lean my shoulder against the cinderblock and look through the railing at the landing below. A low entry is when you swing back toward your own end before the play turns up ice, so you’re coming into the zone from behind instead of alongside. The puck goes up the wall, you come through the middle, and if you time it right, you arrive with speed and nobody between you and the net. If you time it wrong, you get to the top of the circle before the defenseman has turned his hips, and he stands you up, and you’ve killed the whole thing by being early. The fix is that you hold. You stay low, near the hash marks, and every muscle in your legs tells you to go, and you don’t. You let him commit first, and when he does, the ice opens up behind him.
My dad taught me that in our driveway. Fifty a night. I know the exact number, because again didn’t count. Too high, again. Too early, again. Bad pass, again. Puck behind the net, again. Forty-nine good ones and one bad one meant forty-nine.
