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Mathers doesn’t answer. He doesn’t leave either. He just slides his bucket over a couple of feet to make room.

We grab sticks off the rack by the door. Mine is a lefty with the tape half off the blade, and I retape it sitting on the floor while Koda dumps a second bucket out in the middle of the tiles. For a while, it’s just shooting. Rafe goes top corner, top corner, top corner. Koda misses the net entirely twice, then tries a between-the-legs thing that goes straight into the wall behind him, bounces off the rebounder, and rolls directly back into the bucket, and he throws both arms up like he meant it. I work the rebounder, pass and catch, the puck coming back off the green rail a hair faster each time I lean into it. On synthetic, the puck drags, so you have to put more into everything, and by the twentieth one, my forearms are burning in the good way, and I’ve stopped thinking about anything but the puck.

Then Rafe starts carrying. He scoops a puck off the pile and works it through the middle of the room, around the empty bucket like it’s a defenseman, around Koda, who isn’t even trying to stop him, and I step in off the rail and take it off his blade.

He stops dead. “What the fuck?”

“You were holding it.”

“We’re not playing anything.”

“You were still holding it.”

He takes it back with a hard little chop on my stick and goes again, and this time I don’t step in. I watch. He gets to the bucket. Koda drifts toward the rail, open, stick on the tiles, the way he’d be on the half wall. And Rafe pulls the puck back and goes around the bucket anyway, one more move, then another, then shoots. From the second Koda got open to the second Rafe shot: one, two, three, maybe more. In a game, three seconds is the whole play. It’s a D-man closing from the weak side, a stick in your hands, and the puck going the other way.

“That’s what you do in games,” I say.

Rafe fishes another puck out of the net. “Score?”

“Hold it too long.”

“Exactly what I fucking said,” Koda says, loud, like he’s been waiting three weeks for somebody else to say it, which he probably has.

“If I’ve got possession, why the fuck would I give it up?” Rafe says.

“Because Barnes is open.”

“Barnes,” he snickers.

Mathers snorts into his water bottle.

“You pull the first guy,” I say. “That’s good. You’re the best on the team at pulling the first guy. Then you try to beat the second one too, instead of moving it, and by then the lane you made is gone.”

“I make that play.”

“Sometimes.”

“No. Nearly every time.”

“You know you’re allowed to pass before three people are touching you, right?” Koda says. “There’s no rule. I checked.”

“Fuck off.”

He isn’t wrong, though, and that’s the problem with Rafe. He makes plays nobody else on the roster can make. He gets away with the hardest option so often that he’s stopped seeing the easy one, and every coach he’s ever had has let him, because it keeps going in. Until it doesn’t. Until it’s the third period and the other team’s D can read it.

“Okay,” I say. “Do it again. Mathers, be the D.”

Mathers sets his water bottle down without a word and walks out to the middle of the tiles, stick flat and knees bent, the way he’d stand at the blue line. Rafe takes the puck from the top. I set up low. Koda goes wide on the rail. Rafe comes down, and Mathers steps up on him, and Rafe pulls him, a real move, and Mathers bites.

“Now,” I call.

He moves it. Late, but he moves it, over to Koda on the rail, and Koda one-touches it straight back into the middle, and Rafe has already come off Mathers’s shoulder into the space Mathers left, and he gets it back in stride and rips it through the top hole of the shooter tutor so hard the whole vinyl sheet swings. It’s so much cleaner, and everybody in the room can see it, and nobody says it. Rafe fishes the puck out and doesn’t look at me. “Fuck it,” he says, and goes back to the top of the room without anybody asking and does it again. And again.

On a water break, Mathers ends up next to me at the wall. He drinks and looks at the plywood and says, low, “That night at Dec’s. I—”

“Mathers!” Koda yells. “You’re up. Try not to miss.”

Mathers shuts his mouth and goes back out.