Page 181

Nash

She’s on top of me when I wake up, which is how I wake up now. Her face is on my chest, one leg over both of mine, her hand where it’s been all night, flat and warm on my left side with her fingers still laced through mine.

I lie there in the gray and think about last night. I told her. The brush pile. The gas can. The burn unit. Everything I’ve never said out loud to another person in my life, I said it to her in this room, in this bed, about eight hours ago, to a girl who was kissing my scar like she could take the pain out of it.

I look down at her. She’s asleep with her mouth open and her hair all over my arm, and there’s nothing on her face but sleep.

She wakes up about twenty minutes later the way she always does, in stages, with a noise first. “It’s freezing in here.”

I pull her closer.

“I think I can see my breath.”

“You can’t.”

“Nash, I can—” and she’s already climbing over me to the window in nothing but my T-shirt. She slams it down and stands in front of it with her arms crossed. Then she comes back and gets in and puts her feet on my leg, the coldest things I’ve ever felt, and on the way down, she kisses my side. Not anywhere in particular. Wherever her mouth lands on the way past.

“What time’s skate?” she says into my ribs.

“Four.”

“Okay.” She lies all the way on top of me with her head on my chest. “I’m going back to sleep now.”

Suspended doesn’t mean excused, so I’m on the ice at four with everybody else, in my line between Rafe and Koda, running the same pre-scout stuff we’ll run tomorrow in a game I’m not dressing for. Video. Lift. And Berwyn’s harder on me than on anybody.

Third rep of the neutral-zone work, he blows it dead. “Kennebeck, you’re late.” I wasn’t late. I don’t say that. Ten minutes later, I put a guy into the boards in the corner, clean, on the puck, but harder than a Thursday calls for, and the whistle goes before the guy’s feet are back under him.

“Kennebeck.”

I put my hand up and skate back to the line. He’s not wrong. It sits in my throat all afternoon. I know exactly what I was doing in that corner, and so does he, and so does everybody else on this ice.

Greeley’s out here too. He practices. He just can’t dress, same as me. He isn’t centering the third line. Layous has had it since Monday, and Greeley’s been rotating in wherever they need a body: wing on the fourth, draws for the PK unit I’m not on this week, the back of the line. Nobody’s said one word about it in the room. He wins a draw off Layous on one of the last reps, clean, and puts it on a plate for Barnes, and nobody says anything about that either. I don’t smile about any of it.

Berwyn catches me in the hallway after, when I’m half dressed with my skates over my shoulder. “Kennebeck. Two minutes.”

I follow him into his office. He doesn’t sit, so I don’t either.

“Montreal called,” he says.

Everything in me stops.

“They’ve seen it. Obviously. They’ve also seen what we sent them, which is everything: the whole thing, the medical from that night, the statements, the discipline. They’re not taking you off their list. They asked what happened.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“The truth.” He leans back against the edge of his desk. “And when one of them gets you on the phone, or in a room, or in a hallway in January, which they will, you do the same thing. You hear me? You tell them you hit him. You tell them what he did first, because that’s a fact and not an excuse, and then you tell them you were wrong.”

“I was.”

He looks at me for a second. “And then you tell them about Sunday.”

“Sunday?”

“You walked to his house with two guys and came back without touching him.” He shrugs. “That’s the same kid making a different decision five weeks later. They can do what they want with it. But you don’t hide it, and you don’t sell it. You just say it.”

I stand there in an office that smells like the hallway, with my skates on my shoulder. “Yes, Coach.”

“Go home. Eat something. You look like hell.”