“I am easy,” I shoot back.
He shakes his head. “That wasn’t easy. That was a love letter.”
Benson, two seats down, eyes on his visor, wiping it with his thumb. “Cool it, Blue.”
My eyes snap to his. “Heard you earlier, cap.”
He replies, “Heard isn’t doing it.”
I look forward. “I’m cooling it.” I breathe through my nose, and the breath is coming back too hot. Stanley bumps my shoulder a second time without looking at me, harder, with the back of his elbow, and I know what that means.
Knock it off, Golding.
Late in the first period, I take a tripping call.
I want to be honest in my own head because there’s no point being a liar when you’re alone in a penalty box. I didn’t earn the call on the play the ref saw. I earned the call on the play before, when I cross-checked the kid in the back on a battle along the boards that the ref didn’t have eyes on. The next time the ref looked at me, he was going to find a reason. I gave him one.
I take the call standing up. I skate to the box. I don’t look at the ref.
The kid is on the power play.
They set up. He gets the puck at the top of the umbrella. He doesn’t shoot — fakes the shot, draws the killer down, slidesthe puck low to a winger, the winger slings it across the slot, a forward I don’t know the name of buries it.
Lowell up 1-0.
The kid skates his celebration loop with his arms up.
He comes past the glass of my box and slows. He looks at me through the plexiglass and grins.
I sit on the bench inside the box with my stick across my thighs, and I look back at him through the glass.I have two periods to make you remember this game for the rest of your life.
The box door opens. I stand up and skate to the bench. I sit down next to Benson. He looks at me and holds our eye contact. I look away first.
The kid is going to keep his head up for the next twenty minutes. He’s going to chirp from the safety of the bench and play his angles in his own zone. It’s what I would do. It’s what I am doing — playing my game, moving pucks, making the safe pass to Stanley, blocking a shot in the second with my left shin that I am going to feel in the morning. I take a clean hit on a kid who isn’t number twenty-two, and I take it well. The kid groans on his way back to the bench and Stanley laughs about it from the box.
I wait.
The kid’s patient. So am I.
He gets sloppy in the middle of the second.
A faceoff in the Lowell zone, low circle to the right of Percy. The kid is on the wall to my left. I’m at the net front. The puck is dropped, and it does what loose pucks do, which is bounce in a way nobody at the dot expects, and it comes squirting out toward the boards into the no-man’s land between him and me.
I get there first.
He gets there second.
I cross-check him.
Hard.
The kind of cross-check the ref sees from the moon. The kind that saysthis is for March, you piece of shit.The kind he feels in the small of his back for the next ninety minutes.
He turns. His gloves are coming off before he’s all the way around.
We go.
He gets one in on my chin I don’t feel. I get two in on his jaw I feel through my whole arm — my hand is going to be a problem tomorrow, the third knuckle on my right hand specifically — but my hand isn’t my problem right now. The third punch I throw opens his lip.
