Caleb
Conditional status.
Behavioral monitoring.
One more incident and I'm gone, no appeal.
I've swallowed some version of this speech from three different coaches in three different states, so by now I could probably deliver it better than Dixon's delivering it to me. Here's how it goes. You stand still. You keep your mouth shut. You nod when it's done, and you show nothing, because the second a guy like me shows something, that something is what they write down. And you sure as hell don't have an outburst.
It used to be hard. Now I've got it down to a science. There's a trick to not giving a fuck, and the trick is you go somewhere else behind your eyes and leave your body parked at center ice in front of whoever's shoving the speech down your throat.
So my body stands there.
I quietly swallow the words.
And then Dixon turns away from me, yells up into the stands, and the whole day gets interesting.
"Where's my daughter? Hey, Jasmine, get down here, please."
Daughter.
Behind me, Bass says some wild shit. "Hold the fuck up. Coach has a daughter?"
Now here's the thing I can't get over. A rink full of hockey players, and not one of them knew the coach had a kid in the building? I mean, that's weird. Even for a group of self-absorbed hockey shits, that's weird.
Me, though? I clocked her at seven a.m. on my first lap, the way I clock everything, because it turns out everybody in a rink is watching somebody, but she was watching everybody and didn’t seem impressed by a single one of them. I know the difference because watching everybody is how you survive a house like the one I grew up in.
She had on a big hoodie, hanging onto a clipboard and a mug of something like it was her wubby. And she's pretty in a way nobody's bothered to tell her about, which is its own kind of crime.
I figured her for a team manager. Support staff. An intern, maybe.
I did not figure her for this…the coach’s daughter.
She comes down the steps slow, and I watch her do it, which is stupid, because Coach is watching me watch her. But I'll give the fat heads on this team exactly one thing. She looks nothing like her father. Dixon's a nondescript guy, pale, blonde, the human equivalent of a beige wall. She's a knockout. Dark, reddish-tan skin, a whole head of dark curls piled up in a bun that's losing the fight to hold them.
She's a walking ball of contradictions, this one. Chin up like she's the authority in the room. Sleeves pulled all the way down over her hands, which is a dead giveaway she's not half as sure of herself as the chin wants me to believe. Why? No idea. Her eyes go across the room like a scanner. Bleachers, bench, players, me. I don't know what she's adding up, but she's adding up something.
She stops at the boards and doesn't step on the ice.
And while her father talks, she does this one thing nobody else in the building catches. Her thumb finds the rubber lip of the boards and runs it. Back and forth. Slow. The entire time. Her face is a locked door, but the thumb is the tell.
I bank it. Definitely an old habit.
"This is Jasmine," Coach says to the group, in the same dead voice he just used to put me on a leash. "Some of you have apparently been walking past her for three years. That ends today."
Nobody breathes.
Not even her.
"And just so we're all on the same page, Jasmine is my kid, but she also runs my compliance program. Eligibility, conduct, documentation. As of this morning, that includes Mr. Adams."
Wait. What?
"He will report to her weekly. And when she talks, she's talking with my voice. Anybody's got a problem with that, you bring it to me. Personally."
Nobody's got a problem with that.
Hell, they're so busy short-circuiting over the fact that Coach grew a daughter overnight, I don't think they've got the spare wattage to decide whether they have a problem or not.
