The silence afterward lasts half a second. Then the room detonates again. Max stares at me through the laughter, grin gone, gaze warmer. Riskier. I interpret it as confirmation that he’s delighted that I’m finally playing back.
Alone in my office, I take four deep breaths. I open the journal. The butterfly on the cover has been given sunglasses. Hand-drawn, detailed. It is now wearing a small hockey jersey with the number 72.
I turn to page one.
The homework asked for three personal conflict triggers with written reflection on each. He has completed this assignment and added headers, footnotes, and what appears to be an executive summary on the inside front cover. The executive summary is three bullet points:
Conflict trigger one: being corrected by someone who is right.
Conflict trigger two: being told to calm down.
Conflict trigger three: this journal.
I read the actual entries. They are, and I record this nowhere and will take it to my grave, genuinely insightful. Specific. Honest in a way that costs something. He has written about hisfirst coach. About the word useful. About the difference between protecting people and the need to protect people, and why those are not the same thing. I read it twice.
Then I turn to the last page, where the instructions said: Any additional reflections.
He has written one line. The butterfly is growing on me. I close it. Before he arrives, I sit for a moment in the empty training room, journal in hand, along with the executive summary, footnotes, and two pages about his first coach.
I combust slightly.
The door opens. “Journal’s done,” he says, dropping into his own chair this time, the correct one. “Graded on completion or content?”
“Content,” I say.
He glances at me. At the journal. Back at me. His expression isn't the grin. The other one. Gone before I can name it, the performance back in place. “Cool,” he says. “What’s next today?”
I open my notes. “Impulse response patterns,” I say. “We’re going to talk about the seventy-one minute penalty.”
He groans. The groan of a man who was hoping that wasn’t on the record.
“It’s in the file,” I say.
“Obviously.”
“Tell me what triggered it.”
He looks at the ceiling. “You corrected my edge work.”
“And?”
“And I didn’t like it.”
“Why not?”
A pause. He stares at the ceiling a moment longer. Then back at me. The honest version of his face, the one that doesn’t have an audience. “Because you were right,” he says. “And I couldn’t argue it.” I write that down. He watches me. “That’s in there now,” he says.
