“Everything’s in here,” I say.
“Great.”
“It’s also conflict trigger number one,” I say. “From your executive summary.”
He stares at me. “You read the executive summary.”
“I read everything.”
“I wrote that as a joke.”
“It was accurate.”
He is silent for a moment. Then: “This is the worst class I’ve ever taken.”
“You’re getting an A,” I say. The silence that follows is different. He wasn't expecting that.
He picks up his water bottle. Takes a drink. Sets it down. “An A,” he says.
“Provisionally.”
“What drops it?”
“Another seventy-one minute penalty.”
“Understood.” he nods. Serious. “The butterfly stays.”
“I assumed.”
“I named her.” My gaze lifts from the screen. “Toni,” he says. “I named the butterfly Toni.”
I note in the file:Subjecthas named the journal butterfly after the compliance officer. Recommend psychological evaluation.He reads it upside down and grins so wide it reaches his eyes. That grin. The real one.
I focus on my tablet before it costs me anything visible. Too late. He sees it anyway. He always sees it.
Chapter Thirteen
Toni Amato
The arena is a different building without a crowd in it. Without the noise and the smoke and the twenty thousand bodies oriented toward a single point, it reduces to what it actually is: a cold box with excellent acoustics and a lot of fluorescent light. Sound travels differently on empty ice. A skate stop on the far end of the rink carries to the tunnel mouth in under a second. A child’s shriek reaches the upper bowl and comes back as an echo. The building multiplies sound the way it multiplies everything. Takes ordinary things and makes them enormous.
The rink belongs to the kids on Saturday mornings. I agreed to come in early and review the week’s footage with Coach Briggs. Nobody told me that the Gold Coast Guardians open the practice ice to family skates on Saturdays from eight to ten,or that family means approximately forty children in various stages of helmet chaos and full-grown professional hockey players who apparently cannot say no to a four-year-old with a plastic stick.
As I round the corner of the tunnel, I almost collide with a small person wearing a jersey that’s four sizes too big and exuding an aura of absolute authority. She stares up at me. Maybe three years old. Possibly running the operation.
“Hi,” I say.
She considers me with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice. Then she holds out a foam puck. “You drop it,” she says.
“I — sorry?”
“You DROP it.” She thrusts the puck higher. “For the faceoff.”
I take the puck. Drop it. She slaps it with her stick and charges after it across the rubber mat with total conviction, and I watch her go, slightly stunned, before I glance up and see the rest of it.
The ice is full.
Piper is out there with two kids I recognize from her phone wallpaper. There’s a boy, maybe two years old, who’s probably skating better than he can walk. He’s a bit reckless, but he’s also quite agile. Then there’s a girl who moves like she’s been on skates since she was a baby. Chase Maddox, retired goalie and apparently still enormous even out of pads, skates backward in slow, patient circles while a toddler grips both his index fingers and takes steps the size of postage stamps. Harper Knoxis near the boards, laughing at something, her husband’s arm around her shoulders.
