"During the first play especially," he said. "You're compensating and it's costing you half a second."
I said nothing.
"The turnover in the first period —"
"I recovered it."
"You recovered it because they weren't ready. They'll be ready in the third." He said this with the patience of a man who hadalways known more than everyone in the room. "You're dropping your shoulder on the approach. You've been dropping it all season and you keep not fixing it. Do I have to punish you, Jamie? Are you ever going to learn?"
Across the rink Jonah's dad was still talking to him. He was pointing at something on the ice, explaining something, and Jonah was nodding and his dad ruffled his hair and Jonah ducked away from it laughing and his dad grabbed him back.
"Are you listening to me?" His patience was running thin.
"Yes," I said, solemnly. I looked at the ice.
I listened to my father take apart the best period of hockey I had ever played in my life, piece by piece, with the quiet methodical patience of a man who had never found anything I'd done to be quite enough. The dropped shoulder. The hesitation on the right side. The turnover. The two seconds in the first play where my edge work wasn't what it should have been. He went through all of it while the team moved around us and Coach Heller talked to the defense and somewhere Jonah was laughing at something his dad said.
I drank my water and I kept my eyes on the ice to stop my eyes from blurring.
Be strong. Don’t show anyone anything. Shove it down.
I went back out for the third period and I played the best hockey of my life. We won by three.
The locker room after was loud in the way locker rooms were after real wins — not polite, the uncontrolled noise of a group of people who had just done something together and couldn't quite believe it yet. Someone had music going. Someone else was yelling about something. There was gear everywhere and the smell of sweat and ice and tape and I was sitting at my stall with my skates off letting it move around me. Just taking it in quietly.
Jonah found me before I'd gotten my pads off. He sat down nextto me the way he'd been sitting next to me for months and didn't say anything. Just sat there with his elbows on his knees looking at the floor, still catching his breath from the game.
Then he said, without looking up, "I've never played with anyone like you."
I looked at him.
He looked up.
And there it was again — that thing from the ice, from the goal celebration, from every look across the rink that whole season. Right there between us in the noisy locker room, quiet and completely clear. He wasn't trying to do anything with it. He was just — letting me see it. The way he let me see everything, without checking first, without any armor.
I looked at him for a second too long.
I could let myself have it for just a second.
"Jonah." Coach Heller's voice from across the room.
He went.
I looked at my skates and I sat very still.
My dad was waiting outside the rink.
Not in the lobby with the other parents — outside, in the cold, standing by the car with his hands in his pockets. I saw him through the glass doors before I pushed them open. Something tightened in my chest that had nothing to do with the game anymore. I pushed the doors open and the cold hit me hard after the warmth of the locker room. After Jonah.
"Good third period," he said.
I waited. There was always something after the good.
"The shoulder," he said. "Still dropping it."
"I know."
"You know but you're still doing it. Knowing isn't the same as fixing it." He looked through me. "The Caldwell coach was there —I talked to him after the second period. He asked about you. I told him you were still working on your consistency. You're attracting attention early and wasting it, Jamie."
