“Mackie, what are you doing here?”
“Hi to you too.” She’s grinning, completely at ease, sitting with a backpack over her shoulder like she visits NHL practice facilities everyday of her life.
“How did you get in here? You can’t just walk into a?—”
“Security buzzed me in.” She motions in the direction of the entrance like this is obvious. “I told him I needed to interview a player for my journalism class and he said go ahead.”
“Hank let you in?” Hank who I’ve never seen let anyone through without a credential check, including, one time, a guy who actually played for us.
“It’s for a player profile piece. First-person interview, background, game analysis.” She pulls her phone out of her pocket and waves it at me. “I’m picking you for my subject.”
“You could have texted. We could have done this at my apartment.” Where I would have had time to shower and possibly rehearse answers and definitely not be sitting here in a sweaty under-armor with helmet hair.
“That’s no fun. Isn’t this where you’ll be totally in your element?” She looks around the room. “Besides, I wanted to get the full picture.”
“The full picture smells like feet.”
“I know. It’s nostalgic.”
I leadher to a spot in the empty stands above the rink. The ice is white and bright below us and she sets her phone to record, placing it on the seat between us. I’m mentally running through my prepared script of answers to standard questions about how I got into hockey and what it’s like being a backup.
She starts with: “If you could only save one item from a burning building and it can’t be a person or a pet, what is it?”
“What does this have to do with my player profile?”
“I’m establishing your character. Answer the question.”
“I don’t know. My goalie pads?”
“Wrong.” She says it with such confidencethat I almost believe there was a right answer. “This answer reveals everything about a person and you chose equipment. That tells me you define yourself by what you do, not who you are.” She scribbles something in her notebook and I try to read it upside down but her handwriting is terrible. “Next question. What’s your most embarrassing food opinion?”
“I don’t have embarrassing food opinions.”
“Everyone has embarrassing food opinions. Mine is that I think ketchup belongs on literally anything that isn’t a dessert and I will die on that hill.”
“That’s actually disgusting.”
“See? That reaction tells me more about you than ‘what’s your pre-game routine’ ever would.” She’s leaning forward, pen moving, and I realize she’s not writing down what I’m saying, she’s writing down how I’m reacting. She’s scouting me. “Your turn. Embarrassing food opinion. Go.”
“I like pineapple on pizza.”
“Zach, that’s not embarrassing. That’s just Hawaiian pizza. Give me something real.”
“I put ranch on spaghetti one time and it wasn’t bad.”
“RANCH on SPAGHETTI?” She writes something in her notebook, underlining it twice. “That’s going in the article.”
“Please don’t put that in the article.”
“It’s totally going in the article and it’s going to be the headline. ‘Backup Goalie Puts Ranch on Spaghetti: A Profile in Chaos.’”
Her laughter is infectious and I realize I’ve never been this happy about anything that wasn’t hockey.
She does eventually get to the real stuff. Where I grew up, how I got into hockey, the path from juniors to here. She asks about my first save in an actual game and I tell her about a night in front of maybe three hundred people, a breakaway where the forward deked left and I dropped and threw my glove out and somehowcaught it. I can still feel the puck hitting the pocket. Some things your body just keeps.
I end up telling her more than I planned because she has a way of listening where she doesn’t push, but she circles back to things I say in passing, pulling on threads until the whole thing unspools. I mention my grandparents once, briefly, and she doesn’t ask a follow-up question but twenty minutes later she comes back to it from a different angle and suddenly I’m talking about things I haven’t told anyone about in years.
“So you left home at sixteen?” she asks.
