“Yeah. Went to a billet family in Michigan.”
“How old were you when you got called up?”
“Twenty.”
“I’m eighteen, but I’ll be nineteen soon,” she says, not looking up from her notebook. “In case you were wondering.”
I do the math automatically. Four years. I’m twenty-two and she’s eighteen and my brain is already doing the thing where it calculates every possible way this could be a problem.
“I figured you’d want to know before you spiraled about it privately,” she says.
“I wasn’t going to spiral.”
“You just did a little bit.” She glances up. “I watched you do it. Your whole face went weird.” She looks back at her notebook. “My parents are three years apart. It’s fine.”
She moves to the next question like she didn’t just detonate something and leave me sitting in the rubble.
“What’s the hardest part about being a backup?” she asks.
I give her the professional answer, a canned response about mental discipline, staying ready, not knowing when you’ll play. The words are smooth because I’ve said them before, to myself in the mirror on bad days.
“That’s the answer you’d give a reporter,” she says. “What’s the real answer?”
I look at her for a while. The recorder on her phone is running. Below us the rink sits silent, waiting for the next practice. She tilts her head and watches me, the pen still in her hand but not moving.
Then she reaches forward and taps the red button to stop the recording.
“The hardest part is feeling like you don’t belong,” I say. “Like everyone’s waiting for you to prove that calling you up was a mistake.”
I’ve never said that out loud before. Not to Rodriguez, not to my agent, not to anyone. And I just handed it to a girl I barely know and I should feel exposed but I don’t. I feel like I just took off equipment I didn’t know I was wearing.
“That’s not for the article,” she says quietly. “That’s just for me to know.”
She leans over and kisses me on the cheek, quick and light, and I can feel the warmth of it spread across my whole face, down through my chest and I’m going to be thinking about this for the rest of the week. Just the cheek. Just the press of her lips in a cold arena.
“I should go.” She stuffs her phone and notebook in her bag. “I picked up an afternoon shift at Pucks. But do you want to do dinner tonight? Your place?”
“Yeah. Okay.” I want to say more than that. I want to say I’d do dinner every night. I want to say I’ve been counting down hours between seeing her. But “yeah, okay” is what comes out because I’m me and I’m working on it.
“I’ll bring food. You provide the ambiance. Feet smell and all.”
She’s gone before I can come up with a response, slipping down the stairs and through the tunnel exit without hesitating.
I sit in the stands for another minute before following. Rodriguez finds me hovering in the hallway of the PT wing.
“Hey, did I see Mackie here earlier?”
“Yeah. She needed to interview me for a class.”
“Oh nice. Haven’t seen her in a while. She used to come by all the time.”
“Why?”
Rodriguez gives me a puzzled look. “Why what?”
“Why did she used to come by all the time?”
He stares at me for a second. “She grew up around here, man. You know how it is.” He grabs his bag. “You coming or what?”
