Page 71 of Home Ice

“Lucas, one more for Rafe—“

They tried to go through him. I’d never seen that. He clapped a hand on my shoulder and turned me up the hallway.

“Video,” he said.

We walked. In a low voice he asked, “You good?”

I lowered my head, and no words came.

I sat in my stall after video with my phone out, staring at the screen.

Mom: Marlene keeps sending me things and I keep deleting them. Dad says the fake bump is going to get you ten goals by April. Are you sleeping?

Rafe: I’m okay and sleeping a little. tell Dad they’ve started scouting the bump already, he’ll like that.

***

On game day, I took my laps during warmups and stretched at the red line, same as every game night since September. During the second lap, I realized something was missing.

The spot where the glitter kid stood was empty. Nobody took his place. It was empty, a gap in the row at the glass like a missing tooth. The bedsheet with my number and Max’s inside a heart was gone too.

The first shift, I touched the puck at our blue line, and the crowd made a sound I’d never heard.

It started down in the corners of the lower bowl and then moved through the building. It wasn’t everyone, but they were booing.

I passed the puck to Heath and skated into position.

The boos happened at specific moments. They came every time I touched the puck and stopped when it left my stick. They weren’t booing the team. Varga carried through the neutral zone to the same noise as always, and Heath won a board battle and got an appreciative roar. It was about me.

On the bench, nobody said anything about it, but Heath sat closer than he needed to. Varga talked even more than usual.

It didn’t matter for the game. On the ice, it was hockey as usual. Their D was heavy and slow to pivot, and Coach Markel said they’d give us the wall all night.

In the second period, eight minutes in, their weak-side man jumped the fake bump exactly as we’d drilled it. The door swung open behind his shoulder, and I went through and shot far side. It caromed off the post into the net.

The roar started because a goal is a goal, and the score was tied. Then I heard it catch. The sound came apart with boos landing inside the roar like hail inside rain. Entire sections suddenly went quiet.

Heath grabbed my helmet at the glass. Varga arrived yelling in Hungarian, the same as always. We skated to the bench through the noise, and Coach Markel looked down the line. “Same look next time.”

We won 3-1.

The scrum in the hallway was even bigger than at practice. I wouldn’t have thought the hallway could hold it.

Cross came out first after a quick shower on purpose. He did that only when he had a reason.

“He’s our teammate, and he had three points tonight,” Cross said. “Anything else is noise.”

Then he returned to the locker room, and they all waited for me.

I was still at my stall in my undershirt when Trier sat down next to me, in Pratt’s spot, with his phone out.

“Blood work came back,” he said, as if he were telling me something on an ordinary day. “I want to walk you through it, in case you didn’t read it from the list.” He held his phone in front of me. “This is the T4 number. Down from October. That’s the medication working. It’s the gel you rubbed in her ear, so some of this is because of you. This next one’s kidney function. At fourteen, that’s the one you monitor every ninety days without exception—“

“Trier.”

”—and hers came back like a nine-year-old’s. The vet used the word remarkable. I have it in writing.“ He scrolled with his thumb, unhurried.

“That’s good,” I said, and meant it in more than one way.