Page 78 of Home Ice

“No. I’m not going on camera.”

He stopped for a moment. Then my brother, who in all the years he’d been asking to film the shop had never once pushed past my first refusal, pushed back.

“Why not? This matters, Niko. There are two people getting ground up in public, and the tool that stops it is standing in this room telling me no like I asked to film the wood rack.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I could tell you I love Rafe because it’s just you in this room. It’s only us.” Miraculously, my voice remained calm and even. “The second there’s a lens involved, it’s permanent. It gets framed and posted to the world. You’d do all of it brilliantly; every choice would be correct. It’s not you, Max; it’s the camera. It would take the most important thing in my life and make it a product that I can never take off the shelf. I can’t.”

“That’s—“ He stopped and pulled back. When he spoke again, his voice was gentle. “Niko. I make products out of true things every day of my life. It’s my craft. The tile video where I grouted my own hand into the wall, that happened. It’s real, and millions of people laughed at a true thing. But it was true at that moment in time. Everything I do has a timestamp.”

“But the audience sees it as set in stone. You know they do.”

“Okay,” he said quietly. “Yeah. Okay.”

Max’s pitch was over. He picked up his coat.

“This is your call. I know that. I just had to make the case because next week I’m going to want to know I made it.”

He crossed to the door. When he got there, he stopped, but he didn’t turn all the way around.

“Then tell him, at least,” Max said. “Not two million people on the internet. Tell the one person it matters to. You just proved you can say it out loud, Niko.” He turned the rest of the way around. “Tell him.”

The bell above the door rang as he left the shop.

The block plane sat at the end of the bench, squared to the edge, where Rafe had left it.

Chapter nineteen

Rafe

Rafe: how did it go with Max?

Niko: He’s okay. It was good he came.

Iread it twice, sitting at my stall before practice. It was true, and it was short. Niko didn’t pad things, but I’d gotten four paragraphs from him about a hotel bar once.

I decided it was brothers’ business and put the phone back in my stall.

***

“Rafe,” Coach Markel said. “You’re on.”

The drills were about the fake bump, because it was dying the same death the real bump had died. Vegas had scouted it and now they planned to place a man in the middle like a boulder, daring me to keep the puck.

Coach Markel had a solution. I was to drive straight at him and dare him to guess whether I’d break left or right. On my third rush Rook floated on purpose, and I made him choose late. By the time he made a choice it didn’t matter. Heath scored on my pass.

“I was being Vegas,” Rook said.

“Vegas lost,” Heath said.

Hockey was the one thing that hadn’t changed. A closing lane was still a closing lane, and for my hours on the ice the world spoke in reads and doors, and I was fluent in the language.

The room emptied slowly after practice. Varga left loudly, as usual. Heath and Kieran left arguing about whether to buy or rent an extension ladder. I stayed at my stall and re-taped a stick.

The stick didn’t need it. I’d taped it fresh two days ago, and the tape was clean, but I stripped it anyway and started over because I needed something to do with my hands. The room was quiet, and I wasn’t ready to walk out into the rest of the day, where the phone would buzz and Max wouldn’t be there.