Page 12 of Puck You Both

"Celeste. I'm in."

She pauses mid-word. In the background, faintly, a familiar voice screeches, "WHAT THE PUUUUCK."

"You… You don't want to think about it first?"

"No, ma'am."

"Stop calling me ma'am, I've told you a hundred times."

"Yes, ma'am."

She laughs, then gets audibly misty about it, while Papa Paws says something in the background about drywalls.

I’d walk into traffic for that woman. She called me her tall boy once, and I have not yet recovered.

We hang up. I look at the email one more time.

So the assignment comes with mandatory Patrick exposure, so what? It’s fine. It’s irrelevant. What happened in that video room is irrelevant to this campaign, irrelevant to the charity, and irrelevant to me personally.

Irrelevant.

I finish my cold coffee.

I am normal.

***

PRACTICE IS PRACTICE. I stop pucks. The puck-stopping goes incredibly well, actually, courtesy of sublimation. Coach Martin watches me for ten straight minutes and says nothing, which from him is high praise.

Today’s a good day. And it’s a good day all day, all the way until 9:47 PM when it stops being good and turns into a day you wish never happened, when my phone buzzes and I make the grave mistake of looking at the screen.

Unknown: You forgot your puck. — P.G.

No.

No, no, no.

This could be anybody.

Three dots appear under the message.

This is anybody. And they have the wrong number. Lots of people have pucks and lots of people forget them, and then other people text them about it, and they feel the need to sign their texts, and I bet there are millions of people with those initials that happen to know people who—

Unknown: We need to talk about what you saw.

—who need to be talked to about what they say and for fuck’s sake, how is this my life?

I sigh as several responses fight for dominance.

There's nothing to talk about. (Lie.)

I didn't see anything. (Bigger lie.)

I saw everything and I'm not sure how I feel about it. (Truth, therefore unusable.)

Fuck it. I don’t have to respond. He’s not my coach or my teacher or anyone with a shred of authority over me and I’m going to murder whoever gave him my number.

I put the phone face-down on the couch and resume my mobility routine. Twenty-two minutes, every joint, and I do all of it staring at the back of my phone, which sits there the whole time like a landmine