Page 13 of On His Team

I breathe hard through my nose. “Then what the fuck am I doing?”

“Seeing it.”

He taps my shin pad once with his stick. Then he skates away.

I stand there with my hands over the top of my stick, watching him go. And that’s different. That isn’t what Aspen wrote. It’s not what Fuller is asking. The wall isn’t the problem. The middle isn’t the answer. The problem is deciding before I know.

I skate back to the puck pile.

Sixty-two of ninety-one went up the wall.

Maybe sixty-two was right.

Maybe forty was right.

Maybe seventy should have.

That isn’t the point. The point is I didn’t choose sixty-two different times. I chose it once. Then I kept repeating the decision.

“Again,” I say.

Mackey bends over with his hands on his knees. “You said twenty minutes.”

“We haven’t been out here twenty minutes.”

“It has been forty-eight.”

I look at the clock. “Okay.”

“That is all you have to say?”

“Ten more.”

He looks toward the ceiling. Benson is already skating back into position. Percy taps his stick against the crease.

Mackey sighs. “Ten.”

We do twenty-two.

By the last few, I stop narrating every step inside my head.

Most of the team gets off the ice like the building is on fire. Mackey leaves before I can ask him for anything else. I’m following when the toe of my right skate catches a rut near the boards. My foot turns. I go into the wall harder than I meant to. Nothing hurts. Then I push off. Something in the boot shifts.

I sit on the bench and pull the skate off. The top eyelet on the outside has torn most of the way through the leather. Metal hanging loose. If I tighten the laces, it’ll rip out completely.

Benson stops beside the bench. “Bad?”

I shake my head. “Punch job.”

“Equipment open?”

“Not today.”

“You want to call someone?”

“No.” I put the skate in my bag. I’m not asking somebody to come to the rink on New Year’s Day because one eyelet is loose. “I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

When we get back to Hawthorne, I can smell the food before Benson gets the door all the way open. Bacon. Coffee. Something with onions.