Page 20 of On His Team

His face brightens. “Thank you.”

“Put it on a pillow.”

The room breaks. People start talking again.

Stanley tells her she has no respect for leadership. Mara wants the party rule reconsidered. Benson reaches across the table for the marker before Stanley can add anything else.

I keep looking at the board.

Five rules.

One semester.

Chapter 3

GIANNA

I get my hip against the side of the laundry cart and shove. It goes about a foot and a half and stops, because one of the wheels on this cart has been dragging since November, and Donovan keeps saying he’ll put in for a new one. The whole thing is full of practice jerseys that came off the ice ninety minutes ago and got dumped straight into it, still wet, in a pile. I shove again. It goes this time.

The equipment room at Camden runs the length of the hallway behind the home locker room, and it’s basically a garage with better lighting. Concrete floor with a drain in the middle. Two industrial washers and two dryers along the back wall; both dryers are running right now and are loud enough to shake my brain. Steel shelving runs from floor to ceiling on the left, all labeled in Donovan’s handwriting. Skate bench and the sharpener on the right, under the good light.

The whole room smells like hot detergent and wet gear. There’s no fixing that. You can wash everything in this building every single day, and the room still smells like this. I’ve stopped noticing except when I get in my car afterward and catch it in my own hair.

I get the cart to the washer, open the door with my elbow, and start loading.

“Gianna.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you count the socks?” Donovan’s somewhere behind the shelving. I can hear him moving boxes.

I answer, “I counted the socks.”

“How short are we?”

“Nine.”

He comes around the end of the shelf with a clipboard and a pen behind his ear. Donovan’s got maybe fifteen years on any of us and the shoulders of a guy who used to play something, and I have never once seen him sit down.

“Nine?”

“Nine pairs. From a full set of thirty-one.”

He’s not talking to me anyway. He’s annoyed. “Over ten days.”

I nod. “Yeah.”

He writes it down. “They took them home.”

I force my mouth into a line.

“Every year.” He clicks the pen. “Every single year.” He shakes his head and goes back around the shelf.

Nobody in my family completely understands why I picked this major. My mom asked me once if I wanted to work in hockey because of Benson, which is a fair question considering I followed him to Camden in the first place. But Benson is the reason I knew this world existed. He isn’t the reason I stayed interested in it.

I’m elbow-deep in a washing machine full of other people’s sweat, and I’m going to be here another two hours. But there’s a version of Camden hockey that people see — the lights, the horn, the people in the stands on a Friday — and then there’s this, which is a concrete room with a floor drain where somebody has to know that there are thirty-one pairs of socks and where all of them are. I like knowing where things are. I like that when the team gets on a bus at six in the morning, everything they need is on it because I put it there. Nothing can be great without the people who work behind the scenes, and I love being part of that.

Cole’s at the sharpener with his back to me, running a pair of steel through, and the noise of it cuts across the dryers every few seconds in a way that goes through my molars.