Page 108 of Slashed Bonds

By Saturday, Cash had stopped correcting them.

He notices when a system works. He doesn’t need to have built it.

And the dog has eaten half our gear.

Not an exaggeration. Two sets of shin pads. The palm out of Dubois’s glove. A helmet strap, a water bottle, the entire blade end of a spare stick, and the left skate guard from a pair I’d owned for six years, chewed down to the plastic like a bone.

Nobody’s mad. That’s the thing. Eighty pounds of dog sits on your foot and looks up at you with one blue eye and one ruined brown one, and whatever you were about to say about your skate guard goes somewhere else.

He slept in my doorway Friday night.

Not on the bed. Not in the room. Across the threshold, with his back against the frame and his head on his paws, facing the hall, and when I got up at four to check the locks like I do, I had to step over him and he didn’t wake.

I stood in the hall for a while afterward. I don’t know why.

Yes, I do. I’ve never once had anything decide to guard my door.

We’ll bill the committee. They want us to perform like rejects. Rejects need equipment.

The viral trajectory, as Maddie calls it, is enormous.

She built the socials in a day. New accounts, new branding, a logo that’s the viper insignia with a slash through it, and inside twenty-four hours we were trending. Not the polite kind. The whole team, the whole story, every suspension and psych note and disciplinary letter that made us rejects in the first place, dragged out into the light and set on fire.

And the public is eating it.

Like we’re the best thing to happen to hockey since the forward pass. Three emo, depressive fuckers with drug histories and a goalie who put his fist through a trophy case, and apparently that’s what the girls on the reading apps have been waiting for.

We aren’t even wearing the masks yet.

She posted one of me on Friday.

Six seconds. The hit on Teller from the scrimmage, except she cut it so you don’t see Mori at all. You see me, on the far side of the play, not moving. Standing in the lane Teller would have needed if he’d gotten up, with my stick flat on the ice, watching. The caption was two words: the wall.

Forty thousand people have watched me stand still.

Greenie showed me the comments. I read four and handed the phone back. Three of them wanted to know about the band around my neck. The fourth wanted to know if I’d ever smiled, and I have, twice, and neither time was recorded.

She’s building us one at a time. Cash next, I’d guess. Then she’ll put Mori in front of all three and let the internet do the math.

And Greenie.

He hasn’t filmed anything since Saturday morning. He’s been in the kitchen. He’s been in the lounge. He’s been wherever a pink coat is, standing half a step behind it with his hands in his pockets, and the second line has noticed, and the second line has said nothing, because the last man who said something about an Omega in this house had his arm broken by the captain.

Maddie hasn’t looked at him twice. She’s looked at him once, for a long time, and then not again. That’s a woman who’s made a decision and is letting a man sweat it.

That’s Maddie’s next idea. Walk into Ashford’s building on Tuesday with our faces covered. Good for the appeal, she says. Good for the mystery. I think she wants a streaming series about us, and I think it wouldn’t be the rivalry drama she’s picturing. It’d be a documentary. Defective Alphas fighting for a spotlight nobody wants to give them.

Maddie looked at the band around my neck for a long time when she pitched it. Didn’t ask. Filed it. She’s the only person in four years who’s looked at it the way I’d look at it, as a thing with a purpose, rather than a thing with a story.

It has a purpose. It also has a story. She’ll get one before the other, and she’s already decided which.

I wear it because there are nights the room is too loud. Not sound. Everything. Light off a surface. The grain of a wall. The count of the boards in a floor. The band goes over my eyes and the room shrinks to what I can hear, feel, and smell, and I can sleep. That’s all. It isn’t a kink and it isn’t a threat, whatever the second line has decided.

And if she puts a mask on me for Tuesday, I’ll wear it. I’ve worn worse for less.

Which is the joke.

The people at the top of this sport have been careful to give the impression that we’re desperate for the light. That we’re clawing for it. That four years in the dark made us hungry, and hungry things are manageable.