chapter 2

Jace's POV

The puck came at me low and fast, and instead of squaring up the way I’d drilled into my own bones a thousand times, I took the hit clean on the shoulder from a guy twice my patience and half my speed, let it throw me into the boards hard enough that the glass rattled and somebody on the bench swore.

“Whitfield, what the hell was that?”

Coach’s voice, somewhere behind me, muffled by the ringing in my ear. I pushed off the boards and skated it off, rolling my shoulder, grinning at nothing in particular because the impact had done exactly what I needed it to do. For one clean second there was nothing in my head but pain, simple and located and mine.

Then the second passed and my head filled right back up.

My mother’s voice, twenty years younger than it is now, coming through the thin wall of our old apartment. Mrs. Callahan from next door, standing in our doorway with a foil dish of something she didn’t need to bring, asking, the way nosy neighbors ask, careful and syrupy, whose eyes I had. My mother had laughed, easy, practiced, and said his father’s people were just tall, that’s all, tall on both sides. Mrs. Callahan nodded like that answered anything. I was six. I stood behind my mother’s leg and understood, in the specific wordless way six year olds understand things, that whatever the truth actually was, it was a door nobody was opening for me, not even her.

I skated a lap to shake it loose.

“Two minutes, then we’re doing line rushes,” Coach called out, and I used the two minutes the way I used most things lately, badly, replaying a hit I didn’t need to take.

By the time we hit the locker room forty minutes later my shoulder had stiffened into something I’d deal with tomorrow, and half the team was already loud, towels snapping, somebody’s playlist fighting somebody else’s playlist for control of the room. I peeled my pads off slow, half listening to Eli complain about his skate laces, and that’s when I clocked Dez sitting two stalls down, quiet in a way that wasn’t like him.

Dez Sullivan. Walk on. Nobody’s first round pick, nobody’s anything, really, a kid who made the roster on hustle and got maybe four shifts a game if the score was already decided. He was holding his stick like he was deciding something, turning it over in his hands, and I heard him tell Eli, low, that he’d have new blades by next week, he just had to sort a couple things out first.

I know what sorting a couple things out sounds like. I grew up fluent in it.

I didn’t say anything to him. I found the equipment guy on my way out, the older one who’d been here longer than the arena had working heat, and told him to put a new set of blades on my tab, Dez’s size, and to tell him it came from a scholarship fund or a program or whatever sounded less like charity and more like something a kid could take without his face going red.

“He’s gonna ask who,” the equipment guy said.

“Tell him it’s not important.”

“He’s gonna push.”

“Then tell him to shut up and skate.”

The equipment guy laughed and let it go. I didn’t wait around for Dez to find out, didn’t want to be standing there for whatever grateful, awkward thing he might feel obligated to say. I’ve never needed credit for things like that. Credit’s a leash. The second somebody knows what you did for them, they start expecting you to keep doing it, or worse, they start thinking they know you.

My phone was already lit up by the time I got to my car. Forty one notifications, give or take. A girl from my econ class who’d never once spoken to me before this semester asking if I was going to Eli’s thing Friday. A guy I went to high school with, someone I hadn’t talked to since graduation, wanting to know if I could get him tickets. Three different girls whose names I recognized and whose faces I’d have to think about, all saying some version of hey stranger, like disappearing for two weeks was a personality flaw instead of just what happens when you don’t have anything to say.

Forty one people who wanted something from a guy they’d built entirely out of a jersey number and a highlight reel.

I threw the phone in the cupholder and drove home with the radio too loud.

Coach caught me the next morning before I’d even gotten my gear bag off my shoulder, waving me over to the office like it was nothing, like my whole stomach didn’t drop a little every time he did that lately.

“Got a call yesterday,” he said, not looking up from whatever he was scribbling on his clipboard. “Dana Whitlock’s coming to Thursday’s game.”

I knew the name. Everyone who followed the league even a little knew the name. Dana Whitlock didn’t fly out to watch college hockey unless she already had a shortlist and was deciding who made the final cut off it.

“Thursday,” I said, like repeating it would make it smaller.

“Thursday.” Coach finally looked up, something in his face I couldn’t have named yet. “Word is she’s only got eyes for two guys in this conference right now, and you’re one of them. Don’t do anything stupid between now and then.”

I told him I wouldn’t.