Chapter Three

With the hockey player exterior momentarily absent. "It said THAT'S MY BROTHER HE'S OKAY I GUESS in purple glitter." He looked at the table. "She made it herself. Glitter everywhere, apparently. My mom was finding it for weeks."

I stared at my notebook so I didn't smile at him.

"Okay," I said. "Athletic goals for this season."

"Conference championship."

"Everyone says that."

"Everyone wants it," he said. "Not everyone has a specific plan for it. We do." He said it without arrogance  just fact, stated plainly. "Our defensive structure last year had a gap in transition coverage. Briggs reworked it in the off season. This year we're faster on the penalty kill and our blue line communication is significantly better." He paused. "That probably sounded like very boring hockey analysis."

"I'm a journalist," I said. "I'll make it interesting."

"Can you?" He looked genuinely curious. Not condescending  curious. "Do you actually follow hockey or is this a you got assigned a hockey player and now you're figuring it out?"

I considered lying. I considered citing the video I'd watched three times as research. "The second one," I said.

He nodded slowly. "Okay. What do you know?"

"Goals are good. Ruts in the ice are bad."

"The rut thing again."

"The rut thing is load bearing," I said.

He pressed his lips together  that same almost-smile from the rink, the one that didn't quite commit and said: "Fair. What else?"

"You skate backward and don't look where you're going and somehow nothing bad happens."

"I always know where I'm going," he said. "I just don't always look like it."

"What's the difference?"

He seemed to consider how to answer. "Skating is mostly peripheral," he said. "You clock everything in your sightline edges. If you're only looking straight ahead, you're missing sixty percent of the ice." He tilted his head. "Figure skating's not like that?"

"Figure skating is extremely straight-ahead," I said. "You have a program. You know every element, every count, every transition. The whole thing is mapped before you step on the ice."

"Sounds stressful."

"Sounds like preparation," I said.

"I'm prepared," he said mildly. "Just not mapped."

We looked at each other across the scratched table and I became aware that this conversation had drifted somewhere off my reorganized list without my permission. He seemed comfortable with that. He seemed comfortable with most things, which I was finding both impressive and faintly irritating, like a math problem that kept coming out to a different answer than you'd expected.

"I have more questions," I said, looking at my notebook.

"I know," he said. He wasn't moving to leave. "Go ahead."

"Biggest challenge this season."

"Personally or for the team?"

"Both."

He thought about it. The lounge was quiet around us  the particular Monday afternoon quiet of a building between things, everyone somewhere else. "For the team, depth at right wing. We lost two seniors. The sophomores coming up are good but they're not there yet." He turned his water bottle. "Personally." He was quiet a moment longer. "Staying in the moment. I have a habit of " he paused, searching "playing ahead of where I am. Thinking about the next shift before the current one is finished."

I looked up.

"My coach calls it future tripping," he said, with a slight self-aware grimace. "Very technical term."

"Does it affect your game?"

"When I let it." He met my eyes. "I'm working on it."

I wrote it down. I wrote it down because it was a good quote and Hendricks would like it and it was the kind of specific, human thing that made a profile piece work. That was the only reason I wrote it down.

Not because it was unexpectedly honest from someone I'd assumed wouldn't be.

"Last question for today," I said.

"Today," he repeated. "How many sessions is this?"

"Hendricks wants ongoing access through the season. Games, practices, check ins." I kept my voice neutral. "Approximately once a week."

Something moved across his face  not dread, not enthusiasm. Something more like quiet interest, recalibrating. "Okay," he said. "Last question."

I looked at my list. I'd written the human interest questions in careful order, calibrated to build from easy to harder. The last one on the page said: what do you want people to know about you that they'd never assume?

I'd been proud of that question in the planning phase. It felt smart.

Sitting across from him now it felt like I'd accidentally brought a spotlight to a conversation that had been doing fine in regular lighting.

I asked it anyway.

He looked at the ceiling. Not performing the consideration actually doing it, which I was starting to understand was just how he operated, everything at its own pace, nothing rushed.

"That I'm a bad loser," he said. "People assume athletes are used to losing. That it's part of the deal, you process it and move on." He looked back at me. "I hate losing. Like, genuinely. My roommate makes himself scarce after a bad game because I need about two hours to be a functional human again." He paused. "I don't think that's admirable. I just think it's true."

I looked at him.

"Also," he said, with the specific tone of someone adding a footnote, "I'm terrified of geese. Like, genuinely, pathologically. There are geese by the east parking lot and I take the long way every single day."

I wrote: afraid of geese.

Then I looked up. "The east lot geese are not aggressive," I said.

"You say that," he said, "and yet."

"They're Canadian geese. They're basically decorative."

"They have intent," he said. "You can see it in their eyes."

I stared at him. He stared back. He was completely serious.

I looked down at my notebook so he wouldn't see my face do the thing it was doing.

"I think I have what I need for today," I said.

"Same time next week?"

"I'll be at your Wednesday practice first. Hendricks wants observational notes."

"Six AM," he said.

"I'm aware of your schedule," I said.

He stood, pulling his jacket straight, still inside-out, apparently unbothered. He was halfway to the door when he paused and turned back.

"Hey," he said. "The backward skating thing." He nodded at my notebook. "Did that make your notes?"

I glanced down at the page. Insufferably competent, underlined twice, from last Monday.

"No," I said.

He almost smiled  the real version, I was beginning to understand, not the easy public one. Just a flicker of it, there and gone.

"Sure," he said.

He left.

I sat alone in the motivational poster lounge with my recorder and my notebook and the very professional observation that Declan Mercer was  unexpectedly, inconveniently, against all prior evidence a reasonably interesting person.

I clicked the recorder off.

I was absolutely not thinking about the glitter sign