Chapter Two

Monday came faster than I would have preferred.

I spent Sunday doing what I always do when I'm nervous about something: I prepared obsessively and then told myself I wasn't nervous. I made a list of interview questions. I reorganized the list. I looked up Declan Mercer's stats from last season, which were  and I say this with full journalistic objectivity annoyingly good. Forty three points in thirty one games. Conference rookie of the year. A quote in the campus paper from November where he said his goal for sophomore year was to "just play better hockey," which was either refreshingly unpretentious or deeply evasive depending on how charitable you were feeling.

I was feeling professionally neutral.

I also, at approximately eleven PM, found a video someone had posted on the athletics I*******m of him scoring a goal that involved skating around two defenders in a move that had no business being that fluid, set to a song that I would never admit made me watch it three times.

Research. Completely standard research.

The free block after two on Monday put our interview in the athletic center's second floor lounge, which had the ambiance of a waiting room that had tried to become cozy and not quite made it four chairs, a table with a scratch across it, a motivational poster that said CHAMPIONS ARE MADE IN THE OFF-SEASON in a font that suggested whoever designed it had never taken a day off in their life.

I was there at one fifty eight. I had my recorder, my notebook, my reorganized list of questions, and a coffee that I was using as a prop more than a beverage.

He arrived at two oh four, which was late enough to be noticeable and early enough to be technically fine, which I suspected was a calibrated choice and resented slightly. He had a half eaten granola bar in one hand and his jacket was inside out, which okay. Nobody calibrates an inside out jacket. That was just how he existed in the world.

"Hey." He dropped into the chair across from me and looked at the recorder on the table. "That thing on?"

"Not yet." I clicked it on. "Now it is."

He looked at it, then at me. "You're very efficient."

"You're four minutes late."

"I was in the weight room." He turned the granola bar over. "Lost track."

"How do you lose track in the weight room?"

"Same way you lose track anywhere. You're doing a thing and then more time has passed than you thought." He said it like it was obvious, like everyone's relationship with time was just a loose suggestion. "Do you not do that?"

"No," I said.

"Huh." He seemed to file this away. "Okay. What do we do you ask questions, I answer them?"

"That's generally how interviews work, yes."

"Just checking." He finished the granola bar, crumpled the wrapper, and looked around for a bin. There wasn't one within reach. He put the wrapper in his jacket pocket with the equanimity of a person who has made peace with imperfection. "Go ahead."

I looked at my list. I'd organized the questions into three sections: background, hockey, goals. Professional structure. Hendricks had specifically said she wanted human interest alongside athletic profile, which meant I needed the personal stuff too, which I'd put at the end because it felt like the conversational equivalent of deep water and I preferred to wade in.

"How long have you been playing hockey?" I started.

"Since I was three." He said it without thinking, the reflex answer. "My dad put me on skates before I could really walk properly. There's a video of me immediately sitting down on the ice and refusing to move for forty minutes."

I wrote: started age 3. Stubborn early.

"And you just  kept going?" I said.

"Never really considered not going." He leaned back in the chair. "It's like asking why you kept figure skating. At some point it stops being a choice and just becomes the thing you are."

I looked up from my notebook.

He said it simply, without any apparent awareness that it was a reasonable thing to say. Like it was obvious. Like everyone understood that there are some things you do and some things you are and the distinction matters.

I had been figure skating since I was four and nobody had ever said that to me out loud.

"Right," I said. I wrote something that was not actually words, just lines, to give my hands something to do. "Who influenced your style of play?"

He thought about it  actually thought, rather than reaching for the standard answer. "My coach here, Coach Briggs, technically. But honestly?" He tilted his head. "My little sister. She's twelve. She has zero hockey knowledge and watches every game I have footage of and she'll just say things like you looked hesitant in the third period and she's always right." He paused. "Kids don't know they're supposed to be diplomatic. It's useful."

I wrote: sister, 12. Brutally honest. His actual coaching staff.

"Does she come to games?"

"When she can. She lives with my mom in Sudbury, so " he shrugged "it's a drive. She came home in October. Made a sign."

"What did it say?"

Something crossed his face that I hadn't seen yet unguarded, briefly warm..

I was still looking at him