Semua Bab Puck Around And Fall: Bab 11 - Bab 20

The rink at five-thirty in the afternoon had a different personality than the rink at eight in the morning.Morning practice was all business — whistles and drills and my dad's voice bouncing off the rafters like it owned them. But this was the tail end of the day, the ice freshly resurfaced, the overhead lights doing that warm amber thing they did in the last hour before the evening session. A few guys still lingered on the benches pulling off gear. The Zamboni sat parked at the far end like a very large, very slow guard dog.Knox was waiting at the boards when I pushed through the side door, still in his practice gear from the waist down but with the jersey swapped for a hoodie, hair damp and sticking up at the front in a way that suggested he'd pulled the helmet off and done absolutely nothing about it afterward. He had two cups from the vending machine in the hall — hot chocolate, the powdery kind that tasted like ambition and disappointment — and held one out when he saw me."You

I had been to exactly one hockey game in my life before Evergreen.It was a Ducks game in Anaheim when I was nine, and what I remembered about it was primarily the nachos, the way the cold hit you the second you walked into the arena, and a very large man in the row behind us who screamed so hard during a penalty call that he knocked his beer into our row and apologized so genuinely that Dad invited him to sit with us. I remembered nothing about the hockey itself. I had spent most of the third period reading a book I'd hidden in my jacket.The point is: I came to tonight with a limited frame of reference and zero expectations.That was, it turned out, the right way to come.The Evergreen Eagles' home rink held about twelve hundred people when it was full, which it was tonight because it was always full on home game nights — this was what Finn had told me on the walk from the parking lot, breath fogging, hands shoved in his hoodie pocket. The whole town showed up. It was the thing they

I found out Knox wasn't at practice the same way I found out most things in Evergreen — through the group chat, which operated with the speed and accuracy of a small-town nervous system and the editorial restraint of absolutely none.The message was from Torres: Captain's out today. Family stuff. Coach has us running suicides for the foreseeable future. Pray for us.Below it, a chain of crying emojis and one from a junior defenseman that just said this is a war crime which felt slightly dramatic but not entirely wrong given my dad's relationship with conditioning drills.I read it sitting in the library annex during my free period, Elowen open on my laptop and going exactly nowhere, and I sat with the two words — family stuff — and what they meant in the specific context of Knox Callahan, whose family stuff had one primary address.I texted him before I fully decided to.Me: Hey. You okay?The reply took twelve minutes, which was long for Knox.Knox: Dad's been admitted. Observation.

I almost didn't bring it.The chapter had been sitting in my notebook since Tuesday — handwritten, which I almost never did anymore, but something about the night after the hospital had made typing feel too clean, too final. I'd needed the drag of a pen. The way handwriting slowed you down and made you commit to each word before the next one arrived.Elowen went through the door on page three.I had written it in one sitting, two in the morning, the house quiet and the Minnesota dark doing its particular thing outside my window. It had come out the way the best writing sometimes did — not constructed but discovered, like the chapter had already existed somewhere and I was just the person holding the pen when it surfaced. I had read it back once, changed four words, and closed the notebook.I hadn't looked at it again until Thursday morning when I was packing my bag for the elective.I put it in. Took it out. Put it back in. Arrived at Ms. Okafor's repurposed-storage-room with it wedge

Knox warned me about his dad on the drive over.Not in a concerning way. In the specific, slightly pained way that people warned you about family members they loved unreservedly and were also mildly embarrassed by on a situational basis. He said it while merging onto the main road, one hand on the wheel, eyes forward, with the energy of someone delivering a legal disclaimer before a theme park ride."He's going to ask you questions," Knox said."Okay.""A lot of questions. Personal ones. He has no concept of the warm-up period.""I can handle questions.""He's also going to make at least one joke that lands somewhere between dad humor and actual comedy and you're going to laugh and then he's going to think he's hilarious for the rest of the visit, which will make the jokes worse.""Knox.""I'm just managing expectations.""You've mentioned the questions twice now. How many questions are we talking?"He glanced at me sideways. "When Finn came to visit sophomore year after the ankle thi