Page 30 of Rookie Mistake
"You know Nikolai?" I ask, keeping my voice level.
"He came to the rink last month with Mik. He helped me with my stopping. He's really tall." Marcus executes another crossover. The arms are doing something ambitious. "He doesn't smile much but his eyes smile. My mom says some people smile with their eyes instead of their mouths."
Marcus's mom is correct. Nikolai smiles with his eyes. The eye-smile is the underneath's version of the fraction-of-a-smile, and Marcus, who is nine, identified it in one visit.
"Do you have a girlfriend?" Marcus asks.
The question arrives the way children's questions arrive: without subtext, without weight, with the same casual curiosity he'd bring to asking my favorite color. Marcus does not know the question has teeth. Marcus does not know the question is the question I have been circling for years.
"No," I say.
"A boyfriend?"
"Sort of."
The words exit my mouth before the grin can intercept them. The words are two words and they are the first time I have said anything resembling this truth to anyone outside Ava and Nikolai. The words are small and they are enormous and they are hanging in the air of a suburban rink between me and a nine-year-old in an oversized jersey.
Marcus shrugs. "Cool. My friend Jaylen has two dads. They make really good quesadillas."
He skates away. The crossover he attempts features an arm motion that can only be described as celebratory.
I stand at the boards. My hands are on the railing. The railing is cold under my palms. The rink is full of children falling and getting up and I am very still because the two words I just said have rearranged something in my chest that I was not expecting to be rearranged by a conversation about quesadillas.
Sort of. Not "yes." Not "his name is Nikolai and he cooks pasta at ten-thirty and his hands are more honest than his words." Sort of. The hedge. The performance's last foothold in a sentence that was otherwise honest. I said "sort of" because "sort of" preserves the ambiguity that the grin requires, the escape route that the performance maintains, the space between the truth and the told.
But the told happened. The told was "sort of" and "sort of" was enough. A nine-year-old heard it and the nine-year-old's response was quesadillas and the quesadillas were the culture and the culture was: this is not remarkable. This is a fact about you that is as interesting as your favorite color and as important as your stopping technique and now let's get back to crossovers.
The kids don't care. They have never cared. The kids live in a world where two dads make quesadillas and a man can have a "sort of" boyfriend and the "sort of" is not a crisis. The crisis is the adult's. The crisis is mine.
The session continues. I work with the kids for another hour. Sofia lands five crossovers in a row and pumps her fist. Marcus tells me a story about his dog, a labradoodle named Biscuit, who is apparently the world's worst swimmer. Two kids invent a falling competition that escalates until Ren skates over and redirects with the calm authority of a man who understands that children learn through chaos.
I watch them fall. I watch them get up. The speed of the cycle is the thing I want to learn. Not the falling. The getting up. The unselfconscious, fearless, full-body commitment to getting up without first analyzing whether the falling was justified.
After the session, parents arrive. Kids are unstrapped from gear and loaded into cars. Marcus waves from the lobby. "Bye, Eli! Tell Nikolai his stopping technique is really good!"
"I will."
"And tell Mars I scored a goal!"
"I will."
"It went off my shin but Ren says it counts!"
"It counts."
The rink empties. Ren is collecting cones from the ice with methodical patience.
"You're good with them," he says.
The sentence is simple. Four words. But the emphasis on "good" implies something beyond instructional competence.
"Thanks."
Ren looks at me. The look is brief and it contains something I've seen before: in Mik's face during the weight room conversation, in Mars's two-second bar assessment, in Gerald's watching. Recognition. Not of the specific thing I'm carrying but of the carrying itself. The posture of a man holding something he hasn't fully set down.
"The kids don't care about anything except whether you're paying attention to them," Ren says. "That's their whole metric. Are you here and are you seeing me. Everything else is noise."
He goes back to collecting cones. The words stay in the air between us.
