Page 33 of Rookie Mistake
He walks away. Mars walks away the way he skates: efficiently, without waste.
I stand at the smoothie bar. The facility hums around me. Players move through corridors. Luca's humming drifts from the equipment room. Gerald is somewhere in the building, watching, seeing, filing.
A data point about him. Not about risk.
Three years. Three years of the model. Three years of managing proximity and calibrating distance and treating closeness as a threat variable and the treating produced safety and the safety produced loneliness and the loneliness produced the clean apartment and the routine and the reading glasses and the tea and the eleven PM bedtime and the life that was ordered and controlled and functional and empty.
And then Eli arrived with a coffee stain and filled the empty with noise and the noise became music and the music became necessary and the necessary is the thing Mars identified: the lightness. The lightness that is making me better. The lightness that depends on a condition I am managing rather than trusting.
I pick up my shake. I drink it. The shake is protein and ice and the specific, optimized nutrition of a professional athlete's afternoon.
The shake does not taste like anything. It has never tasted like anything. It is fuel. It is the routine, and the routine is the model.
The model is running on old data.
I rinse the cup. I place it in the rack. I walk to my car.
The drive home is fourteen minutes. The apartment is warm. Eli is not here. He is at the facility gym, doing extra conditioning, because Eli does extra conditioning now, because Eli is getting better, because the getting-better is what happens when a man stops performing and starts playing. The teaspoon is in the mug. The sneakers are by the door. The plant is on the windowsill.
The data is everywhere. The data is the teaspoon and the sneakers and the plant and the T-shirt in my laundry that is his and the mug on the counter that says "World's Most Adequate Boyfriend" and the sound of the door at 5:30 when he comes home.
The data says: this person is not a threat.
The data says: update the model.
ELI
The interview happens on a Tuesday after a win against Columbus.
The reporter is from a hockey blog with decent traffic and a reputation for asking real questions instead of the "how does it feel" template that most post-game scrums run on. She's small, sharp-eyed, and asks her questions with the economy of a woman who has been told she talks too much in editorial meetings and has responded by making every word count.
"The Reapers have been called the most progressive team in professional sports," she says. "Five openly queer couples on one roster. What's it like playing in that culture as a young player?"
The question is standard. I've heard versions of it in every interview since camp. The standard answer is ready: great organization, inclusive environment, focused on hockey. The answer is true and safe and the safety is the grin deployed in interview form.
"This team makes space for people," I say. "All kinds of people. The culture isn't a policy. It's not a memo someone wrote. It's how the guys treat each other every day. It's Luca leaving biscotti in your stall before you've played a single shift.It's Mik staying after film to point at the screen until you get it. It's the fact that nobody in this locker room has ever made me feel like I had to be anything other than what I am."
The answer is longer than the standard. The answer is real. The answer escapes the grin and enters the territory of honesty, which is the territory where the grin has less authority and the underneath has more.
The reporter hears it. The reporter is good at her job and the hearing is her job.
"Including you?" she asks.
Two words. The follow-up that the standard answer was designed to prevent. "Including you?" is the question that turns a cultural observation into a personal disclosure. "Including you?" is the door.
The checkpoint runs. It evaluates the question for risk. If I say yes, the yes will be interpreted. The interpretation will be public. It will travel from this blog to the aggregators to the comment sections, and the comment sections will do what comment sections do, which is reduce a human being to a category and then argue about the category.
The checkpoint recommends: deflect. Redirect. Give the standard non-answer that preserves the ambiguity.
The checkpoint is overruled.
"Yeah," I say. "Including me."
Three words. The shortest truth I have ever told and the largest. The words exit my mouth and enter the recorder and enter the reporter's notes and enter the air of the media room, which is the same air as the locker room and the facility and the building where the hiding is optional, and the words are the first time I have made the optional into an action in a professional context.
The reporter nods. She does not push further, which tells me she is good at her job in the specific way that good reporters aregood: knowing when the answer is the answer and the answer does not require elaboration. She moves on to the next question. Something about the power play. I answer it on autopilot.
After the scrum, in the corridor, my phone buzzes. Then buzzes again. Then the buzzing becomes continuous in the specific way that phone buzzing becomes continuous when the internet has decided you are today's conversation.
