Page 6 of Puck the Coach's Son
“No. Thanks. I've got it from here.”
“Up to you.”
I walk away. I walk slow. I can feel him not watching me, which is as good as watching me. I smile at the leg press machine on the far wall like the leg press is in on the joke.
Then I do my accessories: Romanian deadlifts and hamstring curls and calf raises, which are the least interesting exercises in the gym and which I did not plan on doing today, but which keep me in the same room as him for another eighteen minutes. He does four lifts. Two of them I watch in the mirror and two of them I don't. He does not add another warm-up plate. He does not look at me once more.
When he leaves, he takes the slow route past the door, the one that puts him in the corner of my vision whether I want him there or not.
I towel my face off and I check my phone and I do not look at the door.
“All yours, Mad Dog.” The front desk guy has come in to wipe down the benches. He's been watching me too, probably. Everyone watches the enforcer in a pro gym. It's part of the job.
“Thanks, bud.” I rack my dumbbells. I grab my bag. I leave.
Ice at eleven.
New coach is angry. You can see it in the line of his shoulders through the glass before he comes out the bench door, and the room feels it a half-second before he's on the ice. Yesterday was day one. Today is day two, and day two is when he makes day one mean something, and the thing he wants day one to mean isCreed.
Fine.
I am on the second line for the system work. That's already punitive. I belong on the first line and everyone in this building knows it. I line up where I'm told. Coach runs us through breakout options. He names the system. It's not a bad system. It's his system. It's the system I refuse to play inside, which is the point of the exercise, and he knows it, and I know he knows it.
I run it wrong.
Not wrong enough to get cut. Wrong enough that he notices. I take the weakside option when the system calls for the strongside option. I cut back behind the net when the system says to go up the wall.
“Creed.”
I stop. I turn. I look at him.
“The system,” he says, “is the strongside option.”
“Yeah, Coach. My bad.”
“Run it again.”
I run it again. I take the weakside option.
He blows the whistle so hard the bench flinches.
“Off.”
I skate to the bench. I don't hurry. I don't drag. I sit where I'm told. My teammates do not look at me, which is its own form of looking at me. Phoenix leans over once from a stall down and says, under his breath, “Bud.”
“I'm good.”
He watches my face with his captain's patience.
“You're not good. Chill.”
I spit on the ice between the bench and the boards, which is a thing I do to indicate I've heard him. I do not indicate whether I've heard him correctly.
“I said I'm good.”
He drops it. Phoenix is a good captain. He has to try and he has to know when to stop.
Coach runs the rest of the first line through the system three times without me, and then he starts putting the second line through it, and I sit on the bench and watch the kid.
