Page 71 of Knottingley Ever After
I hate it.
I do not let myself acknowledge that I hate it.
“Wash up.” I lift my voice to the room without looking away from her crease. “Tomorrow morning, six sharp. Late means a wasted day of drills with no scrimmage, so unless you have a soft spot for skating in circles until your hamstrings file a complaint, do not be late. Dismissed.”
I turn before the team can read whatever else is on my face, and I skate.
My office is a small panelled room at the back of the staff wing, originally a faculty parlour in a building that has not been a parlour in fifty years. Bookshelves I have largely failed to fill. A desk that came with the room. A leather chair I bought myself the first summer I was hired. The wall opposite the door holds the framed inventory I do not look at unless I have a guest, which is a wall of plaques and signed pucks and one yellowingnewspaper page that calls me the youngest head coach in the league’s history to take a senior roster to the championship, and which now hangs there primarily as a reminder that you can win a great deal in this sport and still come home, every night for a decade, to a flat that smells of cedar and your own coffee and nothing else.
I sit. I open the next folder in the stack. I am four signatures into a stack of fourteen when the door does not knock so much as suffer a polite warning shot before opening.
Whitlock first. Marek a half-step behind him, the travel mug in his hand at last empty, which is itself an event.
“Declan.”
“Gentlemen.” I do not look up from the form. “You are aware I have a meeting in twenty minutes.”
“Which is why,” Whitlock says, in the carefully metered voice of a man who has rehearsed his entry, “we wanted to catch you first. Now exactly what strings did you pull to get the girl on the team.”
I lift my eyes.
They are both standing in front of my desk with the matched, faintly betrayed expressions of two men who feel a piece of household furniture has been rearranged behind their backs. The disappointment is rehearsed. The anger is real and lives lower in the chest than either of them would admit to.
I cap the pen. Set it down. Lean back.
“What exactly is the issue.”
“Ten years of regulation,” Marek says, with the flatness of a man who has, in his time, used the wordregulationwith affection. “The league has a clean and consistent ruling on pack-eligibility for Omega athletes, the ruling has been respected in every program in the country for the last decade, and your captain, on your countersignature, walked it across the lawn yesterday and dropped it in a bin. With two of his seniorteammates piling on as the supposed rest of her pack overnight. None of which is plausible. None of which makes sense.”
“Speak the rest, Marek.”
“You orchestrated this.”
“Mm.” I let the corner of my mouth do approximately nothing. “If you genuinely believe that is true, gentlemen, and that I have manufactured an entire packship arrangement out of thin air to bypass a league rule, you are well within your rights to escalate. The KPLO compliance office takes anonymous tips. So does the headmaster’s council. So does, indeed, the league commissioner. I will gladly write the email myself if you would like the cc.”
Whitlock’s mouth thins.
“The league only listens to you, Declan.”
I laugh.
It is not the right room for it, and I am not the right man for it, and I do it anyway, short and dry and entirely without warmth.
“No, gentlemen. The league listens to me because I was the youngest head coach in its history to take an Alpha-roster team to a championship final, and I am still, at thirty-six, the youngest coach on staff at any program in this division with more than ten years of senior-tier head-coaching experience. The league does notlikeme. It tolerates me, because the alternative is publicly admitting that the man with the trophy case is also the man who, in your shared opinion, has lost his professional mind over the first pink-haired Omega to walk through the door.”
Marek opens his mouth. I keep going.
“What you two are afraid of, and you can correct me if I have misread the room, is that I will, in fact, be the first coach in this conference to put an Omega goalie on a televised playoff series. That she will be on national broadcast, in a crease, doing her job. That every Omega kid watching with her parents will see her andunderstand the door is not actually nailed shut. That the next six years’ worth of Omega applicants this program is currently rejecting at the inbox level will, suddenly, become a great deal harder to reject. None of which, I notice, is a development either of you appears interested in.”
“Declan.” Whitlock, dangerously soft. “Whatever saint you have decided to play this season, it is not going to work. The other half of the team is the better half regardless. Brennan is a known quantity. Voss is a known quantity. We have spent two seasons grooming that unit. You should be pouring your strategic capital into the men who actually want the program to win.”
“Sector two has the better captain.”
It comes out without effort. It happens to be the truth. Marek’s mouth thins by a degree.
“Fine,” he allows, conceding the unwinnable point. “Kavanagh is strong. We have never said otherwise. But the simple reality is that a pink-haired distraction in his crease is going to slow him down. Slow all of them down. Disrupt the cohesion you and I and Whitlock have spent two seasons building in that house.”
“Slow him down.” I sit forward. “How, exactly, is the goaltender supposed to slow the captain down. She is not racing the play. She is not centering the puck up the ice and missing handoffs. She is standing in twelve feet of painted real estate at the back of the rink, shielding the only piece of the game that converts to a number on the board. You are talking about her as if she were a forward losing pace. She is the wall. The wall does not slow the team down. The wall is the entire reason there is a team to slow.”
