Page 98 of Knottingley Ever After
It is, as always, a converted utility closet with a single bench, a chipped mirror, a hook on the back of the door, and a faint chemical smell of the bleach the cleaning crew applied at six this morning. I do not turn on the overhead. The mood lighting of the safety bulb in the corner suits me better.
I sit on the bench. I drop my bag at my feet. I unstrap a glove. I let it fall.
I pull my phone out of the small zip pocket of my pads.
The lock screen is full of notifications I do not have the energy to read yet. Texts from Matteo. Texts from Jude. A single text from Rémi that says, simply,proud of you.A flood of Instagram tags. A small alarming influx of follower-request notifications from people I do not know. The TikTok app, sitting on my home screen, has a small red badge that I am, professionally, terrified of opening.
I open Pinterest instead.
The board that has been nagging me for ten days is right at the top. I tap into it.
Hockey Houses with Warm Lights.
That is the title I have given it. In a soft little italic font, like I were sixteen and writing it in the back of a school notebook.
I stare at the title.
Iris O’Shea. You are twenty-four years old. You are a Division One starting goaltender. You have just robbed a redshirt sophomore on national livestream in overtime. And you are sitting in a converted utility closet with a Pinterest board called Hockey Houses with Warm Lights, secretly designing a future you have not been promised.
Cheesy.
It is so cheesy.
I tap the three-dot menu. Delete board. Confirm.
I stare at the empty space.
I undelete the board. Hands shaking slightly. The recently-deleted folder is generous about second chances and Pinterest is, blessedly, not a witness in any current legal proceeding I am party to.
Not the night for this kind of decision.
In the morning. Decide it in the morning. With actual sleep.
I slip the phone back into the pocket of my pads. I tip my head back against the cinderblock wall behind the bench. I breathe out long and slow and let the exhale carry the last small hot bead of game-adrenaline out of my chest.
And the small private chamber that has held the post-game encounter with Coach Declan for the past four minutes opens, briefly, and gives me, very dryly, the assessment.
I stood up for myself. In the corridor. The level voice. The non-reaction. The clean refusal to chase him for the validation he refused to offer.
I am, by my own standards, satisfied.
I am also, by my own standards, very much aware that the satisfaction is the surface of something I have not yet bothered to read the depth chart on.
Because the elephant in the corridor with us is still in the corridor with us. The elephant has been in every corridor we have shared for two weeks. The elephant has been on every sheet of ice, in the dark kitchen at five in the morning, in the cabinet, in the strawberry shake. The elephant has a face and a Yorkshire accent and a hand he once put on the back of my shoulder when I was sixteen after a third-period save, and the elephant is not, by any rational measure, going to stop being in the room because I have, in three separate ways now, declined to look at it.
I push myself up off the bench. I pull my own bag onto my shoulder.
And I look, one last time, at the corridor through the half-open door of my converted utility closet, the spot where his back disappeared down the hall in his unhurried granite step.
How long,I ask the small, faintly steaming silence of my own little locker room,are you actually going to be able to run from the elephant in the room?
CHAPTER 19
Bare Minimum
~IRIS~
“My fucking God, is this absolutely necessary.”
