Page 6 of Knottingley Ever After
I am twenty pounds of gear and one hundred and ten pounds of glitter-pink Omega and absolutely electricwant.
The tunnel mouth swallows me into echoey concrete and fluorescent buzz. The team is just ahead, a knot of shoulder pads and ringing voices, the locker room belching its specific bouquet into the corridor: industrial laundry soap, mildew, melting ice, the chemical pine of the cleaning solution Jimmy the equipment manager uses to swab the floor, and the unkillable, ambient ham of twenty-three Alphas’ sweat.
Pete spots me first.
“THERE SHE IS,” he howls, like I haven’t been on the ice this entire time. He surges forward and grabs my mask off my head despite my squawk of protest, ruffles my pink hair intosomething resembling a startled chrysanthemum, and crows, “Damn,O’Shea. We’ll be seeing you in the official playoffs in some big-league city before we know it.”
He sayscitylike it’s a foreign word he’s tasting for the first time.
Like Knottingley, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, isn’t a town so much as a freezer with a postal code.
Lonnie throws a sweat-damp towel over my head from behind.
“Big-league! Big arena! Big sponsorship deals! Big endorsement money! Big?—”
“Big chance of getting a concussion if you don’t take this towel off my face, you absolute menace?—”
“IRIS O’SHEA SPONSORED BY GATORADE,” Pete bellows down the corridor at no one in particular. “IRIS O’SHEA SPONSORED BYRED BULL.IRIS O’SHEA SPONSORED BY THAT ONE BRAND OF FRUIT SNACKS SHE EATS ON THE BENCH?—”
“Welch’s,” Lonnie supplies.
“WELCH’S FRUIT SNACKS, BABY?—”
“I will sue both of you,” I declare, peeling the towel off my hair.
My braid is now genuinely, terminally lost. Pink strands corkscrew in every direction. I look like a startled flamingo. I do not care.
“I will sue you for slander, defamation, and dragging my name through thefruit-snackmud.”
“The sky’s the limit, baby,” Pete says, and he means it. He grabs my shoulders and shakes me, gentle this time, his huge dumb grin lighting up the tunnel’s sallow fluorescents.
“Tonightis just the start. You hear me? Whatever Coach has cooking, it’s gonna be massive.”
I look back over my shoulder, down the long tunnel of cold concrete, toward the rink mouth I just skated through.
I can’t see Declan from here. Just the bright slice of ice and the lingering blur of pale-blue movement behind the glass.
Somewhere out there, my coach is handling something I don’t understand yet, with a man whose smile didn’t reach his eyes and whose scent crawled across my skin like static.
But Declan gave the impression that everything is fine.
And Declan does not lie to me.
He has never lied to me.
Not yet, anyway.
I turn back to my boys, my big, loud, ridiculous, brotherly mess of teammates, and I let Pete sling his arm around my neck and march me toward the locker room and whatever gloriously horrifying cocktail Lonnie has illegally pre-mixed in his hockey bag.
The corridor smells like rubber, sweat, sugar, and victory.
My ribs ache in the best way.
And as the locker room door swings open and the noise hits me—hits us—like a wall of pure, deafening, blue-and-white joy, I think:
The sky’s the limit, O’Shea.
I am nineteen years old, the best Omega goalie my town has ever produced, and tonight my coach looked at me with pride in his eyes like he was carrying it for both of us.
