Page 148 of Wild Card 13

Popcorn flew over the glass in a yellow-and-white storm. The refs shouted at absolutely no one who was listening. The banddragged the student section through the fight song while a line of freshmen with shovels looked like they were reconsidering every life choice that had led them to high school hockey.

Mase crashed into me with both arms.

“That was disgusting,” he yelled.

The guys mobbed us near the boards while the crowd kept roaring.

I looked up to see Lucy standing. The blanket had fallen off her lap. Naomi was yelling something beside her. Arlo had both hands in the air. Mom was laughing. Grandma Ruth was beaming and clapping from her seat. Dad was standing even though it was only the first period.

And Thane was being typical Thane.

He was watching me. Not like a brother. Like a player.

I hated how good that felt. I hated it almost as much as I wanted more.

The rest of the game did not turn simple after that.

We went up 2–1 in the second when I fed Simon through traffic and he finally stopped thinking long enough to score. For nine whole minutes, the ice felt like it belonged to me again.

Then I got greedy. Instead of chipping the puck deep with support behind me, I tried to cut inside at the blue line because I could see the move in my head and my hands believed they could make it real.

Carlson stripped me clean and tied the game easily.

Coach sat me for the next two shifts.

Shame made my skin too tight beneath my gear. Anger, I could use. Nerves, I could skate through. But shame sat in the bottom of my stomach and whispered that everyone had finally seen the thing people worried about when they talked about me.

I stared at the ice, breathing hard through my nose, trying not to look at the scouts.

I looked at Lucy instead. She was still standing. Her eyes were fixed on our bench, and there was no disappointment in her face.

Lucy did not love me because I was good at hockey.

She liked that I was. She understood it better than she admitted. But that was not why.

She loved me when I failed biology quizzes. When I said thewrong thing. When I showed up ten minutes late with coffee I had remembered she liked because remembering the coffee felt more important than being on time. She loved the parts of me that did not make sense in a stat column.

Eden Prairie scored once more before the second ended, and we went into the third down 3–2.

The locker room during intermission was the quietest I had ever heard it. No one joked. No one threw tape. No one complained about the refs.

Coach let the silence sit long enough for all of us to feel it. Then he said, “This is what you wanted.” Coach stood in the middle of the room, one hand braced against the whiteboard, tie loosened at his throat. “You wanted the big game. You wanted the crowd. You wanted the section final. You wanted to prove Northbend belonged here with teams like Eden Prairie.”

His eyes moved across the room and stopped on me. “Now you are here,” he said. “And they are not giving it to you. Good. Nobody worth beating does.”

He pointed at the board. “Third period, we stop chasing. We win walls. We finish checks. We make the first pass. We get pucks through traffic.”

The third period was ugly.

Prairie clogged the neutral zone and forced every breakout into pressure. Every whistle came with pushing, jawing, gloves pressed against cages.

Then, halfway through the third, Simon took a tripping penalty. Down one. Ten minutes left. Penalty kill.

I hopped over the boards.

Eden Prairie set up quickly, but for the first time all night, I stopped watching the puck like it owed me something.

I watched Carlson. I watched his hips. His stick. The way he drifted toward the soft spot behind our defenseman near the backdoor lane.