Page 144 of On His Mind

“She’s yoursomething,” Stanley calls back, delighted.

Blue doesn’t take the bait. He just skates a slow circle with his jaw locked. I flick the puck out to him off my stick because he needs somewhere to put all that. He catches it clean and takes off up the ice. Stanley chases him the length of the rink, still going, still naming Penelope’s new roommate every third word like a man reciting scripture.

Something goes tight in my chest listening to it, watching Stanley chase Blue down the ice over a girl. I’m so far downinside that feeling that Blue doubles back and roofs one over my glove before I’ve registered he’s even shooting.

“Wake up, Deveroux,” Coach barks from center.

Stanley wheels away hunting fresh blood and finds Benson parked at the far dot.

“Cap.” He glides in slow. “Explain something to me. Explain howyouget to just date Lucy. Out in the open. After you’re the one who stood in that kitchen and—”

“I’m not doing this with you again,” Benson says.

“Youvowed, Cap. On your life. And now—”

“Lucy’s not going to cost me a draft spot.” Benson’s voice drops into the flat. He’s already done with the conversation. “I’m going pro. And I’m with her. I’ll figure out how the two of them fit as they come. That’s it.” He fires a pass so hard Stanley has to jump it. “Grow up, Stan.”

Stanley clutches his chest like he’s taken a slapshot to the heart and glides back down to me. Rowan is shaking his head the whole way.

“You two.” He throws his arms wide. “You’re all I’ve got left. The last men standing. The final defenders of the faith. The rule lives on in your hearts, and your hearts alone—”

“You’ve got the Linwood girl coming to practice,” Rowan says, looking dead at him.

Stanley stops so fast his edges spray ice. “The one who takesnoteson me?” He waves a glove at the air. “Her dad sends her. It’s a whole professional thing. It’s nothing.”

“Right.” Rowan pushes off and skates away, leaving the word hanging there behind him like a smell.

“You son of a—” Stanley hurls his gloves straight up over his head. “It’s over. The house has fallen. There are no soldiers left. I stand alone.”

I stand in my net and stop the next three he throws at me — glove, blocker, glove — and I keep my face flat the whole time,because I’m watching it come apart. The rules we swore we wouldn’t break during our college career are being broken.

Benson’s got the girl. Blue looks like he’s fighting against himself. And the sky hasn’t fallen. Nobody’s lost a step. Nobody’s lost a draft spot. The only thing that happens when a Hawthorne man goes down is that the rest of them talk shit about it for a week and then forget about it. That’s the whole consequence. That’s the beast I’ve been so afraid of my entire time here.

In the locker room after, the tension I was so sure I felt out on the ice isn’t there. It burns off the second the skates come off. Benson’s got Stanley in a headlock. Stanley’s laughing so hard he can’t breathe. It was never real. Every vow, every threat, treated like the joke it always secretly was, and I sit on the bench half-dressed and think about that.

I still sneak Penelope in through the side of the house anyway.

The season is mine this year. Mine, as a junior, which almost never happens — the kid I spent two years bracing to lose my crease to transferred out over the summer, and just like that the net belongs to me. All of it. Every minute of every night.

My backup’s a freshman now. Tony Beaumont. He’s got good hands, raw as a fresh cut, eighteen and jumpy in the exact way I was eighteen and jumpy, flinching at shots he ought to be swallowing whole. Fuller starts me, and I stay started. I don’t come out. Not once.

Friday we’re down a goal in the third, and I stand on my head for twenty straight minutes. I stop a two-on-one with the pad, kick the rebound to the corner, and when the trailer scoops it up with the whole top of the net gaping at him, I throw myself across the crease and rob him clean. Glove hand. High glove side. The half-inch that beat me two years ago and doesn’t beat me anymore.

The barn comes up around me like a wave breaking. Benson taps my pads with his stick as he goes by. We close it out. They hand me the game puck.

This is it. This is the exact thing I chose, sitting on that porch back in August — the thing I looked her in the face and told her I couldn’t afford to risk. The reason. My reason. And here it is, come true and real, and it’s mine. I’m good, I’m playing, I’m starting every single night, the trade I made paying out precisely the way I swore to myself it would.

I sit in the room after with the puck zipped into my bag and the guys roaring around me, and I wait to feel it.

I wait to feel happy. Satisfied. Excited for the future.

It doesn’t come.

It’s the same as the empty rink at six in the morning. The same as FIFA on the couch with the guys, the same as every good thing that’s landed on me this fall. I got the net. I kept both my worlds, careful, balanced, exactly the way I drew it up. And there’s a hole punched clean through the middle of all of it, and the win just pours straight through and out the bottom and leaves me sitting there holding nothing.

I always figure out what I feel too late — that’s the curse of me, I only ever understand a thing once it’s already behind me. But I don’t have to wait this time. I already know. I’ve known since the porch.

I zip the bag. I get on the bus.