Page 2 of Offside

“Ja. And you’ll give it to them. This is a good thing.” He waited. “Griffin goes too?”

“Griffin goes too.” I smiled.

He made a sound low in his throat—the Swedish equivalent of well, that settles it. “Good. You’ll have someone who knows you.”

There was warmth in it. There was always warmth in his words, underneath the Lindqvist tendency toward the practical, and I let myself feel it for a second before he handed the phone to my mother, who did not use either language because she immediately started crying in the universal one. I talked to her for a few minutes. Told her I was fine. Told her Phoenix was only a three-hour flight. Told her I’d call when I landed.

After I hung up, I sat with it.

The television was still going, muted and cycling through highlights and graphics about the expansion draft. I’d seen teammates get traded and watched the way it could affect them. Being told you were useful somewhere else. This felt different. Someone had pointed at me specifically and said you.

I pulled up the weather app. I’d been doing this compulsively since Audrey, my agent, first floated Phoenix as a possibility. It had become a ritual I couldn’t explain.

107°F. Feels like 112. Humidity 14%.

I’d grown up in Minnesota. I knew ice in my bones. A cold that settled into your joints during outdoor skates in December, the way frozen pond water felt different under a blade than arena ice, the short days and long winters and the northern lights that made everything look like it was happening in a photograph taken thirty years ago. I’d spent summers in Malmö with my parents and grandparents, learning to move between a second country and a second language, the strange dual loyalty of belonging to two places at once.

Phoenix, however, was going to be an adjustment. An absurd, sun-blasted, rattlesnake-logoed adjustment.

I was, against all reasonable expectation, eager for it.

On screen they were running B-roll of the new arena. No retired numbers, no banners, no history at all. Just a blank sheet of ice and whatever you made of it.

My phone buzzed. Griffin, graduating from fire emojis to actual words.

Griffin: Roommates again?

I smiled despite myself.

Ryan: I’m not living with you.

Griffin: You said that sophomore year too

Griffin: Coming home. See you there brother

I set the phone down and checked the desert on my weather app one more time. A hundred and seven degrees. A brand new team. My best friend in net behind me.

I stared at the ceiling.

Låt oss gå, I thought. Let’s go.

CHAPTER 1

RYAN

The practice facility smelled like fresh paint and possibility, which I figured gave us until November before both wore off.

I’d arrived forty minutes before anyone else. Not because the schedule required it, not because I was making a point, but because I didn’t know how to arrive any other way. Early was the shape my mornings took. It had been that way since peewee hockey in Eden Prairie, since the first coach who’d told me the ice belonged to whoever wanted it most, and wanting it most started before anyone else showed up.

The Sidewinders’ facility in Glendale was brand new in a slightly unreal way. Everything too clean, boards too white, glass unscratched. The Sidewinders logo stared out from center ice, a coiled rattlesnake in burnt orange and black, aggressive and angular, like it had already decided how this was going to go.

I stood at the boards and took it in for a moment.

I liked it. I wasn’t going to say it out loud yet, but I did.

I got on the ice at six forty-five and skated until my legs remembered what they were for. The rink was cold and quiet and entirely mine, and I ran edges until the silence started to feel like mine too. I thought about what the Sidewinders’ GM had said when we’d sat across from each other in that conference room in February, making their case. We’re not building around a system, Ryan. We’re building around you. That’s what this contract is. We want someone who’ll put his name on this thing.

I’d flown home and called Griffin. “They want me to be the guy.”