Page 67 of Slashed Bonds

Pruitt’s our backup. Nineteen. Butterfly goalie, textbook, drops early and covers the bottom half like a tarp. He’s good. He’s not Niko, and he knows it, and it makes him nervous, which is a thing shooters can smell.

None of us on the bench is watching.

The first two shifts, she does nothing.

I mean that as praise. She takes her position on the right wall and she stays there, and when the puck comes her way she moves it, one touch, to whoever’s open, and she doesn’t shoot and she doesn’t carry and she doesn’t try to show anyone anything.

She’s mapping.

I recognize it because it’s what I do for the first five minutes of every game. You don’t play the opponent. You learn him. Which foot he pushes off. Which way he looks before he passes. Whether he checks his shoulder at the blue line. You let the flashy thing wait until you know exactly what the flashy thing will cost.

By the second shift she’s got Teller. I can see it. Her eyes track him every time he touches the puck, and every time, he does the same thing: head down, shoulders to the boards, committed before he’s looked.

She’s found the beam that’ll take the weight.

Cash sees it too. His headphones come off one ear.

That’s not disrespect. It’s how we are. Until someone calls our name, the three of us zone out into whatever’s running behind our eyes, and what’s running behind mine right now is a corridor in a house I’m not going to think about.

Cash has his headphones half on. Niko’s still on the ice at the belly of the dog.

So we hear it before we see it.

The loudest hiss of ice I’ve ever heard.

A stop. Hard. A sound like somebody dragging a shovel across a sidewalk, sharp enough that every head on the bench comes up at once.

And there she is.

Dubois lost the puck at the far blue line. Their winger picked it up, a big kid named Teller who thinks he’s faster than he is, and he’s coming up the wall with his head down and his shoulders square to the boards, and she’s come across from the weak side.

Wrong angle for a steal. Right angle for something else.

She plants.

Both edges. Inside skate biting so deep I see the shavings fly from the bench. Her hip drops. Her shoulder turns. And she doesn’t reach for the puck at all.

She lets Teller skate into her.

He goes airborne.

I’ve thrown a lot of hits. I’ve taken a lot of hits. I know what it looks like when a body is moved by force, and I know what it looks like when a body is moved by geometry, and this was geometry. She put her hip under his center of mass at the precise moment his weight was committed forward, and physics did the rest.

Teller lands four feet away on his back and slides into the boards.

Let me be precise about that hit, because nobody else on this bench can be.

An enforcer throws a check with his shoulder. That’s the tool. You come in with your weight already moving, and you make contact high, and the size differential does the rest, and if the other man’s bigger than you, you lose.

She’s not built for that.

She’s five-eight, lean, and she’d lose that fight against anyone on this ice.

So she didn’t have it.

She came across the lane so that Teller’s path and hers would meet at a single point, and she arrived at that point a half second before he did, and she stopped. Dead. Both edges. Then she dropped her hip below the line of his and let him supply the force.

Every pound of that hit was his. She only chose where it went.