Face-Off

by Michael Betcherman

  “What can I get you?” she asked after a few awkward seconds.

  “Coke. No ice.” Where did you learn to be so smooth? the Voice asked sarcastically.

  “Great game, Alex. You were amazing.” Lara walked up beside him and gave him a quick hug.

  “Thanks. I thought you were working today.” Alex and Lara both had summer jobs at his uncle’s travel agency.

  “Things were slow so Uncle Roman let me leave early.” Lara called Roman uncle even though he was actually her dad’s cousin by marriage.

  “You look sharp,” Lara said, taking in his jacket and tie. “Your mommy take you shopping?”

  “Ha, ha.”

  The girl at the concession stand handed him his Coke.

  “You shouldn’t be drinking that stuff,” Lara said. “Do you know how much sugar there is in it?”

  “You gonna tell my mommy?”

  Lara laughed. Alex wished he could be as loose with other girls as he was with her. Like with Jenna. Jenna worked at a café near the travel agency. Roman sent him there almost every day on an espresso run, and every time he went he was determined to ask her out, but he could never pull the trigger. He was pretty sure she liked him; she always greeted him with a big smile, but he hadn’t been able to say much more than “two espressos, please,” let alone ask her out.

  It was different with Lara. They had known each other since they were little kids and he didn’t feel he had to impress her.

  “I gotta pee,” Lara said. He watched her walk toward the washroom in her tight-fitting jeans. She’s definitely not a little kid anymore, he thought. It felt a little strange to be thinking of Lara that way, but they’d been working side-by-side at the travel agency every day for the past month and it wasn’t the first time he’d had the thought. Across the hallway a guy wearing a Team Maldania jacket was watching her walk away as well. From the way he was looking at her, it was clear he didn’t think she was a little kid either.

  “Pila voja,” he said to Alex after Lara disappeared into the washroom. Pretty girl.

  Alex nodded. He wondered why the guy was speaking to him in Berovian—although since he was a Maldan he would have said he was speaking Maldanian. Maldans and Berovians spoke the same language—they just called it by different names. Then he realized the guy must have seen his name on his hockey bag. Petrovic was a dead giveaway, the Berovian equivalent of Smith or Jones.

  “Ready?” Lara asked when she came out of the washroom. Alex picked up his hockey bag and he and Lara headed off. The Maldan gave him a curious look.

  “Vo dinya,” Alex said. Goodbye. It was one of the few things he could say in Berovian, although he still understood the language. He and his mother had spoken Berovian until they moved out of Roman’s house a few years after they arrived in Vancouver, when they could afford a place of their own. After that they only spoke English. His mom insisted on it. She said it was important if he was going to do well in school.

  The University of Minnesota scout was standing by the exit. He glanced at Alex’s name on his hockey bag. “That was a heck of a performance, son,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Alex said, trying not to sound too excited even though his insides were bursting.

  The scout put out his hand. Alex shook it. “Bill Henry. University of Minnesota.”

  “Alex Petrovic.”

  “What grade are you in, Alex?”

  “Going into grade twelve.”

  “Are you planning to go to university?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You going to stay here in Canada?”

  “Not necessarily. I guess it depends on whether I get any offers to go to the States.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem, son. Not if that’s the way you normally play. You got some serious game.”

  You got some serious game. The words sent a chill up Alex’s spine.

  “How cool was that?” Lara said after the scout walked away. “You must be flying.” She knew how much Alex wanted to go to Minnesota.

  “It’s no big deal,” Alex said nonchalantly.

  “No big deal,” Lara repeated with a smile that told him he wasn’t fooling her for a minute.

  FOUR

  Alex was awakened the next morning by another one of his dreams. This time he was missing a leg, which was particularly inconvenient because he was playing goal at the time. The dream faded away as soon as he sat up. All he could remember was that everybody on the other team was wearing a Lou Roberts goalie mask.

  The sun was streaming into his bedroom. It was only a quarter to eight, but according to the thermometer outside his window the temperature had already hit twenty degrees. It was going to be another scorcher.

  There was no point trying to go back to sleep. He had to get up at eight o’clock in order to get to the travel agency by nine. He got out of bed and did his push-ups and sit-ups. He’d started doing them a little over three years ago and hadn’t missed a single day since, except when he had his appendix out. When he started he could only do twenty-five push-ups and fifty sit-ups, but now he was up to eighty-five push-ups and one hundred and fifty sit-ups.

  When he finished he stood in front of the mirror and checked out his physique. The three small scars from his appendectomy were still visible above the waistband of his boxers. The doctor said it would take a few years for them to completely disappear. He flexed in front of the mirror, as if he were posing for a body-building competition. His arms were definitely getting bigger but they weren’t exactly what you’d call pipes. He wished he wasn’t so skinny but he couldn’t put on any weight no matter how much he ate.

  Team B.C. was playing Maldania later that day. On his way downstairs Alex tapped the full-size poster of Lou Roberts that was taped to his bedroom door for good luck, something he always did on game day. Lou was crouched in goal, his eyes—one brown and one green—staring out of his goalie mask with an intensity that always caught Alex’s attention.

  Alex had bought the poster at a Canucks game several years earlier and had waited outside the locker room after the game so Lou could sign it. When he told Lou he was a goalie, too—kind of cheesy, he had to admit, but hey, he was only twelve at the time—Lou wrote “To a member of the clan” on the bottom of the poster. That’s when Lou officially became his favourite player.

  He remembered that the Team Maldania goalie had a Lou Roberts mask, too. Maybe that explained his dream, he thought, although he was more concerned with Team Oregon’s game against Team Michigan than with his own against Maldania. The Maldans were so bad that Team B.C. would beat them even if Alex really did have only one leg.

  The article in The Vancouver Sun about the game the night before was short, but it was sweet. “Team Oregon dominated the play but the Americans were turned back time and again by Team B.C.’s goalie, Alex Petrovic, whose outstanding play allowed the home team to escape with a 2–1 win.”

  A heckuva way to start the day, Alex thought as he put the newspaper on the kitchen table and stood up to make his breakfast. He cracked three eggs into a bowl, added a little milk, and whisked the mixture until it was a uniform colour. He took a few anchovies out of a jar on the counter, chopped them up, and scraped them into the bowl. Then he put two pieces of bread in the toaster and poured the eggs into a frying pan, stirring them gently with a spoon.

  He’d been making a lot of his own breakfasts since he was ten, and a lot of his dinners, too. It had started out as a necessity—his mother usually left early in the morning for work and often didn’t get home until late at night—but now he enjoyed it.

  “There’s nothing sexier than a man who knows his way around a kitchen,” Lara joked one time when he made her dinner while they were working on a school project. He wouldn’t serve her until she promised not to tell any of his teammates on the Richmond Cougars. That was the kind of thing a jerk like Mike Leonard would grab hold of and never let go. Leonard didn’t need much of a reason to make someone’s life miserable, and finding out that Alex liked to coo
k would more than do the trick.

  When the scrambled eggs were ready, Alex spooned them onto a plate and spread some peanut butter and grape jelly on his toast. He was about to sit down when his mom came into the kitchen.

  “Morning, Anna.” He bent over and gave her a kiss. He was always surprised at how small she was. In his mind’s eye she was a lot taller than five foot one.

  “Morning, dude,” she said.

  She started calling him dude a few years ago, when he started calling her Anna. It had started out as a joke but the names had stuck.

  “Are you coming home before your game tonight?” she asked.

  “No. I’m going to the arena straight from the travel agency.”

  “I’ll try to make it but I’m not sure I’ll be able to. It depends how long my meeting with the contractor lasts.” Anna owned three health food stores in the Lower Mainland and was about to open a fourth in Langley.

  “That’s okay,” Alex said. “It’s not going to be much of a game.”

  “Is Maldania that bad?”

  “Worse.”

  Work kept his mother so busy that she rarely made it to his games. It used to bother him when he was a kid. He’d come out of the locker room after the game and have to stand there by himself while his teammates were being congratulated by their parents. “I’m as disappointed as you are,” Anna told him once when he was upset because she couldn’t come to a playoff game. “One of the joys of being a parent is sharing the important moments in your child’s life. It kills me to miss out on that.” It was obvious once she said it, but Alex had never looked at things that way. It was the last time he ever brought up the subject.

  He knew he wouldn’t have been able to play hockey if Anna hadn’t worked so hard. It was an expensive sport. Equipment, especially goalie equipment, didn’t come cheap. Then there were the registration fees and travel expenses when he had to go out of town to a tournament. They were financially secure now, but that hadn’t always been the case. He knew his mother had gone without things she wanted for herself so that he could play hockey. Yet she had never complained about the cost. She always made sure he had what he needed.

  “I’ve got to run,” Anna said, glancing at her watch. “I have interviews all morning for the manager’s job at the store in Abbotsford.”

  “You should eat something first,” he said.

  “I’m the parent, remember?” she said.

  “I can make you eggs. It will only take a couple of minutes.” For someone who was in the health food business, his mother had terrible eating habits.

  “I’ll grab something on the way,” Anna said, walking out of the kitchen and into the hallway.

  Alex looked at her as she stood in front of the mirror applying her lipstick. His mother wasn’t an unhappy person, but there was a heaviness to her that she could never seem to shed, as if she were carrying an invisible weight on her shoulders. That was only natural, Alex thought. She’d been through a lot.

  He wondered if she was lonely. There had been a few boyfriends over the years, but none of them had lasted. Part of the reason was that work kept her so busy that she had no time for a social life. But Alex thought the main reason was that no relationship could measure up to what she had with his father. One thing for sure, the two of them must have really loved each other to get married in the first place.

  “The fact that we were two human beings who loved each other didn’t matter to my parents,” Anna told him once. “I could have been a murderer and they would have stuck by me. But marrying a Maldan, that was something they couldn’t forgive.”

  Anna saw him looking at her in the mirror. She looked at her watch. “I gotta scoot,” she said. “Later, dude.”

  FIVE

  The bus ride to the travel agency normally took twenty minutes, but traffic was unusually light so Alex arrived early. Roman was the only other person there.

  “I need you to take a look at my computer,” he said. “It’s not working.”

  “Did you try restarting it?” Alex asked as they walked into his uncle’s office.

  “I keep forgetting to do that,” Roman said. He was useless when it came to computers. “That was quite a write-up you got in the paper,” he said enthusiastically as Alex sat down at his desk.

  “It was nice,” Alex said calmly as he restarted the computer.

  “Nice?” Roman scoffed. “It was fantastic. Who do you play tonight?”

  “Team Maldania.”

  “Tak voi guz,” he said gruffly, a scowl appearing on his face. Kick their ass. Even though Roman had been in Vancouver for nearly thirty years, he considered himself Berovian first and Canadian a distant second. All his friends were from Berovia—Anna called them the Berovian Mafia— and he talked about the war with Maldania as if he’d been in it despite the fact that he left Berovia years before it started.

  “We’ll do our best … That should do it,” Alex said after he confirmed that the computer was working.

  Lara had arrived and was on the phone when Alex got back to his desk. “I’ll see if Mr. Kuchar is free to talk to you.” She pushed the hold button and then pushed another button to connect with Roman. “Another cranky client for you, Uncle Roman. He wants a partial refund because his return flight was delayed,” she said, rolling her eyes at Alex. It was amazing how many customers complained about things that were beyond the travel agency’s control, as if using it should be a guarantee that every meal would be cooked to perfection and all the arrangements would run like clockwork.

  Just then, Greta, the agency’s travel consultant, came through the front door. She was wearing a tight-fitting dress that revealed every curve of her outstanding body. “Can you do me a favour, sweetie?” she asked Alex. “Find out what the visa requirements to Zambia are.”

  “I’ll get right on it,” Alex said, trying not to stare at her chest.

  “Thanks.” She ruffled his hair affectionately and walked to her desk, hips swivelling. Alex watched her leave.

  “Careful your jaw doesn’t hit the floor,” Lara said. She walked to the filing cabinet and put a folder away.

  “That obvious, huh?”

  Greta put her purse on her desk and continued down the hallway toward the washroom.

  “Can you do me a favour, sweetie?” Lara said, mocking Greta. Then she made a gagging motion, putting her fingers in her mouth. Alex laughed. “She is personally setting women back fifty years,” Lara said.

  “It’s disgraceful,” Alex said, craning his head in Greta’s direction in an exaggerated motion, his eyes riveted on her butt.

  Lara laughed. “What time is your game tonight?” she asked.

  “Six o’clock. You coming?”

  “Can’t make it.”

  “Seeing the nerd?”

  “If you mean Jason,” she said sharply, “yes. And he’s not a nerd.”

  “You’re right,” Alex said. “He’s a jerk, not a nerd.” He regretted saying the words as soon as they left his mouth.

  “You’re the jerk,” Lara said angrily.

  “Sorry,” Alex said. Lara stared at him. “That was out of line.” Lara kept staring. “Way out of line.”

  Lara nodded, finally accepting his apology. Then she spun around, shooting her leg out in a ninja kick that missed his head by a few carefully calculated inches. “Just don’t let it happen again, Petrovic,” she said. “Or I’m going to have to mess you up.”

  Alex laughed, but the truth was that Lara probably could mess him up even though she was barely half his size. She was into muay Thai—kickboxing, most people called it— and she was good enough to compete on a provincial level. Alex went to most of her fights, and he was always shocked by the transformation that came over her the minute she put on her gloves and entered the ring. The friendly smile and the warm gaze vanished, replaced by hard eyes and tight-set lips. She was absolutely fearless. He’d seen her get knocked on her ass with blows that he was sure would keep her down for the count, but she’d be back up on
her feet in a few seconds with a look of fury on her face that usually spelled disaster for her unfortunate opponent.

  Alex knew he shouldn’t have said anything about Jason but he couldn’t help himself. The guy was a jerk. He could be fun, and he was good-looking, Alex grudgingly admitted, but he didn’t treat Lara with the respect she deserved. Even though she was a hundred times smarter than he was, he acted like her opinions didn’t count.

  He wondered if they were having sex. They probably were, he thought. Everybody seemed to be having sex these days. Everybody except you, the Voice chimed in. Alex had never had sex. That was his deep dark secret, something he had never told a living soul, and never would. He’d come close with Aimee a few weeks ago, just after school ended. It was the last time they saw each other before she moved to Halifax. They’d been going out for a few months by then and things were getting hot and heavy. He was pretty sure she wanted to do it that last night, but for some reason he just couldn’t make his move.

  Now Aimee was in Halifax and he was still a virgin. A virgin. He hated that freakin’ word. He knew he wasn’t the only seventeen-year-old in the world who’d never had sex, but it sure seemed like it. Getting laid—how often and with how many girls—was a prime topic of conversation in the locker room. Not all of the guys bragged about the girls they were sleeping with, but the ones who didn’t brag about it made sure to drop a comment or two that let everybody know they were getting some. He’d done it himself. He couldn’t be the only one who was lying. Could he?

  At four o’clock Alex went into Roman’s office to tell him that he had to leave for his game. Roman was talking to his marketing manager, Tomas Radich.

  “Maria’s insisting we send Lina to private school,” Tomas was saying. “You know how much that costs?”

  “Fifteen thousand?” Roman suggested.

  “Try twenty-five,” Tomas said. He turned to Alex. “I hear you played a great game yesterday.”