by Devon Monk
I should answer her, but all I could read from that text was when are you going to fail again?
Duncan dropped down in the seat next to me. I’d pretended to sleep, then had actually fallen asleep, only waking up when we stopped for dinner at some diner that handled a busload of hockey players like we were old, uninteresting news.
He’d stopped by my seat when we’d gotten back on the bus, but Watts had called him back to where he was sitting, and after hesitating over me while I mashed up my coat to make a pillow against the window and totally ignored him, he moved on.
I heard them laugh over some game they were playing on their phones, and closed my eyes.
But the rumble of the engine and the rocking of the bus over the twisting road kept me awake. Plus, I was getting a crick in my neck.
I sat up and stretched as best as I could and stared at the darkness beyond the window.
This was our first road game. We were playing against the Redding Rumblers, a team that was fast and inventive. They were the kind of team I loved to play. Their speed the kind of thing I liked to match. Liked to best. But the way I’d been playing, I was worried I’d be able to keep up out there.
Someone lurched forward then dropped down in the seat next to me. I expected it to be Duncan or maybe Graves, both of whom had positioned themselves behind me on the bus so they could keep an eye on me, but it was the D-man, Tetreault.
“Here.” He tossed me a can of Coke, and was already opening his own before I could tell him I wasn’t thirsty.
The Coke was cold. Okay, I actually was a little thirsty.
“Thanks.”
“You still mad at Lock?”
“Who said I was mad at him?”
“I was there, my friend. I saw your face.”
There was no use denying it. And sometimes the truth was what worked best in a team dynamic, even if it wasn’t a comfortable truth.
“Yeah, I was mad.” I shrugged and swigged the Coke.
“He’s not a bad guy,” Tetreault said as if we were suddenly chat buddies. “You’re new to the team, and sometimes it takes him awhile to warm up to new guys.”
“Two months of training isn’t enough time to get to know me?”
“Not the wizard part of you.” He frowned like he couldn’t believe we were having this conversation. “None of us know that part of you, Hazard. You’ve never once shown us. Never once slipped.”
“No magic on the ice, remember?”
He snicked air through his teeth. “We’re all magic out there, Hazard. We’re all on the ice. And if you think we don’t tap into it, don’t use it? Then you haven’t been paying attention.”
I wished Tetreault would go away, go study his biology textbook or whatever it was he’d brought in his overstuffed book bag.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s fair. But what you other marked do has like, a range of acceptable. Shift enough to help with stamina, breathing, speed, strength? Okay by the rules. Tune into the magic and whatever else it is sensitives do? Okay by the rules. But pull magic out of the air? That’s going to get me thrown out of the game.”
He turned the Coke can around in his fingers, pressing the metal just hard enough to make a crinkled paper sound.
“You’re thinking about it like it’s some kind of outside force you can control. Magic isn’t like that. Magic is a part of us, Hazard. It’s a part of you like blood and oxygen. Without it, you’re not alive. So you can try not to use it, but it’s there. Always there. In your skin, in your sweat, in your muscles. It leaves fingerprints on everything you do. Everything and everyone you touch.
“If you focus on something, if you really want something, magic is going to concentrate on that want. For me, it means I’ve got a little leopard in everything I do. That’s a part of me. Nothing I need to fight. Nothing I need to keep off the ice.”
“I’m not…I’m not that way. Magic isn’t a part of me like that. It’s just something I do.”
He stared down the length of the bus for a minute, then turned so he could face me. “That’s not true, Random. You might think it is, but it’s not.”
“You’re not a wizard, Danny.” Two could play at the first-name game.
“No, but my twin sister is. She tells me everything.” His face scrunched. “I mean everything. Say what you want, but trying to keep magic off the ice isn’t going to happen. Magic isn’t a part of you, Hazard. It’s every part of you.”
“Well, every part of me wants to play hockey. Every part of me wants the team to win. Lock was right. I can’t let magic get in the way of how I play hockey.”
“You are so not listening. Look, you’re a wizard. Magic is in your body and in your brain. It’s in your dreams, in your subconscious, in your mind. It’s in your hockey play too. And that’s a good thing. It can give you an edge. Just like the magic in all the shifters out there gives them an edge. Don’t hold it back. Don’t try to ignore it. You’ll screw up more if you’re fighting it out there.”
“I can’t. If I don’t have control.” I shook my head. “It could be so, so dangerous.”
“So what are you going to do? Fight it? Fight yourself?”
“I’m going to make the smart plays. I’m going to focus on hockey. And if my magic pushes too hard, I’m going to take myself off the damn ice.”
“All right,” he said like he didn’t believe me and didn’t think I believed myself either. “Good you have a plan.” He tipped back his soda and drank. “Maybe Lock will ease off a little.”
I didn’t think that would be enough. A goal or two might do more for Lock’s opinion of me. “Do you know why he hates wizards?”
T2 stared at me and there was more cat in his eyes than I’d seen before. I held his gaze because I grew up with a wolf and I knew what looking away would do.
“That’s something you should ask him, don’t you think?”
“Not really.”
He blinked, breaking the tension, his cat once again hidden. “You’re smarter than you look, Hazard.” He grinned.
Just like that, we were teammates again. Hockey players. The heavy conversation was done.
Thank God.
I waited for him to leave, but he just settled into the seat and pulled his phone and ear buds out of his hoodie pocket. I went back to staring out the window at the nothing that was occasionally broken up by distant lights. Houses, or more likely warehouses and farms out this far away from any big city.
“Steele and Lock used to be friends,” Tetreault said.
A chill rolled down my back. “What?”
“Long time ago. They came from the same town. Moose Jaw. Played together. Nowak was his coach for a couple years.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. “Sorry?” I tried.
“Yep. Coach Nowak is a prick. Everyone knows that. Some people say he’s dirty. Throws games.” He shrugged. Hockey was full of rumors like that. Especially this league.
“Did you ever play for him?”
“Played against his team for five years. That’s as close as I want to know him. Or Steele.”
“But…” I didn’t know how to say it.
“Lock was Steele’s friend. Yeah. I don’t get it either. It’s a was though. They don’t speak to each other anymore.”
I thought back on the game. Tried to remember if I’d seen Lock and Steele interacting while on the ice.
I didn’t think they had been more friendly or hostile than anyone else.
“Never could figure out what they had in common,” he said. “Besides hockey, I mean.”
Hatred of wizards? I thought, but didn’t say.
Tetreault put his ear buds in place and thumbed his way through his music selections. He tapped one and then reached down and rummaged in his book bag. The thick hardback he thumped open made me glad I wasn’t trying to make my way through college.
I didn’t know how he did it, juggling practices, games, and classes. I had enough trouble just trying to play hockey without screwing
up the rest of my life.
But at least he knew where he was going with his life.
My plan, my big plan of getting into the NHL, was gone. And if I couldn’t cut it in West Hell, then what?
We finally pulled into the cheap motel in Redding, California, just off of the highway.
Duncan waited for me to get my duffel and gear bag out of the bottom of the bus before he walked with me to the room we were sharing.
“Are you going to pout the whole trip?” he asked.
“Maybe.”
He snickered and shoved the door open. The room was orange: curtains, two double beds, walls. Not fancy, but clean. I tossed my bags on the floor by the bed close to the window.
“Lock doesn’t know you, Ran,” Duncan said as he threw his hoodie on the chair and kicked his shoes in two directions.
“It’s fine.” I toed off my shoes and stowed them under the desk.
Duncan sighed. “Seriously. He’s just worried about the team. Not you.”
“Yeah, that’s what I got out of him telling me that he didn’t want a wizard on the team.”
“Like he has any say in it, right?”
“Yeah,” I grumbled.
“You’re here because coach picked you, not because Lock likes you.”
“I know.” And I did. Duncan was right. I had earned my place on the team. But if I didn’t keep the magic under control, I’d earn my place right off it.
“Want the shower?” he asked.
“I’ll shower in the morning.” I crawled under the covers, tired all over.
Duncan hesitated, like he wanted to say something more, then grabbed his shower kit and walked into the bathroom.
I lay there in the darkened room, listening to the hiss and splat of water running in the shower. The shoving match in the room connected to ours was probably the two T’s fighting over who got the better bed. There was the crash of something like a lamp or heavy book falling, a full half-minute of silence, and then laughter.
I pounded on the wall above the headboard. They pounded back.
More laughter.
Duncan started singing, the same song he always sang in the shower: Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like The Wolf.”
I groaned, but smiled. I was surrounded by too many happy people.
I reached over the bed and dug my phone out of my jean pocket. Genevieve’s message was still there, unanswered.
When’s the next game?
I stared at it, trying to decide if I should tell her.
Duncan shuffled out of the bathroom and fell into bed. He tossed one way, then the other and then back. He’d been doing that since he was seven and I’d had my first sleepover at his house. It was before my mom had signed my life and care over to the Sparks.
“Hey, Ran?” he asked after he was quiet for a moment.
“Yeah?”
“Screw Lock. Don’t listen to him.”
“Don’t listen to the captain. Great advice, Donuts.”
A pillow walloped me in the face. “Don’t listen to the guy who doesn’t understand you. When he’s calling the shots on the ice, fine. Otherwise? Screw Lock. Ran? Did you hear me? Ran? Random?”
I knew he’d bug me until I answered. If there was nothing else I was sure about in this world, I was sure I belonged to Duncan and his parents and that they knew me, knew the real me, even if I’d been hiding a big part of myself from them for years.
“If I say yes, will you shut up and go to sleep?”
He snorted. He did the side-to-side toss thing again and messed with how many pillows were under his head, adding, subtracting, folding, adding, and subtracting until he was back with the original two he’d started with.
He’d been doing that since he was seven too.
He fell asleep almost instantly and started snoring.
I stayed awake, staring at my phone.
By the time I finally fell asleep, I still hadn’t answered her text.
Nineteen
The Redding Rumblers lived up to their names but not in the way I expected.
They were loud, shouting and whistling and slapping sticks constantly at each other on the ice. The insults flew fast and furious, and not always to the opposing team. They harassed each other just as often as they heckled us.
And they laughed. Laughed when they blocked a goal, laughed when they won a face-off, laughed when they earned penalty minutes.
Big, boisterous, noisy and just so frickin’ happy it was impossible not to have a good time. I thought Duncan had died and gone to heaven.
Not to say that the game wasn’t physical. It was. They were a fast team, felt like the entire bench was filled with guys who had wings on their heels.
All that laughing, all that name calling, all the good-natured swearing rubbed off on us.
I was grinning as often as I was grunting, chirping back insults that sounded more like happy invitations for them to do impossible things with their anatomy.
We played hard, worked together as a team better, making less errors, and reading the ice and play like we knew what we were doing. Our lines finally fell into rhythm players clicking like we’d been doing this for years.
I wasn’t the strongest on the team by a long shot. I missed several obvious passes and the three clear shots I had at a rebound went nowhere. I was a little slow to react. My focus was all over the place.
Or maybe I was focusing too hard. I kept hearing Lock in my head telling me to keep magic off the ice, as if even me being there, breathing, reacting, giving everything I had, wasn’t good enough. As if everything about me was tainted with magic.
Overthinking was deadly in any sport and twice as bad in a game as fast as hockey.
The Rumblers might have been good, (and they were) but they also brought out the best in the Thunderheads, present company excluded.
They brought out the fight, the scrabble, the last-second push, the risk and impossible shots that made hockey more than a game.
It made me proud of my team. Made me hungry for the more than just a glimpse of what we could be. Because right there on the ice in Northern California, I saw my team accelerate and rise.
They were good. They were amazing.
They were better than me.
My performance had been clumsy, slow, confused.
Coach wasn’t happy with me either. He benched me for the entire third period.
We scored two more goals and still lost by one.
Down six to five. But a losing team hadn’t skated off the ice with that big of a grin on their faces in a long time.
The energy, the sheer joy of hockey that the Rumblers radiated, was contagious. All of us felt it.
“Cheerful fucking rat bastards,” Watson proclaimed as he peeled out of his gear and started toward the shower. “Love to hate ’em!”
“I’d love them better if they lost.” Graves wiped a towel over his head and shrugged into a T-shirt.
“We’re going out, right?” Duncan said. “C’mon, there has to be a good place around here we can eat. Get a beer. Hassle the Bumblers.”
“That name’s not going to stick, Donuts,” JJ said.
“Not if I’m the only one using it, it won’t.”
JJ glanced over at Lock who was getting dressed, his back to the rest of the team. “Usually we just go to a Burger Thing and hit the road.”
Duncan turned his pleading gaze to me, and I shrugged. Who was I to tell the team what to do? Also, who was I to ask the captain if we could go somewhere nice because my best friend was having a post-game happygasm?
I think he read that in my expression.
Duncan sniffed and turned those puppy dog eyes on Graves.
Graves glanced at me, then sort of took in the mood of the room, and dropped onto the bench so he could pull on his cowboy boots.
“Might be nice to see a little of the city before we leave,” he said with hat calm drawl of his. “Wouldn’t mind a beer.”
Everyone was still dressing or undressing,
on their way to getting cleaned up. But there was a tense expectation in the air.
Everyone was waiting to see what Lock would say.
He turned back toward the rest of the room, took a pretty quick read on the situation. “It’d have to be damn cheap beer.”
“This is Redding,” Troiter said. “That’s the only kind of beer they have.”
T2 high-fived him.
“I’ll ask Coach.” Lock slung his duffel over one shoulder and walked out of the locker room.
“Yes!” And here I thought Duncan couldn’t look happier.
Twenty
Turned out Coach was already planning to take us to a place that was a little more upscale than a drive-thru. One of those family-friendly joints that had fake 1950s decor, real 1950s music, and vintage vinyl booths. The signs said they served home cooked meals and plain label beer.
Yep, the beer was cheap.
We were a loud bunch, most of the good mood still clinging even though we’d lost. None of the Rumblers were in the restaurant, not that anyone had really expected them to be.
Lock barely smiled and didn’t order a beer. He looked like he was sitting on a pile of cactus.
I hadn’t ordered a beer either.
Coach Clay and Assistant Coach Beauchamp sat across the restaurant from us on the stools at the bar, beers half-gone. They were partly keeping an eye on the team, and probably hoping for a minute’s time away from all of us before we were sealed back into the six and a half hour bus ride.
Halfway through the grilled chicken quesadilla I’d ordered, I felt my phone vibrate. I pulled it out, thumb-swiped it.
I googled it.
Your team website sucks.
U play tonight!
Streaming.
Assholes!
Sorry u lost.
Rumblers suck.
Why r they laughing so much?
R they high?
Is that a thing?
I know u play next Friday.
I’ll be there.
Got my own ticket, loser.
Want coffee?
I read them all, each of them popping up fast, because I’d been out of cell range on the ride here and apparently the 1950s internet in the restaurant had just decided to get cranking.
