The Understatement of the Year (17 page)

Coach took a minute to look every guy in the eye, one at a time. “Where. The. Fuck. Were the rest of you?”

—
Graham

The following weekend, on the way home from the Union game, the bus was dark and quiet.

Needless to say, there’d been no cause to blast our win song after the buzzer. Orson did his best, letting in two goals the whole game. But we couldn’t put the biscuit in the basket to save our lives. Without two of our best offensive players, our rhythm broke down.

So here we were, riding home late on a silent bus, every guy thinking dark thoughts. And then there was Bella. She was currently curled up in the seat beside me, her head on my chest as if I was her own personal bolster pillow.

Across the aisle, Hartley sat with his arms folded across his chest. He wore the stoic expression of a man serving out the last bit of his prison term. As our captain, he’d ridden along to the game even though he wasn’t allowed on the bench. It couldn’t have been fun to watch us lose from the stands. Knowing Hartley, he blamed himself for the loss to Union.

Nobody on the bus was happy right now. And I’m sure everyone sat in his seat, assigning blame. It’s just that I’m pretty sure they didn’t all blame themselves.

Poor Rikker.

Thinking of him gave me a weird little nauseous rush. I was pretty embarrassed about what I’d done. Running away from him after practically pouncing on him?
God
. I couldn’t imagine what he thought of me. Tomorrow, I would call him and apologize. I’d tell him that I was glad he was my teammate, and I hoped we could be friends. I could do that. I’d still be the world’s biggest coward, but I could make a fricking phone call.

I would have already apologized, it’s just that I hadn’t seen Rikker. He’d stood at the back of the world’s most depressing team meeting. And then I heard Coach tell him that even though Hartley would be attending the Union game as captain, Rikker would not be on the bus.

He did not manage to keep the flinch off his face.

After that, Rikker walked straight out of the room, and I hadn’t glimpsed him again. If his exams were done, he’d probably already gone home to Vermont. We got three weeks off, before we had to come back for hockey just before New Year’s.

“Hey, Coach!” somebody yelled from the back of the darkened bus. And when he stood up, I saw that it was Big-D.

“Yeah, kid?” A couple of seats ahead of me, Coach swiveled around to answer him.

Big-D trundled down the narrow little aisle, his phone in his hand. “There’s some news story out there about our team. I just got, like, twenty texts warning me not to drop the soap in the shower.”

Jesus
.

Coach stood up, parking his butt against the seat back. “Okay, guys, listen up. There is an article, and it’s in the
Connecticut Standard
. But the national outlets are going to jump on this. Rikker’s transfer was pretty unusual, and a reporter sniffed that out and interviewed him. So the team is going to be in the news for a little while.”

There was a collective groan, and a few curses thrown around.

“Hey!” Coach barked, holding up a hand. “It’s just noise. If you want people to respect your game, if you want to
win
, you need to play through the noise. You guys fucked that up once already, right? I’m telling you right now, if you can’t concentrate, go ahead and hang up your skates.
Not
on the news or on the shit people send to your phone. Your game is all that matters. Figure out how to win again, and the reporters will be asking much different questions. Like, ‘how does a small school like Harkness do it?’”

Coach folded his arms, and the bus got very quiet. “I know you don’t like having this shit in the news. But neither does your teammate, Rikker. What happens next in your team story is completely up to you. Don’t blow it by getting distracted by the noise.”

Coach turned around, as if he was going to sit down. But then he stopped and turned toward the back again. “I can practically hear your wheels turning. You’re thinking, ‘my buddies are going to have a field day with this.’”

“We didn’t sign up for this shit,” Big-D grumbled.

Coach just shook his head. “That is exactly the wrong way to look at it. The truth is simple: you can either have an easy life, or you can be hockey players. The pro scouts are poking around, keeping tabs on some of you. You’re hoping make it into the AHL after college, or — God bless you — the NHL. Guess what? People are going to write shit on the Internet about
you
. You’re too slow. You’re too small. You’re ugly. Some of it might even be true.”

There was a little chuckle at that.

“It’s just noise, right? And you’re sitting on this bus thinking, ‘Yeah, but I won’t care, because I’ll be a professional hockey player.’” Coach paused to smile at us in the dark. “Nothing is
ever
getting easier for you in this sport. The noise only gets louder. The hits get harder. You’re a bunch of pampered little shits right now. Did you stop to consider that some of teams you play against have their own noise? Maybe they practice on shitty ice, or the coach is a drunk. You think you’re being tested by this shit on the Internet? Fine. But find a way to pass the test. Because there will only be bigger ones.”

Then Coach sat down. And I let out a giant breath that I didn’t even know I’d been holding.

“Wow,” Bella whispered beside me.

Wow, indeed.

Eventually, the bus pulled off at a rest stop, so that everyone could have a pee break and maybe buy a candy bar out of the vending machine. “Ten minutes,” the driver called. Bella counted everyone as we got off the bus.

I didn’t go into the building like the others. Instead, I hung back in the parking lot. When I was sure that I was all alone, I took out my phone.

—
Rikker

When my phone rang, I hauled myself up off the couch in Gran’s den and turned down my music. I was surprised to see a 616 area code lighting up my phone. Graham had the same number he’d had in high school. I really never thought I’d see that on my phone again. “Hello?”

“Hi.” Then there was a small silence. “I was going to call you tomorrow. To apologize. But then something happened on the bus just now, and I wanted to tell you about it.”

“Uh, okay?” That sounded ominous.

“There’s some newspaper article out there, but I guess you know that already. But it must be making the rounds on Reddit or wherever, because guys started getting texts about it.”

“Fuck,” I said. So this was really happening.

“Yeah. But Coach just gave Big-D a smackdown for whining about it. And it was a hell of a speech. He didn’t even quote any dead presidents. He basically just said that if you’re the kind of wuss who lets a few texts wreck your day, don’t bother calling yourself a hockey player. And forget about the pros.”

Shit!
“And how did that go down?”

“Okay, I think. It was hard to argue his point.”

I just stood there in Gran’s old farmhouse, losing my everloving mind. “Did you read the article?” I trapped my phone with my shoulder and leaned over my laptop to type my name into Google.

“No, I just called you.”

My screen lit up with hits. I clicked on the link that would take me straight to the reporter’s original article. I was hoping that the title would end up being something bland about transfer rules. Instead it read, “I Just Wanted to Play Hockey.”

There was a photo, too — an action shot of me in my Harkness uniform, lunging for the puck. Thank God they’d chosen that, and not the goofy one from the team program. In this one, you could hardly see my face.

“Rikker, are you still there?” Graham asked into my ear.

I stood up quickly, feeling a little lightheaded. “Yeah, I’m here.”
I’m here, but I wish this weren’t happening
. The article had fifty-seven comments under it already.

It would probably be a bad idea to read them.

My phone beeped, and I took a peek at it. “Actually, Bella’s trying to call me.”

“Yeah?” Graham chuckled. “Well you’ll have to call her back, because I need to talk to you for one more minute. Listen, I just wanted to say I’m sorry I freaked out on you the other night.”

Funny. I’d thought of almost nothing else for the last five days. Until right this second, when it suddenly seemed pretty unimportant. “It’s okay,” I told him. When I let Graham jump me, I’d already known that he was nursing some size XXL issues.

It was
always
going to end like that.

“I just…” Graham stammered. “It made me realize that I just can’t… do that with you again. Or
any
guy. I’m not going to be… going there.”

Jeez.
Just say it out loud, Graham
, I begged him in my mind.
Say “gay.”
He couldn’t even fucking say the
word
.

“I forgot for a little while the other night. But it’s still true. And I’m sorry I freaked.” he finished.

What a head case. “Okay, man. I get it. You do what you have to do.”

“But I want us to be friends again.”

Well, ouch. Even in the most fucked-up of circumstances, it hurt to be friend-zoned. “Okay,” I said. What other choice did I have?

“I missed you, you know. You’re the only reason I kept playing hockey. Because it made me think of you.”

Dayum!
This was quickly becoming the most tweaked conversation I’d ever had. “You could have called, you know,” I said. Though I didn’t really intend to take the conversation in this direction. I didn’t want him to know how much it had hurt to be abandoned so completely. I lay in that hospital bed for days, and every time someone opened the door, I waited for it to be him.

“I was afraid.”

Yeah, I got that.

“…But it was wrong not to call, and I spent five years feeling bad about it. So I’m calling now. We were always tight, and I threw that away.”

Yeah, you did.

“So tell me how we can be friends again, and I’ll do it.”

Sure, pal!
We could be the kind of friends who never, ever drank tequila together. Because if we did, that scene from the other night would probably play out all over again.

“I guess you’re going home to Michigan for Christmas, right?” I asked.

“Yeah. Tomorrow.”

“Cool.” He didn’t even have to pretend that we were going to hang out together, because winter break was here. “You know,” I said on a whim, “you could come to Vermont for a night on your way back.” But there was no way he would say yes to that. And it felt a little mean to call him on it.

There was another silence. “How would that work?”

“You could fly into Burlington instead of Hartford, and we’ll drive down in time for practice on the thirtieth. I’m renting a car anyway.”

“I didn’t buy my ticket yet,” he said slowly. “I’ll look into it.”

“You do that.” But what were the odds? He’d probably just tell me later that the tickets didn’t work out. It might even be true. There weren’t that many flights into Burlington.

“Okay man. Hang in there. You know, with the whole article thing.”

“Yeah, it’s going to be a party.”

He chuckled, and the sound of it was so familiar that it made me sad. “Later.”

“
Adios, Miguel
.”

But he didn’t answer me in Spanish. Instead, he just disconnected.

After I hung up with Graham, shit got serious.

My phone started ringing again, and it never stopped. By the next morning, I didn’t even recognize the bulk of the incoming numbers. One of them said ESPN on it. What athlete doesn’t want to take a call from ESPN, right?

This guy.

I kept my cell phone powered down most of the time. I logged into the Harkness College directory and unlisted my telephone number and email address. Everybody who mattered in my life (all four of them, or whatever) knew how to reach me on Gran’s house phone, anyway.

Hunkering down on my bed with an old Kurt Vonnegut novel, I tried to shut out the world.

“John?” my grandmother called up the stairs to me around noon.

“Yeah?”

“Your coach is on the land line.”

“Thanks, Gran! I got it!” I picked up the house phone. “Hi, Coach.”

“Rikker! Quite a stir you’re causing on the interwebs. Is your phone ringing?”

“Yeah, but I don’t answer.”

He chuckled. “The press office wanted me to wake you up at dawn with instructions. But I told them there was no way you’d speak to another reporter if you could help it.”

“This is true.”

“Look, kid, the timing of this is good for you. Outside the rink right now there’s three news vans.”

“What? Why?” I felt nauseous all of a sudden. Hopefully, my teammates were all too busy leaving town to notice.

“First Division One hockey player to come out, yada yada. That, and it’s a slow news day in sports.”