Page 112 of Puck You Both

I take the phone with me to the ice. Fifteen is still monk shit, thank you.

Another message waits for me when the drill resets:

Wall: Becker got his head stuck in a jersey.

And again, half an hour later:

Wall: Update: still stuck.

The man is at his own practice, with his own pucks to stop and his own coaches to disappoint, and every thirty minutes he reaches out to put one dumb, ordinary fact in my hands, because he knows it'll be fine is the thing people say right before it isn't. He just stands in the crease with me from Chicago, on the half hour, sending proof the world's still stupid, and it’s one of the only things keeping me upright now.

That, and my skates with their tremendously sharp edges.

At the other end of the ice, Patrick resets his crease. Then he resets it again.

To the untrained eye, he’s goaltending. To me, a decorated Patrick scholar, it's the equivalent of finding him running down the highway naked, screaming at clouds. Patrick resets once. He does everything once. Anything done twice should have been done correctly the first time.

On the next rush, one of our rookies loses his man, who strolls in at the far post with an open net and a dream.

Patrick kills the dream right away, then his stick cracks against the post. "Get your shit together or get out of the drill."

The rink goes so quiet you can hear the compressor.

Exhibit two—Patrick doesn't snap, ever. Publicly, nothing has bothered Patrick since the invention of recorded history. That’s his entire brand. Somewhere in the Arctic, a polar bear looks up, while half my team glances at me like it’s my fault.

Which it kind of is, but they don’t know the extent of it, so…rude.

Two minutes later, Patrick skates the full length of the ice, taps the kid once on the shin pad, and glides back to his net like nothing happened, his version of flowers and a card. The rookie looks more terrified now than when he got yelled at.

During the equipment break my phone buzzes with a new sender, one that’s currently forty feet from me.

Patrick: I'm here if you need anything. Goalie session ends at four.

Complete sentences, punctuation, and stated time.

He's officially broken.

When I look up, his eyes dart down to his skates as he pretends he wasn’t looking.

There are days when being cared about feels warm and fuzzy, but today’s not that day. Right now, it feels like two very large men are pressing against my ribcage from two different cities. It’s very romantic. Also, hard to breathe.

By lunch, the whole building has caught my nerves. ESPN is on in the lounge when I walk in, my own face parked in a corner of the screen under a deadline banner. I’m not even two steps in when somebody changes the channel. We land on figure skating and a dozen grown men instantly develop a passion for a Finnish teenager's triple loop.

I'm being pre-mourned.

The Finnish girl falls, making three defensemen wince. Cool, cool. Even the substitute programming has a body count.

I plaster on my I didn’t see that, carry on face and check my phone as I unwrap my sandwich.

Wall: Petrov's word of the day is "lousy." He is using it about the management.

Wall: The management is now involved.

The second one gets an actual laugh out of me, loud and sudden, and Stevens looks over from the far end of the lounge, a look that reminds me I’m not legally allowed to laugh today. I hold up the phone toward him and he nods like I’ve sufficiently explained myself.

Berg passes through the lounge once. I scan his face for my future, expecting to find one of his only two settings, emergency or disappointment. Today he's wearing a third face, smooth and unreadable, a factory option nobody knew existed.

At 2:47 exactly, and I know that because I gave up my monk ambitions around lunch, Berg appears in the tunnel, catches my eye, and jerks his head toward the exit.