Page 35 of He Has Pluck

She shows up in the locker room at the Garden with her camera. Carlos is camera-less and follows close behind her, and I mean really close, and my already challenged cool degrades another few degrees. I wonder if he’s just a friend or a wannabe lover. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. It always does.

Juliette sets up her camera on a tripod this time and arranges lighting, all business, in complete control. She adjusts the camera height and has Carlos sit in the interrogation chair to test it. Then she goes about rearranging the background.

“Can I help?” I ask, tired of standing here with my arms folded, trying to appear relaxed.

She ignores me, but Carlos answers. “No, we’re all set. We’ll just be another minute.”

After she moves some props from a corner of the room that I hadn’t noticed before, to their spots behind the bench where we’ll be sitting, she goes back behind the lens and checks it out.

Tony nudges me, a wiseass smile on his face, something beneath a smirk. “We have a meeting after this,” he says to Carlos. “So we need to get this done sooner than later.”

“No worries,” Carlos answers with a polite smile, but he doesn’t keep the thread of annoyance from his voice. I don’t know whose side to be on between Carlos and Tony G. But then I remember Tony’s my teammate and Carlos is nothing except a friend of Juliette’s, and that should mean exactly zero to me.

My head is fucked up because hockey and the team should always come first. It should be baked into my head by now—I thought it was.

With impeccable timing, Delaney shows up just as Juliette the camera maestro has completed her preparations.

“Take your places, gentlemen,” Juliette says. “Delaney, you stay behind me and keep it quiet.” She has balls to talk to Delaney that way, but then I already knew all about her ballsy attitude. Tony and I follow her direction and take our spots on the bench, dressed for hockey minus the skates and sweat, helmets off and hair groomed.

“You want us to mess up our hair like we just came off the ice?” I ask because I’m not shy about busting balls either. She ignores me, but I push my hand through my hair and give it a good muss. It’s gotten long, so it’s shaggy anyway.

“Suits you,” she says, and my dick reacts because my mind goes to bedroom hair.

Tony G. roughs his hair up, but since he’s used gel, it now stands straight up, and I laugh at him.

“You look like a rooster,” I say. He tries to reach over and touch my hair, but I block him, and he laughs.

“What’s the matter, Jason? Worried about looking good on camera all of a sudden?”

“No, but I don’t want your damn hands in my hair.”

He pulls his hands back, and we calm down. I turn to the camera, surprised to see the red light on and Juliette in her place behind the lens, filming. She circles her hand to indicate that we should keep going.

Before I can stop him, Tony juts his hand out and pushes it through my hair and pulls it straight up.

“Fuck.”

He laughs. “Perfect. Welcome to the Brawlers locker room. Not a hair in place.” He grins at the camera.

“Okay, settle down guys,” Carlos says. Then he launches into his questions and prompts, asking about team comradery, tensions, players’ quirks and the seriousness of the game underneath all the joking and fighting. We go out of the room and walk in again, squirting water on our faces again, playing out a post-game scenario where we’re supposed to be laughing and shooting the breeze.

It turns out Tony G and I have little except hockey in common, and Ice Chip has her work cut out for her cutting out the awkward moments from her video.

“Time to call it quits,” I say. “We have that team meeting.” Juliette comes out from behind the camera, and I get the sense she would have kept going until we all dropped.

“That sucked,” Tony mumbles on the way out the door. We barely had enough time to get back into our street clothes.

“When you’re right, you’re right.” I think it’s the first time I see eye-to-eye with him, without reserve, since I met him.

Coach is already in front of the room when we walk in the back door to the stadium-style room that looks more like a college classroom than a hockey team meeting room. I’m forced to take a seat in the back row with Tony as Coach starts talking.

“This is the playoffs, gentlemen. Some of you have been here before, some haven’t. Either way, it’s time to circle our wagons, and I’m going to lay out for you what that means.

“This first week, before the first round of the playoffs starts, the schedule will be the same every day. Early morning skate starting at seven am, followed by breakfast, followed by naps, followed by afternoon drills, followed by treatments then team dinner, then a short team meeting and then team buffet followed by home to bed. You will turn in by nine pm every night. I can’t emphasize this need for an early turn-in enough. If your household is too busy or chaotic for you to get to sleep early, I expect you to get a hotel room for the duration.”

Shit.

“You will have no life outside of hockey for the rest of the playoffs, starting right now.”