Page 3 of Slashed Bonds

No. Not lost.

Stripped.

There’s a difference, and I plan to use the correct verb for the rest of my life.

Three lines of email from the league’s competitive integrity office. No signature. No phone number. An anomalous designation panel and an unlisted pheromonal modulator in a sample I gave voluntarily, in a portable trailer behind the rink in Trois-Rivières, while eating an orange.

Doping.

They’re saying I doped. That I bought an edge I couldn’t earn against Alphas. That every draw I ever took clean came out of a vial.

Me.

I’ve been on the ice since I could walk. I’ve skated Christmas mornings. I’ve skated with the flu, with a cracked rib taped down so tight I couldn’t take a full breath, through two heats the team physician swore would flatten me. I watched other girls quit and envied them for four seconds each time before going back out.

There’s no version of me that needed to cheat.

Every person who ever ran a bag skate for me knows it.

They know it.

My mind does what minds do when they’re trying to survive a room.

It leaves.

It goes to Tuesday. Not this Tuesday. The one nine days ago. Semifinal against Ravensworth. The last shift of my life, and I didn’t know it, which is the standard cruelty of last things.

Fifty-eight seconds left. One goal down. Renaud pulls the goalie, and I go over the boards on a change so tight my blade bites ice before my back foot leaves the bench.

Ravensworth wins the puck behind their net. Their defenseman looks up for the outlet, and I’ve watched enough film on him to know he won’t go glass-and-out on his backhand. Ever. He tried it once in a U18 final, got it picked off, and he’s been afraid of that pass since.

So I don’t chase him.

I shade the strong-side half wall and wait for the thing he’s afraid of to become the only thing he has left.

He forces it up the boards.

I read it off his shoulders before it leaves his blade.

Top of the circle, in stride. Their winger closes hard, all shoulder, committed to the body, so I drag the puck across my toes and slide it between his feet and step around him into the space he gave up to hit me.

The crowd catches up half a second late. The sound comes off the concrete like something breaking.

Two-on-one. I’m carrying. The defender plays the pass, because everybody plays the pass, because my whole scouting report is twenty-one assists and eight goals and a girl who’d rather set the table than eat at it.

So I sell it. Head down. Weight shifting. Blade opening toward my winger on the far side.

The defender leans.

The goalie’s shoulders rotate a degree and a half toward the seam.

A degree and a half is plenty.

I pull it back to my forehand and snap it high glove side from a garbage angle, no wind-up at all, the whole shot happening inside my wrists.

The sound a puck makes hitting mesh is the only sound I’ve ever loved without conditions.

We won in overtime.