Page 15

Hale comes into the room at five-twenty on a game day, which, according to the wiki and according to Webb, has never happened. Not once. Not in seventeen years.

He's wearing a suit. A real one, dark gray, the kind with a vest. His tie is already pulled loose, and his face is the color of the cinderblock.

"Whoa," I say. "Who died?"

He doesn't answer. He sits down in his stall and starts undoing his cufflinks, and his fingers slip on the first one twice before he gets it.

"Cap," Webb says, quiet.

"I'm fine."

"You look like⁠—"

"I said I'm fine, Marcus."

Webb shuts up. I've never heard Hale call him Marcus. I don't think anyone does. It lands in the room like somebody dropped a tray.

I lean over. "If you need someone to fight, I'm small but I'm mean."

"Castel." He doesn't look at me. "Not today."

His voice is so flat that I actually shut my mouth, which my mother would tell you is a medical event. I turn back to my stall. Webb catches my eye across Hale's back and gives me a tiny shake of the head. Leave it.

I leave it. I tape my stick. I listen to Hale breathing beside me, slow and careful, the way you breathe when you're trying not to be sick.

It's a good game until it isn't.

Denver's fast and their goalie is a wall, and for two periods nobody can get anything past anybody. I get an assist in the second, a drop pass to Sorel that he rips in from the slot, and Sorel points at me on the way back to the bench and the building chants my name for a few seconds. My name. I try to act like it's normal and fail completely.

Hale plays like a machine. Nothing fancy. Every puck goes where it's supposed to go. He blocks a shot with his shin in the third and I hear the crack from the bench, and he gets up and finishes the shift anyway. When he comes off, he's gray under the red of his face, and Dana leans over the boards and says something in his ear, and he shakes his head once without looking at her.

He drops onto the bench next to me. Up close he smells like the ice and something else, a trace of cologne from the suit, which is so strange on him that I almost comment on it.

"That was your shin," I say instead.

"I know where my shin is."

"It sounded like a branch breaking."

"It's fine."

"You say fine like other people say um."

He turns his head. For a second I think he's going to take it off, my face or my head or both. Instead he just looks at me, and he looks so tired that I forget what I was going to say next.

"Castel," he says. "What do you want?"

"I want you to let Dana look at it."

"Dana's looked at it."

"Dana looked at it from the other side of the boards. That's not looking. That's waving."

Webb, on my other side, makes a noise into his water bottle.

"If I let her look at it," Hale says, "will you stop talking?"

"For one shift."