Page 4

"Who told you that?"

"The internet. You have a fan wiki. It's extremely thorough." He sits down and starts unlacing his shoes. "It knows your shoe size. It knows your dog's name. It has a whole section about your left glove."

"I don't have a dog."

"You had a dog. Biscuit. There's a memorial page." He looks up at me and his face goes briefly, completely sincere. "I'm sorry about Biscuit."

I don't know what to do with that, so I pull my shirt over my head.

"Anyway," he says, "is there a thing I'm supposed to do? Like, rookie rules. Do I carry your bag, tape your sticks, sing on the bus?"

"You don't touch my sticks."

"Okay."

"You don't sing on the bus."

"That one's going to be hard."

"You do your job, you keep your head up on the boards, and you stop telling reporters where you're going to score."

He grins. It takes over his whole face. "You saw that."

"Everybody saw that."

"I meant it, though." He pulls on a base-layer shirt and his head pops out the top, hair sticking up in every direction. "First shift. I can feel it."

"You'll feel the Outriders' D if you try to walk the middle."

"Varga?" He waves a hand. "Varga's slow. I played against him in juniors. He's got hands like oven mitts and he cries when you go around him."

"Varga's thirty goals a year."

"Slow thirty goals a year."

Webb makes a noise into his tape roll that might be a laugh.

Rémy goes quiet for a second, digging through his bag. When he talks again his voice is lower, like it's just for me. "Hey. I saw the thing today. The divorce thing." He doesn't look up. "That sucks. People being in your business. I'm sorry."

Nobody has said that to me. Not like that, flat out, with nothing attached to it. Saul said go play hockey. Priya said don't be a cautionary tale. This kid I've known for nine days says that sucks like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

"Get dressed, Castel," I say.

"Rémy."

"Castel."

"We'll work on it," he says, and starts humming again.

Doc does the shot at five-fifteen in the side room with the door closed. It's a long needle into a small space, and it hurts the way it always hurts, like somebody pouring cold metal into the joint. I look at the ceiling tile with the water stain shaped like Florida. I've looked at that tile a lot of times.

"Give it twenty minutes," Doc says.

"I know."

Coach Moretti is waiting in the hallway when I come out. He's sixty-one, he coached me in my second year in this league, and he's never once in his life started a conversation with hello.

"Your kid's going to be a problem," he says.