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"Barely!" He's so happy it's coming off him like heat. "Did you hear it, though? The ping? Best sound in the world."

"It's the sound of not scoring."

"It's the sound of almost." He leans back against the boards, still grinning, and tips his head toward me. "Next one goes in. Watch."

Moretti leans down between us, not looking at either of us, eyes on the ice.

"Problem," he says.

"Yeah," I say.

The next shift starts. I should be watching the puck. I'm watching number twenty-seven.

Chapter Two

RÉMY

The crossbar is still ringing in my teeth when I sit down.

I know it's gone. I know it's been gone for a full minute and the play's moved on, but I can still hear it, that high clean ping, like somebody tapped a wine glass with a fork at the biggest party in the world. Nineteen thousand people stood up for it. For a miss. My first shift in the big league and I made a whole building stand up for a puck that didn't go in.

Maman is somewhere up in section 112 losing her mind. I can't see her, but I know. Tabarnak. A whole building.

"Castel." Moretti's voice, over my head. "Next time you dump that."

"Yes, Coach."

"You're not going to dump it."

"Probably not, Coach."

He makes a noise like a car that won't start and walks down the bench. Beside me, Hale is watching the ice with his whole face shut, the way he watched me in the room when I came in. Like I'm a weather report he doesn't trust.

He smells like tape and that cold-menthol stuff the trainers put on. There's a thin line of sweat running down from his helmet into his collar. He's got a nose that's been broken at least twice, and a scar through his left eyebrow that isn't on the wiki, which is an oversight, honestly, somebody should fix that.

"You're staring," he says, without looking at me.

"I'm scouting."

"Scout the ice."

"The ice is boring. It's white."

The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. The place where a smile would go, if he let it out. I decide I'm going to get the whole thing before the season's over, and then I get tapped for my next shift and forget about him completely for forty seconds.

First intermission, it's still nothing-nothing, and the room smells like wet gloves and orange slices.

Sorel drops into the stall across from me. He's twenty-three, from Trois-Rivières, and so far he's the only guy on the team who's talked to me in French without it sounding like a test.

"Tabarnak, the crossbar," he says. "You know they're already making it a sound on TikTok?"

"Already?"

"My sister sent it to me. It's a guy screaming and then ping. Four hundred thousand views."

"It should have gone in."

"Nobody cares. It's the ping." He throws an orange slice at my chest. "Eat. You look like you're going to pass out."