Page 104 of Rookie Recovery

Translation: Toodlepip.

It’s out of our hands. We’re trading you. You understand?

Translation: It’s a four fucking day drive to your new team. Your signing fee was astronomical. It could do so much for the team. You’ll find your feet, but we’d prefer our kits rhinestoned over giving you a permanent home.

It’s the nature of pro sports.

Translation: Everything you represent is more important than who you are.

So, I’d sit on the Bobcats’ bench for how much longer? A few games? A few weeks? Months?

Miss training camp. Done. Miss preseason. Done that too. How many games of the regular season would I miss? How many times would other coaches and managers notice my absence from play? Conspicuous because I made myself conspicuous.

Fake it until you make it.

Be the shit until everyone believes you’re the shit.

I scooped up a loose puck, bobbled it on the curve of my stick. Toe-dragged to my feet, kicked with the left under the blade of the right, back onto my stick.

I faked it so hard. Was all the shit. Made everyone sit up and pay notice. Look at me! I’m good at this. Pick me.

Keep me.

Only I forgot to be so vocal about that last part.

And I fucking let myself believe it might be different this time. I’d found somewhere I loved. With a team I loved. And a man who I loved so wholeheartedly, I didn’t know what hurt more. The pain of not playing the game that was my very reason for existing. Or the pain of knowing that Jamie didn’t feel the same.

Because if he felt the same, he had a pretty shitty way of showing it.

I was fine. My shoulder was fine. I still had it strapped up, like Dr fucking Sullivan had told me. But it didn’t hurt, at least not nearly as much as it had done. I took a hard slapshot, just to prove it was fine.

It was. As reliable as ever.

I got it. Jamie had played pro and had to quit because of an injury. And I understood he was only doing his job. And doing it really fucking well. Like it was the only thing that mattered to him. And I knew he didn’t want the same thing to happen to me. I got it. I promise I did.

But he wasn’t me. I wasn’t him. I wouldn’t let the same thing happen.

I needed to play. I needed to skate out that first game.

I needed the world not to forget me. Pass me over again. Move me from one state to another.

I could skate it. And I could fucking boss it. And Jamie knew that.

So, if he wouldn’t sign me off, then I guessed I had no other option.

There was no way in hell I was sitting this one out.

I would go over his head.

“Bowman, come in, take a seat. I assume you’re here about Sullivan’s … prognosis?”

Prognosis. What an apt choice of word. I sat at the large conference style table that served as Coach Turner’s desk. It was strewn with papers and scribbled notes and sheets of A2 flip board paper, and several cups of half-drunk black coffee. Turner’s office, if you could even call it that, couldn’t be any further from Jamie’s stark, ordered, miserable therapy room.

I sat on my hands and pursed my lips together so that I wouldn’t blurt out everything on my mind. That I wanted him to ignore my doctor’s very specific advice and grant me the go ahead to play this game. Because one game benched could lead to a season and then what? I wasn’t ready to give up this dream yet.

But that was what I came here for. So eventually I’d have to find the right words to persuade him to let me skate. Or leave his office sad and broken. Like I’d left Jamie’s.

In the middle of the table sat a manilla folder with BOWMAN, A. R. in the top left corner. Presumably my damning MRIs were in there, along with my unsigned release forms.

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