Page 47 of Game Misconduct

“Can I talk to you?” Mike’s mouth was dry and his stomach was doing those loopy jumps that it had done the day of the draft. He hadn’t thought this plan through at all.

Araceli Garcia turned on her heel and kept walking. She said, over her shoulder, “No, and I particularly don’t want to do it in the middle of traffic, Sato.”

Mike followed her obediently; once they were safely over the curb on the other side, she turned to look at him again, regal and withering. “I really do want to talk to you, um, about your brother—”

“I don’t see what you could possibly have to say to me.” Her voice was low and husky but sharper with rage. “Unless it’s to apologize for going after him on the ice like that, forhurting him like that, and somehow, I don’t think that’s what you’re planning to do.”

Mike’s mouth opened and closed. He could feel the gears grinding to a halt in his head. The need to tell her was there but he didn’t know how to say it, and for a minute he regretted everything in his life that had led him to be, like, the kind of person who desperately wanted to make things better for someone who was kind of important to him, but whose family probably hated him. Definitely hated him. And for a good reason. It was really fucked up. His face must have been doing something he didn’t know it was doing, because Araceli’s expression softened, minutely, as she waited for him.

“Please,” Mike swallowed. The words ground themselves out against his will. “Iamsorry for the tooth thing—but it’s not like that anymore.”

“Oh?”

It took him several false starts to the sentence before he managed, “Danny is—”

“Danny?”Araceli repeated, her eyebrows shooting up, then apparently made her decision in a snap second. It was the kind of decisiveness that Mike admired. “Well then. I think you’d better come and have a cup of coffee with me. We can go back to my office, if you’d feel more comfortable speaking to me there.”

“Uh, okay. Sure. I mean. We can.”

He followed her back across the street like he was walking in a dream, or maybe a nightmare. This was exactly his nightmare, both talking about things he was feeling and someone figuring out things about him he had always been more comfortable keeping secret. The feeling of exposure and of humiliation of someone knowing what was going on in his head, someone he’d never even met before. He was doing this impossible thing for Danny, he told himself, as he followed Araceli into the lobby of the huge building at the corner of Eighteenth and JFK and tried to ignore the panic twisting his stomach. Of fucking course Danny’s sister worked like two blocks away from his apartment.

“Hey,” Araceli said, when they were in the elevator, “take a deep breath, okay? It’s okay. We’re just going to have a chat.”

“It’s not really okay,” Mike mumbled, catching himself running his hand over his skull. He was sweating a little, and not because the building was warm.

It was a small office with a waiting room and a few doors that branched away from it. She gestured to him to go into the one with her name on it, while she slipped off her parka and went to make him a cup of coffee at the mini Keurig they had set up against one wall.

“How do you take your coffee, Sato?”

“It’s just Mike. And, uh, black, please.”

He went into the room and looked around at it, at all of the psychology books she had on the shelves, at the plants that covered every surface. The room was relatively devoid of anything personal about her, and it had the kind of bland comforting air that Mike had instinctively hated the one time his parents had tried to drag him to see a shrink in middle school.

He didn’t know where to sit. There were three chairs arranged in a kind of a half circle, and another chair behind Araceli’s desk. In the end he took the chair closest to the door. He could feel his heart beating a billion fucking times a minute, and knew his leg was jiggling up and down, but he couldn’t stop it even when he tried.

Luckily Araceli didn’t say anything about it when she came back in, just handed him his cup of coffee and sat down in the chair that was opposite his, giving him a little space with the third chair in between them. He curled his hands around the hot cup and chewed on his lip and waited for her to start, but she just watched him, studying his face. This wasn’t a standoff he could win because he’d started this.

“Dr. Garcia, I—”

“You can call me Araceli,” she said, the corner of her mouth tilting up, “you’re not one of my patients.”

“Right. Right. I’m Mike, then. Because like, um, Mr. Sato is my dad.” He drank the coffee, a too-large gulp that burned his tongue, and looked down at his boots and tried to think of how to say this. There were so manyumspunctuating the words that he felt, for a second, like he was back in school in Portland, sweating in front of the class and trying to give a book report on a topic that he understood about halfway. “I’m sorry to have, like, scared you or whatever, I know what it looks like on the ice and I’m sorry, you probably hate watching that shit. I didn’t mean to hurt him like that, I just...”

“Hey,” Araceli said again, over the rim of her own coffee cup. “Mike, it’s okay. Take a deep breath. I’m not going to do whatever you think I’m going to do.”

“I know, it’s just... I’m really fucking bad with this shit, okay?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Give yourself some credit, please. You approached me, you came here voluntarily, that’s more than many people would do, I think. Just calm down. Okay? You have all the time you need.”

Mike took another hasty gulp of the coffee. “I’m worried about him,” he said, finally. “Okay? I’m really worried about him and I thought maybe you should know. I...”

Araceli was looking at him again, and he couldn’t tell if her expression was surprise or pity. “May I ask—why?”

Mike’s ears burned and he knew his face was probably bright fucking red. Or making some kind of expression he couldn’t control. He was going to throw up, or pass out, or, or just, like, scream and run out of the room. He wasn’t going to be able to do this; he was going to chicken out like he always did when he thought about telling Bee. Strangely, he thought about Danny’s hand on his back, the way he’d said,c’mon, babe, just tell me, and tried to use that to calm himself down. He had to say something, even if he exposed things.

“Danny’s really like...kind of important to me? We’ve been talking a lot this season.”

“Okay,” Araceli said, and her voice was so even, so comfortingly nonreactive, that Mike wanted to fucking cry. He’d basicallysaid itand the world hadn’t ended. “I did mean why are you worried about him, but thank you for telling me, Mike. Danny doesn’t tell me very much about his life anymore.”

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