Page 14 of The Fall
I swallow. “I’d tell you.”
Blair unlatches his helmet, pushes it back, and runs a hand through his damp hair. It’s dark, and the ends are curling. A day’s worth of scruff shadows his jaw. He didn’t shave this morning because he wanted to get me to Dr. Lin as fast as possible. It’s a rugged look, made for him.
“You sure you’re okay?” His voice softens. His eyes roam over my face.
“Yeah.” I try to smile, but it feels like a grimace. “I’m good. A little disoriented.”
Coach’s whistle cuts the air. The team breaks up, moving back to the drills, but Blair stays with me. “After this, we’ll get you somewhere quiet. Stretch out, decompress.” He skates backward, his eyes never leaving mine.
Finally—finally—he shifts his focus back to the team, to Coach, to the drills, and releases me from his hold. I exhale, bend forward, tremble.
Forehead pressed to the boards, anesthetized by the cold, I let my thoughts bleed into the rink. This is hockey. This is practice. This is home.
Right?
The world is spinning, spinning and spinning, and I dig my fingers into the cold plastic, trying to hold on. Stay steady, Torey.
Hawks and Hollow pick up again, slicing a circle. Hayes is still chirping. I keep one eye on Blair, a storm on the horizon that can ruin and rebuild the whole world.
Let me remember all of this.
Let me hold on.
“You seeing this shit, Kicks?” Hayes’s laughter bounces off the locker room walls. He’s the team’s class clown, with a grin that pulls everyone in. “Rookie’s got hands, I’ll give him that.”
I force out a laugh. Does it sound as hollow as I feel? I should know all the rookies—their names, their stats, the way they move, shoot, celebrate a goal.
I should know all of those things about myself, too, but I don’t.
“He’s gonna be a problem for the other teams,” I manage.
Hayes seems happy with that, and he shifts his shit-talking across the room, hassling Fischer about his dangles.
My eyes bounce around the locker room, searching for something, anything, to spark a memory. Anything I recognize at all. Lockers, spilled gear, ice-soaked carpet. Balls of used socktape, rolls of stick tape. Other than the different colors, it could be any team’s locker room in any arena.
Blair stayed to talk to Coach out on the ice, and Hayes and the rest of the guys dragged me to the locker room, seemingly overjoyed to have me with them. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that wanted, and even though these guys are all essentially—to me—strangers, that was impossible to resist.
I’m paying for it now. My head is screaming again. This is a lot of noise compressed into a too-small space.
There’s a broken hockey stick mounted on one wall, split violently in half. Someone took a hammer to it and fixed it up there, messy but decisively permanent. There’s nothing else around it, no plaque or sign, no framed photo, nothing to explain the significance of that shattered piece of fiberglass.
Something hot and jittery bolts up my arm, slithering around the top of my spine.
“Yo, Kicks,” Hayes says. He frowns. “You all right, bud?”
“Just tired.”
“Tell me about it.” Hayes collapses onto the bench next to me. “Coach is really putting us through the wringer this week. Wish I had a maintenance day today. Excuse to be lazy.” He shoots me a wink, still playful, but a little of his good cheer and playfulness fades the longer I stay quiet. “You wanna cancel tonight?”
“Tonight?”
“Dinner? You and Calle and the fam?” He looks concerned. “Lily’s been going crazy without you, but if you’re not feeling it...”
The air turns brittle. Lily?
“Yeah, of course.” My jaw twitches. Keeping this charade going is like trying to hold back a tidal wave with my bare hands, but I don’t have any other option. Dive in headfirst or lose it all, and I can’t,won’t, lose this. “Sorry, I had a long night. After thehit…” I trail off, hoping that he understands when I don’t even understand.
Hayes scoots closer to me. His voice drops lower, lost to everyone else in the room. “Yeah, Calle told me. Sorry, man. Concussions suck so much.” He gestures vaguely toward his own head. “I was out for two weeks with my last one. Couldn’t do anything. I sat around until I thought my eyes were going to fall out of my head.”
