Page 68 of Bad Teammate
Something didn’t add up.
Sasha might be a selfish brother, but he wasn’t a selfishhockey player.
Hm.
Strange.
24
Derek
I stood in the slot, wide open, smacking my stick on the ice.
“NIKO! SLOT!”
But it didn’t matter how much I yelled. The only reason I was so wide open in the first place was because the Colorado defenders stopped bothering to mark me. They’d figured out that Niko wasn’t going to pass me the puck, so why should they even bother wasting a guy to cover me?
Instead, they doubled up on Niko. And Niko danced with the puck, doing his cutesy little 360-degree spins until he inevitably ran himself out of ice and coughed up the puck.
All.
Game.
Long.
And I had afunny feelingit had something to do with a text I received just before the start of the game, when we were still in the locker room. It went like this:
“Hi, Mr. Reaves. This is Julia. I’m just passing along this text Aleksander wanted me to translate: ‘Message for Derek: Katya is acting very strangely—happy and dancing and singing all morning. Now she’s cooking Russian food for dinner? It’s obvious you haven’t told her what you said you would last night. Do it immediately—or else.’”
When I’d read the text, I glanced up from my phone and caught his smirk from across the locker room.
Or else?I thought, staring him down.Who the fuck do you think you are, threatening me? Do you seriously think you could hurt me?
Silly me. I thought he’d meant he’d fight me. But after a period of bullshit hockey,it was crystal clear what he’d meant by that “or else.”
It meant he’d make me look bad on the ice.
Back on the bench, I grabbed him by the collar. “Cut the bullshit, Niko,” I roared in his ear. “Pass me the fuckingpuck next time. You understand? PASS. THE. PUCK.”
Niko looked at me and laughed, as if this were all a game to him.
“It’s not funny, kid. You’re pissing me the fuck off. Start passing.”
Hathaway reached over and tapped me on the shoulder. “What’s going on with you two?”
“Nothing,” I snapped. “The kid is fucking brain-dead today. That’s all.”
On our very next shift, I went streaking through the neutral zone with a Colorado defender closely marking me, following me like a shark. The defender was Jack Cameron, a hulking kid with a six-foot-five frame. Cameron grew up on a farm in Iowa, and he had the big, brawny muscles to prove it, too.
The young buck can do it all, really: play good D, hit, make a play, score a beauty. Cameron is what we call “sneaky good”—meaning the rest of the league hasn’t yet realized how incredibly skilled he is, or how dangerous he can be. This year, his fourth in the league, Cameron finally seems pissed that he’s not getting the respect he deserves. Since the start of the season, he’s come out with a chip on his shoulder, gunning to make an impact on the game every single night.
And whileotherpeople around the league might not have noticed that he’s racking up a body count with his crushing body checks, I sure as hell have. I kept a close eye on him all night, making sure he couldn’t line me up for one of his punishing hits.
So go fuckin’ figure, with Jack Cameron breathing down my neck, Nikofinallygave me a pass—a suicidepass.
(Suicide pass:when a player passes the puck to a teammate who is already well covered, and receiving the pass puts him in immediate danger.)
As soon as I glanced back and saw the puck skipping across the ice towards me, I knew what was coming.
