Page 5 of Puck the Halls
Gone is the amused McNeill. Now I see the number seventeen who gets riled up on the ice when another team pulls slightly ahead in a game or when he’s made a stupid play.
“If we drive a little north and go across Nebraska instead of Kansas, we should miss the storm,” I say.
He nods and turns on his heel.
“Where are you going?”
“To rent a car. And yes,” he calls over his shoulder. “Iget to choose what we’re driving. Butyou’repaying.”
CHAPTER 2
Sammy the Malamute
WADE
“I made my family disappear.”I grin as I stand in the middle of Bossman’s fancy-ass house, dropping my duffel bag at my feet.
The house is quiet, the only sound the ticking of a clock somewhere and a beeping coming from the home monitoring system. The place is wired for fucking everything. Lights, heat, security, leak monitoring. The Christmas lights are on a timer. The hot tub temperature can be turned up or down from the tablet that I was told is in the kitchen, and Google Home will probably know if I eventhinkabout touching the liquor cabinet.
Like alien electronics picking around in my brain.
It’s damn near the Big Brother house, but I don’t give a shit, because…
“I made my family disappear,” I repeat, kicking off my shoes by the front door. This feels like a no-dirty-ass-sneakers-in-the-house kind of house.
I love my family, but I have four older sisters and they gang up on me.
When I was a little kid, they treated me like a baby doll, alternating between aggressively caring for me and disciplining me. In a playing-house-kind-of-way.
I guess I would have appreciated their collective imagination if I wasn’t the one getting fake grounded all the time.
My gag reflex is overly sensitive from having a spoon shoved down my throat with too much enthusiasm. And I still shudder when I see a curling iron because it brings back memories of them practicing beach waves on my four-year-old head of hair that my mother refused to cut.
It does things to a guy.
I’m a real person, man.
Even if I spent my early twenties wearing a fuzzy dog costume.
Now that I’m twenty-five, Mr. Armstrong still thinks I’m an idiot, but at least I work in the special events department for the Racketeers. I’m finally back in college after dropping out at nineteen and hoping to work my way up in the marketing department.
But the last few weeks it’s felt like everyone wants to kick me when I’m down. My roommate moved out and in with his girlfriend so I had to move back in with my parents. I flunked my final exam in statistics because I didn’t have enough time to study because I had to move on two days' notice. My sisters are over every day because they claim to have Christmas stuff to do, like baking a zillion cookies and wrapping presents using Mom’s gift wrap room.
What they really like is coming over to get away from their kids, drink Mom’s wine, and try to grind me down about being single.
Which leads me to my love life.
I sigh as I make sure the front door is locked behind me and make my way toward the kitchen.
I don’thavea love life.
Erika, the mascot for the Dallas Dragons, just dumped me for no fucking reason. After two years of flirtation, we finally got there, and then she just pulled back. Some bullshit about long distance relationships not working. I think it has more to do with the dude who is Seattle’s mascot and has fucked his way through every mascot in the league, both guys and girls.
I don’t have proof of that but they did start a separate text thread without me now that I’m technically not Sammy anymore.
I still put on the suit—the dog one—for charity events and special appearances but at the games I’ve been replaced by an eighteen-year-old kid named Jameson that everyone fucking loves.
Not that I’m feeling sorry for myself or anything.
