Playing Defense (Corrigan Falls Raiders) (8 page)

Change our lives. I wanted to be cynical about it, but I couldn’t really convince myself. I was going to a hockey game that night, invited by one of the players, sitting with the girlfriend of the team captain, and that girlfriend was also
my
friend. My life already
had
been changed. “I could take pictures at the game tonight,” I said tentatively. Ms. Coyne beamed at me.

“It’d be pretty hard for me to be all cool and nonchalant about my niceness if I was snapping selfies the whole time I was doing nice things,” Karen mused. “But I bet I could take pictures of some of the stuff I did. Or the faces of people I make smile.”

“I can’t believe you call
me and Chris
hippies, when you’re coming up with crap like that!” I laughed.

Karen grinned back at me. “You guys are contagious.”

“Awesomeness
is
contagious,” Ms. Coyne said. She sounded satisfied. “You two are patient zero. But this could spread a long way, if you keep it up.”

That sounded like a bit more than I’d been planning on. “It’s supposed to be about
individual
awesomeness, though. It’s not some big community service thing. I mean, Karen’s is, right now, but that was chance. Chris and I are just trying to get more awesome
ourselves
.” I wasn’t sure if I should feel guilty about that or not.

Ms. Coyne didn’t seem too concerned. “I think you’ll find that any increase in awesomeness will have an effect on the larger world,” she said calmly. “Maybe not a huge effect, but you never know.” Then she added, “I can tell you it’s already had an effect on me. And I wanted to ask if it would be okay with you if I started my own branch of the sisterhood. I think you were right that it wouldn’t be good for me to be in the same group as my students, but my partner thinks it’s a fantastic idea, and we have some friends we think would be interested. I’d even like to present it to them using a lot of the ideas you two came up with. The Shakespeare, and everything.”

Completely overwhelming. Karen and I stared at each other for a couple seconds. Then Karen said, “I don’t think we’d have the right to stop you, even if we wanted to. It’s not like we own the idea, or anything.”

“Maybe not the
right
. But I don’t think it would be very awesome to use someone’s idea without their permission. Seems like a bad way to start this sort of a project, really.”

“I think it’d be cool,” I said. I was still overwhelmed, but in a good way. “And maybe we could share ideas. I mean, maybe yours would be all sophisticated and adult and everything—”

“I’m going to try to convince my partner to eat more adventurous food,” Ms. Coyne said. “For a start, at least. Not too sophisticated.”

I wanted to ask about the “partner” thing, maybe find out if this was a male partner or a female one, but I decided it wasn’t really any of my business. “What do you think
your
challenge will be?”

Ms. Coyne’s smile was bright. “I have no idea. But I’m looking forward to finding out.”

And that was a big part of it, I realized. The looking forward to things. Instead of just going through the motions of my life, I was having adventures, even if they were fairly small ones. I glanced over at Annalise, who was still staring at her book, and thought that I was the
opposite
of a sheep. “I’m looking forward to the hockey game,” I told Ms. Coyne, Karen, and anyone else who cared to listen. I didn’t tell them the whole truth, didn’t mention that at least part of my interest in the game was based on a growing fascination with a certain towering defenseman. “I might not like it, but…yeah. I’m looking forward to finding out.”

Chapter Six

“Sit still,” Tyler growled. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

It was a good question, but I didn’t feel like answering it. “I’m fine,” I said, and I kept pacing along the rubber mat in front of the bench in the change room.

“Are there scouts here?” Tyler asked. He suddenly looked like he was going to start pacing, too. “Did you hear something?”

“What? Scouts? No, I don’t think so. I mean, maybe. I don’t know.”

“He’s nervous ’cause his little buddy is here,” Cooper said. He was usually a good guy and a pretty close friend, but he and his girlfriend, Dawn, had broken up about a week earlier and he’d been kind of bitter since then. I waited to see if he was going to say anything he shouldn’t about Claudia, but he had enough sense to keep his mouth shut.

And Tyler distracted me with a whack of his stick against my shin pads. “Your tutor? Is that who he means? Karen’s friend?”

“Her name’s Claudia.”

“Karen said she was coming. And she
said
you had a crush. I knew it! But, seriously, you’re this nervous about her seeing you play? You know there are thousands of people at each game, right? Any reason you’re nervous about this one person?”

“Those people all
want
to be here. They actually like watching hockey. Claudia doesn’t. Or at least, she
probably
doesn’t. She’s only here to be awesome.” And to study us, of course.

Tyler groaned. “I am so sick of hearing about being ‘awesome.’ Karen won’t shut up about it.”

“You’re just jealous because you’re not a sister.” I was dimly aware of a few other players frowning at me, but I wasn’t worried about that. “Claudia’s giving hockey a try. She’s being open to new experiences.” I turned then and spoke loudly enough to drown out the locker room chatter. “We can’t fight tonight, okay? No fights.”

“Does the coach know about that?” Tyler asked. He sounded mostly amused, but maybe a tiny bit concerned.

“He doesn’t need to know. He doesn’t really like it when we fight, anyway. He won’t care.”

“If they push us around, we have to push back,” Cooper said firmly.

I knew he was right. That was the way the game was played. We could avoid fighting most of the time, and we were a pretty disciplined team. We didn’t take stupid penalties. But that only went so far. We couldn’t let the other team dominate us physically, and if one of them started something, we couldn’t skate away from that.

“Just take it easy,” I pleaded to the room at large. “Don’t start anything. Let’s have a nice, quiet night. Lots of goals and stuff, but, you know…no fighting.”

Tyler shook his head, then raised his own voice to speak to the room. “Everyone remember that Winslow is full of shit, okay? We have to play our game, even if he’s got a crush on a pacifist.” He saw my expression and shook his head again. But this time he said, “But nobody go looking for trouble.” He looked at me. “Okay?”

It was our standard rule, not something special for that night. We never went looking for trouble. But he was right; we still had to play our game, and it didn’t make sense for me to try to change that. “Yeah,” I said grudgingly. Then I added, “Thanks.”

Tyler just slapped me with his stick again, this time on my ass, and then the coach came in and gave us a few last-minute instructions and we headed out onto the ice for our warm-up skate.

The crowd was still coming in, and I tried to keep myself from looking into the stands and going crazy, but I only made it one lap around our end of the ice before I sneaked a peek in the direction of the seats I’d gotten for Claudia and Karen. They weren’t there yet, which started up a loop of all the things that could have gone wrong to keep them away. Maybe Claudia had decided it was a stupid challenge and she didn’t want to waste her valuable time on hockey
or
hockey players. Maybe their car had broken down on the way to the arena. Last I’d heard they were catching a ride with Karen’s stepmom, who had a fairly new car, but still. Maybe it had gotten a flat.

Or, shit, maybe they’d been in an accident. No, I didn’t want to think about that, but the only thing I could think of to chase
that
idea out of my head was a picture of the two of them in the lobby of the arena talking to some random guys, some smart assholes who’d come home from some smart asshole school where they were learning how to be even
smarter
assholes, and Claudia would be all impressed by how damn
smart
they were, and—

Tyler skated up beside me and slapped my shin pads. I’d never really noticed him being so slaphappy before, and I couldn’t figure out if he was doing it more than usual because I was being weird and grumpy, or if he
always
did it that much and I was just noticing it more because of being weird and grumpy.

“What?” I grumbled.

“She’s wearing team colors,” Tyler said, and I whipped around, skating backward as my eyes searched the stands.

It would have been easier to find her if she
hadn’t
been wearing team colors, really, but finally, in the sea of black and yellow, I found a little island of the same black and yellow, heading toward the seats I’d gotten for her and Karen. They ran into a bit of a traffic jam on the stairs and Claudia turned to look toward the ice.

And that was when I smashed into the boards and wiped out.

I’m a defenseman. I skate backward a lot, and I’m pretty good at it, usually. But apparently on that night I’d lost the ability to know where I was on the ice. Which is kind of a bad thing for a hockey player to lose.

Tyler stopped beside me, his skates kicking up some ice to cool my flaming face, and he shook his head in amused disgust. “I checked with Coach,” he said as he stared down at me. “There are no scouts watching tonight.” He paused a moment, then said, “Thank God,” and turned and skated away.

When we went back into the locker room for the pregame talk, Coach pulled me aside and told me I needed to keep my head in the game or he’d bench me. Which didn’t actually help all that much, because then instead of worrying that Claudia would see me get in a fight, I worried that she’d see me riding the pine all night. Would it be worse for her to think I was a goon, or a benchwarmer?

“Hey,” Tyler said, and he slapped my shin pads again. Then, not even saying anything, he swung his stick again, this time catching me on the hip.

“What are you doing? Stop hitting me all the time.”

“Is that what you’re going to say if the other team comes after you? You’re going to whine at them?”

“What? No. But…what? Are you making some sort of argument here? I mean, if the other team comes after me you want me to take them down, right? Is that what you think I should be doing with you?” Tyler’s big for a regular guy, but
I’m
big for a hockey player. If I went after him, he’d be in trouble.

And judging by the way he grinned at me, he knew it. “That’s a good question. I don’t really have a strategy here. I’m mostly just trying to annoy you.”

“For a reason?”

“I think it started off as trying to get you to pay attention to the game. But now I’m doing it for its own sake, mostly.”

“So are
you
paying attention to the game?”

“I’m doing better than you.”

“That’s really not saying much.”

We got called out to the ice then, and during the anthem I saw Claudia staring around the arena like she was just then noticing how many people were there, and it reminded me that this game
was
kind of a big deal. Not for the team, necessarily—it wasn’t the playoffs or anything. And not for any individual player—there were no scouts in the stands, no real need to show off. But for the people in the audience? Corrigan Falls wasn’t a rich town, and tickets for the game weren’t cheap. These people had paid their hard-earned money, given up their Friday night, and they were waiting for us to entertain them. But more than that. They were waiting for us to make them
feel
something. They wanted to be excited, to get caught up in the energy that comes with a good game, to feel like they were part of something larger than themselves.

And I wanted to give that to them. In a weird way, I wanted to give something to myself, too. I’d been trying to ignore what Karen had said about my hockey playing, how I didn’t try as hard as I should, but it had been dancing around in the back of my mind ever since I’d heard it. And I thought about Claudia, getting so into her crazy math stuff, being so happy when she worked something out and found a solution to a problem. Math wasn’t fun for her, exactly, but it was a worthwhile challenge, something she cared about and worked hard at. I didn’t want to coast through everything, not all the time. Maybe I was just a gorilla, but I was going to be the best damn gorilla I could be.

So when the puck dropped and the game started, I threw myself into it. I played hard, got into the groove, and maybe I didn’t quite forget about Claudia up there watching me, but I…I guess I trusted her. I believed that she’d be tough enough to handle it if things got a bit rough, and open-minded enough to let herself enjoy the game and get caught up in the energy of it.

Three minutes into the period, I took advantage of a turnover in the neutral zone and headed up the ice with the puck. Tyler was right behind me, because that’s where he needed to be for the play to work, and Tyler was
always
where he needed to be. There was only one defenseman back, and as soon as he committed to covering me I dropped the puck for Tyler, and he took the shot.

Red light, buzzer, roar of the crowd. First goal of the game, and when I looked up into the stands, Claudia was on her feet right beside Karen, both of them clapping and cheering and jumping around like we’d just won the Stanley Cup.

The last of my tension drained out of me as Tyler and I skated over to the bench.

”Nice pass,” Tyler said.

“Nice shot,” I replied.

Then he slapped my pads again and I pulled the stick out of his hands and threatened to shove it down his throat, and he laughed at me. My nerves were gone.

But that didn’t mean I wasn’t still sneaking looks up into the stands. And every time I saw Claudia, she was totally part of the crowd. Part of the energy and the action and the fun. If she wasn’t enjoying herself, she was doing a really good job of faking it.

I wanted to talk to her about it. For the first time I could remember, I wanted the game to be over so I could go do something else. As much as I loved hockey? I was more interested in Claudia.

That probably should have freaked me out, but it didn’t. It just made me feel good.

…

“We couldn’t wait for them inside?” I asked Karen as she led the way toward the parking lot. Karen’s stepmother had dropped us off at the arena with the understanding that we’d get a ride home with Tyler, so we didn’t even have a car to wait in. “It’s kind of cold out here.”

“Shit,” she said, looking at my thin jacket, then reluctantly back toward the arena. “We can. Yeah.”

“But you don’t want to? Why not?”

She shrugged like she wasn’t going to explain, then sighed and said, “It’s a weird scene. There are all these girls who wait for the players. You know, like…” She trailed off, then shrugged again. “There’s this really clear line between the
other
girls and the girls who are actually
dating
players. And the girlfriends can be kind of bitchy about the…they call them puck bunnies—that’s the nicer name—and I don’t like that, but I also don’t like standing there, wondering which of the girls Tyler’s been with, and then I start feeling kind of bitchy about them myself, and then I feel guilty because I shouldn’t be judging other people for their choices, and… I don’t know. The whole scene is kind of the opposite of awesome, you know? So I try to avoid it.”

“I’ve never kissed a boy,” I blurted out.

Karen stared at me. I don’t think she was amazed by my lack of experience, exactly. It was more like she was trying to figure out why I’d told her that right then. “Okay,” she said cautiously.

I tried to gather my thoughts. “Sorry. I just…that freaked me out a bit. All the stuff about… When you say ‘been with,’ that’s a euphemism for sex, right? You’re not talking about, like, hanging out or something.” I paused long enough for her to disagree, but unfortunately she didn’t. I hadn’t spent that much time with Tyler, but he hadn’t seemed like someone who’d—who’d done
that
. At least not with a lot of different people.

“I still get a bit embarrassed when I see a pregnant woman,” I said. Another random thought that I apparently decided needed to be expressed. But when I thought about it I guess it wasn’t actually all that random. “I don’t see how she can just walk around like that, with everyone knowing that she had sex. Total proof, no point in denying it. I’m adopted, and I used to really like that, because it meant that technically, it was possible that my parents had never actually had sex. You know?”

Karen was clearly trying not to laugh.

“Shut up,” I said, pushing her shoulder. “I know it’s stupid! It’s just—I’m weird, okay? It’s not like I don’t like boys, or like I don’t—you know. I find them attractive. Whatever. I just—it’s weird to think that people have this whole secret life that I don’t have. Does that make sense?”

She was still smirking a little, but it turned into a gentler smile as she nodded. “Yeah, fair enough. I used to feel that way a bit when people would talk about their dads, because I grew up without one. So they’d be all, ‘you know how dads are’ or whatever, and I’d be sitting there thinking, ‘no, I
don’t
know how dads are.’”

“Yeah, like that. But weirder.”

“But you
want
to, right? I mean, not full-on sex, if you’re not ready for that. But if a guy you liked—I don’t know, say maybe you liked Winslow?—if he wanted to kiss you, and you liked him, you’d want that?”

I tried to imagine it, and my stomach tightened and twisted, which sounds like it should be unpleasant but somehow really wasn’t. “Yeah,” I said quietly. “I think I’d want that.”