The Understatement of the Year (Ivy Years #3)

December

GONGSHOW: a rough, dirty game of maximum intensity.

Rikker

The interview itself was not that bad.

One morning, the week after Thanksgiving, I waited in Coach’s office with a young woman from the Harkness College press office. “You don’t have to answer any questions that make you uncomfortable,” she assured me. “Just look at me, and I’ll tell the reporter that you’re not going to answer.”

That sounded easy enough, I guess.

“I’ll go get her, if you’re ready.”

I was never going to be ready. But I nodded anyway.

A minute later, she returned with the reporter, a mild-looking mom type. “I’m Cyndi,” the reporter said, putting her digital recorder down on the table between us. “Thank you for meeting me, especially during exams. You must be busy.”

“Sure,” I said. “Actually, I have my first exam next week. In Spanish. So if we could do this in Spanish, that would really help.”

She grinned. “No can do. Not only do I not speak Spanish, I don’t really speak sports. I’ve never interviewed a hockey player before. Do you have any tips for me?” She was trying to put me at ease, I guess.

“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” I told her. “We don’t like to see the words ‘bloodthirsty’ or ‘violent brutes,’ though.”

She gave me a smile. “Tell me why you left Saint B’s.”

Straight to the point. Great. “Well, okay. On a Sunday night near the end of the regular season, that would have been last March, the head coach learned of my sexual orientation. He called me in Monday morning and told me to clear out my gear. He said, ‘I don’t want that in my locker room.’”

She flinched. “That must have hurt.”

She wanted to talk about my feelings, but I wasn’t going there. “Honestly, it’s about the most lukewarm hate speech ever written.”

She tapped a pencil on her knee. “It doesn’t matter what words he used, though, does it? Were you surprised to be kicked off the team?”

Yay. Now I would get to tell the reporter how stupid I was. “Yeah, actually I was surprised. Saint B’s is a Catholic college, so I guess that makes me an idiot. But there’s a pretty active gay student group.” Not that I’d ever gone to an event. “And also, the college has ‘sexual orientation’ in its non-discrimination clause. I thought that would count for something.”

“I saw that, too,” she said. “That’s fairly progressive for a school with religious roots.”

I shrugged. I didn’t know whether it was or wasn’t. But when Saint B’s started courting me, and offering me scholarship money, Skippy made me look it up. “You cannot play for them if they can toss you out for being gay,” he had said, grumpy that I wanted to go to school in Massachusetts instead of Vermont, where he’d be.

Later, I’d wished that I’d listened.

“What did your teammates think?” the reporter asked.

“Um,” I cleared my throat. “I never got a chance to find out, you know? A few of them wrote slurs on my Facebook page.”

Her eyes widened. “Did you document that?”

Seriously? Who would want to save a screenshot of assholes writing: Faggot, I hope you die of AIDS. “Nope. I deleted my account instead.”

“So, the team did not stick up for you.”

Careful, I coached myself. “I got a couple of texts that were very supportive. The guy who I was actually rooming with on road trips called to say that he thought the whole thing sucked.” I didn’t tell her that when I saw his name come up on my phone, I chickened out and let it go to voicemail. Later, I screwed up my courage and listened to the nice things he had to say. I’ve never been any good at predicting who will turn out to be cool and who will be an ass. One of the faggot comments on my Facebook page was from the guy I used to lift with in the weight room. I’d thought of him as a friend.

Called that one wrong.

Still, I did not want this reporter writing that the Saint B’s hockey team was a bunch of meatheads. “It’s important to remember that most of the team didn’t really get a chance to be supportive or not. The coach was a real Napoleon type. And he showed me the door so fast, I never saw most of those guys again.”

The reporter chewed on her lip. “So you weren’t out to your teammates.”

I shook my head. “I was a freshman. I wanted to prove myself. And I just wanted to play hockey.”

She nodded slowly. “How did your coach find out, anyway?”

Even though I’d been expecting this question, I still got a cold sweat when she asked it. “I’m not going to give details about that.”

“Okay.” Her eyes lingered on me. “So, it wasn’t you who volunteered that information to your coach.”

“Not in a million years.”

“Did you plan to stay in the closet for four years? Or were you waiting for the right moment?”

Good question, lady. “I didn’t have a plan, yet,” I told her. “I thought I’d have a while to figure it out.”

After that, it got easier. Cyndi went on to ask me about my transfer, and that was a less personal conversation. “Your uncle called the coaches and explained the situation?”

“Yeah, he did that for me. And I’m ten kinds of lucky that it worked out. It’s not only that Coach didn’t mind the circus.” It was just dawning on me that Coach must have known reporters and news stories would happen. “But also that he needed a wing.”

“So, the schools that said ‘no’ to you weren’t necessarily discriminating against you?” she asked.

“Hell no. The entire Division One roster isn’t very large. And there are hundreds of guys who want to play.”

“You must be a pretty valuable player.”

I wasn’t touching that. “I guess we’ll find out.”

She grinned. “And how have your new teammates treated you?”

“They’ve been great,” I said immediately. “The season is going well. No problems.”

Unfortunately, I spoke too soon.

As luck would have it, our next scheduled game was against Saint B’s. Coach called me into his office again before practice on Friday to discuss it.

“How is this game going to go, do you think?” he asked.

“We can beat them,” I said. “The first line is tight but their bench isn’t very deep.”

Coach looked out the window for a moment and then back at me. “Do you think you should play?”

What? “Of course I’ll play. Why wouldn’t I?”

He sighed. “The article didn’t publish yet, at least. It’s going to make Saint B’s look bad.”

“If anybody reads it.”

He swiveled his chair toward me again. “They will. And you’re going to get even more attention.”

God, I hoped he was wrong. “Let’s just beat Saint B’s.”

Coach grinned. “I like your style, kid. I really do. So I’m putting you on the first line for the Saint B’s game. Make me proud.”

Awesome. “I will, Coach.” I really thought I could.

I was wrong.

Graham

I was not at all prepared for what happened at the Saint B’s game. It was a home game against a so-so team. What could go wrong?

Just everything.

The first sign of trouble came a half an hour before faceoff. During that last thirty minutes in the locker room, every guy was busy getting amped up in his own special way. Some people sat quietly in a corner, thinking calm thoughts. But there was a lot of joking around and smack talk, too. The place was crowded, with everyone strapping on their gear. There were two trainers in the room, too, taping up muscles and helping to stretch out tetchy limbs.

I went into the hallway supply cabinet for some orange hockey tape. Don’t laugh when I tell you that I play better with orange tape. Hockey players are some of the most superstitious people you’ll ever meet. (Just ask Hartley about his lucky underwear.)

At the distant end of the hallway, I saw Coach come out of his office. But before he got very far, a gray-haired guy in a Saint B’s jacket came wheeling out of the visitors’ locker room. He got up in Coach’s face. “There’s a reporter up my ass, and it’s your fucking fault,” he barked.

There was a tense silence, and then I heard Coach chuckle. “Really?” He stood his ground, even though the other guy was practically spitting into his mouth. “That can’t be true. Because I thought you had a team policy against taking anything up the ass.”

Although the other coach’s back was to me, I could hear the fury in his voice. “You want this bitch asking me questions, do you? You think you can make my team look bad?”

Again, Coach chuckled. “You don’t need my help with that.”

I jammed the tape into my hockey shorts, freeing up my hands in case the other guy threw a punch at Coach. But the bastard only yanked the visitors’ locker room door open and disappeared inside again.

With a pounding pulse, I ducked back into our room to finish taping up my stick. A minute later, Coach stalked in looking tense. “Listen up!” he barked.

The room got quiet immediately.

“Your opponents want to win tonight. But we want it more, right?”

“YEAH!” everyone shouted as one.

Coach was pacing near the door. “Look. Their coach is a blowhard with a nasty temper. And his offensive line is sketchy this year, because we stole one of their best players. We didn’t play this team last year, but you saw how it is on the tapes. To win this thing, they need to get under your skin. Are you going to let them?”

“NO!” we hollered together.

“Good. Because I need you to remember that you’re bigger than that. This game isn’t going to be about finessing the puck. This game is going to be all about attitude. And the team that keeps the coolest head is gonna win. So I need you to repeat after me: Attitude is destiny!”

“Attitude is destiny!”

“Okay. Let’s kill ‘em. Get out there.” Coach’s face looked as tense as I’d ever seen it.

Bella put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m pretty sure that quote is supposed to be, ‘character is destiny.’”

“Yeah? I think I’d keep that critique to myself.”

“I was planning on it.”

“Hey, Bella?” I gave my skate laces one more tug and stood up.

“Yeah?”

“Any reason Coach would be talking to reporters?”

She frowned. “No idea. Why do you ask?”

“Just something he said.” My teammates had begun to stream out the door, cat calling and whooping it up. “Let’s go.”

“Kill ‘em tonight, Graham.”

“Yes ma’am.”

But… yeah. Not so much.

For the first eight minutes of play, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. In the first place, Hartley was kicking ass, so the D-men like me didn’t have a whole lot to worry about. My teammate Trevi, a junior wing, fed Hartley an early goal, and all seemed well.

Things deteriorated very quickly about nine minutes in.

On the next faceoff, I watched one of the Saint B’s wings — a giant with the name EROS printed on his back — yapping into Trevi’s face. I couldn’t hear what was said, but the look on Trevi was far past ordinary annoyance. His face turned the color of raw meat.

The next time I noticed Eros, he was leaning over Orson, who was minding the goal tonight. And Orson’s jaw was as hard as concrete, though he didn’t remove his eyes from the field of play.

So I knew this Eros must be a real piece of work. But I didn’t get to witness his assholery firsthand until a little later. Saint B’s had the puck, and it was my job to get it back. As I flew behind our net on the backcheck, I heard the guy ragging on Orson. “You’re Rikker’s favorite, right? ‘Cause you’re already wearing knee pads.”

Holy crap.

Distracted by the comment, I didn’t get to the puck fast enough. Their other wing flung it to the Saint B’s center, who flipped it to Eros. The asshole took a shot. But Orson butterflied himself in the crease, saving it.

Play moved down the ice, but not before I heard Eros lob another one of his gems into Orson’s face. “Faggot! I bet you like it when Rikker comes in your crease.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Orson growled.

A minute later my shift was over, and I swung myself over the wall. A row of tense faces greeted me. The snarl on Big-D’s lips was as ugly as I’d ever seen it. Eros’s poison had begun to spread.

Rikker was living out my nightmare tonight. Because it’s one thing to tolerate the gay guy when everything is going well. And it’s another thing to have some red-faced asshole yelling “faggot” into your face.

Trust me. I’d know.

The upshot was that my team began playing a sloppy game of hockey. And that meant that Coach got pissed off. Which meant that Hartley got pissed, too. The players, not to be outdone, got pissed off that Coach and Hartley were pissed off.

And nobody would even look at Rikker.

Meanwhile, Eros took long shifts, asking his toxic little questions. “How many to a bed on your road trips?” And, “do y’all usually jerk together before practice, or after?”

Each of these little ditties had the effect of exploding my teammates’ ability to concentrate. Their passes stopped connecting, and our offensive strategy broke down.

Theirs didn’t.

Orson got shelled, saving shot after shot. Each time he fell onto the puck, stopping the action, our team might have had a chance to regroup. Instead, Eros or one of his cronies, shoulder to shoulder in the faceoff circle, started the taunts anew.

Inevitably, Eros and Rikker ended up helmet to helmet on a faceoff. I could not look away. From the bench, I could see Eros’s mouth moving. And Rikker’s eyes were angry slits. After the puck dropped, I saw Rikker haul off and shove his former teammate in the gut. The refs didn’t see it, because Hartley had won the faceoff and play rocketed toward Saint B’s goal.

Rikker didn’t get away with it though. Not really. Because when Hartley passed him the puck a few seconds later, Eros saw his chance.

The next two seconds seemed to last a week. Rikker skimmed the boards and scouted for his opening. I saw him adjust the angle of his stick in preparation to take a shot. But I also saw Eros dig in his edges, accelerating toward Rikker like a torpedo. And it didn’t matter that Rikker got his pass off. There was no stopping the bigger guy’s momentum. Because recovering the puck was no longer the point.

The hit was brutal. Eros slammed Rikker into the plexi, and I watched my teammate crumple like a bag of rocks onto the ice.

Eros stumbled, too. That’s why it wasn’t really efficient to hit another player so hard. Like they taught you in physics, for every action, there was an equal and opposite reaction. So if you go around flattening people, you’re going to get knocked around, too, losing precious seconds with the puck.

The only reason to hit like that is if you’re trying to injure. Or at least make a point.

Eros made his.

Rikker lay on the ice, unmoving.

Rikker

Oh, fuck. Oh… fuck.

Get up, I ordered myself. Now. At least once a season this happened. That awful feeling of having the air knocked out of me — like my lungs didn’t remember how to expand, and my guts had been permanently compressed.

But even without air, I lurched to a seated position. Somehow I got one skate back onto the ice, and struggled for the second one. The hockey game narrowed down around me, and there was only a thin slice of my consciousness left — a straight tunnel between the spot where I’d been brutalized and the bench. Go, asshole, I ordered myself, even though I still hadn’t drawn a full breath. Somehow I limped toward my team, and somebody — Bella — yanked the door open for me as I approached.

“Fucking egregious!” she screamed, pushing me onto the bench. “I will kill that motherfucker.”

Bella kept up her litany of curses while I bent over at the waist, willing myself not to puke through the bars of my helmet grate. I needed to pull myself together, and right away. Even half conscious, I knew I couldn’t afford to look beaten right now.

I pulled myself into a vertical position again. Even as my stomach stopped clenching, the other parts of my body that had gotten slammed began announced their displeasure. My ribs were practically vibrating. And I was going to have a bruise the size of Massachusetts on one hip.

Bella’s worried face was parked right in front of me, and as I rose up, her eyes went wide. “You’re bleeding.”

Now that she mentioned it, I could feel something wet on my jaw.

“He slashed your chin.”

Whatever. I was so busy hurting in other places I didn’t even care.

But she unclipped my helmet grate and lifted it. Then she grabbed it with two hands and angled my face toward the ice. “Hey ref!” she shouted. “Look at this shit!”

“Bella, Jesus.” I tried to pull away, but when someone has you by the facemask, that’s pretty much impossible. She swung my mask to follow the ref as he skated by, and I had to grab her wrists and wrench her off of me. “Let go of my fucking head.” It was hard to even describe how angry I was in that moment, and how drunk I felt from the pain and the disbelief. If instant death had somehow been offered to me right then, I would have been tempted to accept.

“But slashing you in the face is a disqualifying penalty!”

“Just…” I yanked my glove off and swiped at my face. When I looked at my hand, there was a pretty good smear of blood there. But I’d live.

Somebody had passed Bella the first aid kit, which she was now yanking open. “Let me wipe that off and see how big the cut is.”

“Better glove up,” Big-D said as the buzzer rang for the end of the first period. “You don’t want to get Rikker’s blood on you.”

“Shut your fucking mouth,” Bella snapped as she pulled on a blue latex glove. Because that was the policy. I’d seen her do it many times before.

But it didn’t matter. Big-D’s comment was out there, and I hung my head like a fucking pariah. I’d spent the whole first semester trying to convince my team that I wasn’t scary. And in the span of twenty minutes, Eros had torn away any goodwill that I might have built up.

Fucking Eros.

Fucking Saint B’s.

Fucking reporter.

Fuck my life.

Coach gave a five-minute rant in the locker room before the next period. He was practically spitting fire. “What did we just fucking talk about before the game? This is your rink. Your ice. And you’re letting some prick from a second rate team throw you off your game! FUCK him! How many shots on goal are you going to let these assholes take before you fight back?”

He threw his clipboard into the wall and stormed out.

There was a moment of utter silence in the room before my teammates — red-faced from both exertion and anger — began filing back out to the bench. I followed them, trying not to wince every time my chest pad moved against my ribs.

“Are you good to play?” Hartley asked me when it was time for the second period to begin.

“Of course,” I snapped. They would have to drag my lifeless body off the ice before I’d give up. But, shit. Two more periods to go. This was already the longest night of my life.

Every second of the next period cost me.

Eros hadn’t attacked me again. Yet. But for the first time in my life, I played scared. When our shifts overlapped, I spent too much time looking out for him, and too little time watching the puck. I missed three passes in a row, and that made me want to puke almost as badly as getting slammed in the guts had done.

And every time Eros got anywhere near my teammates, he kept up the douchey commentary. “I bet you guys like holding each other’s sticks, don’t you?” I heard him say.

Stupid shit, right? But he was just distracting enough to do two things: lose us the game, and remind my teammates that I was a liability.

Meanwhile, Saint B’s offensive line continued to fire a hailstorm at Orson. And in between, Eros taunted our goalie with questions about how often the team showered together.

Orson let in two goals that period. But he saved about a thousand.

The third period had just begun when Eros finally managed to get in Big-D’s face in the corner. I was too far away to hear the first part of it, but when they came toward our bench, I could hear Eros asking: “…do you spit or swallow?”

Big-D’s face turned blood-red. And when his shift was up, he straddled the bench and gave me a rough shove out of his way.

“Enough!” Hartley spat. “Pay attention to the fucking puck, okay? What’s your job, here?”

“I didn’t sign up for this shit,” Big-D returned. “And I’m not throwing down for him if they jump him again.”

“Shocker,” I muttered.

Orson let in another lamplighter, unfortunately, and the whole bench grunted with disappointment. And then it was time to faceoff again. I heaved myself over the wall, coming face to face with Graham for a second. His face was red, and his eyes were burning with something that I couldn’t read. But it was probably disgust, the same as everyone else.

Saint B’s won the faceoff, and Graham took off after the puck. He correctly anticipated the pass to Eros, and leaned in. Hit him, my subconscious begged. As if it mattered. As if anything could make this moment more bearable.

But Graham didn’t hit him. Instead, his weapon was a simple poke-check. But he got that stick in there just a little further than necessary, and managed to trip Eros even as Graham passed the puck to Hartley. I blinked, wondering if that was intentional.

Eros went down hard, and the ref didn’t call Graham on it.

The moment that Eros picked himself up off the ice, he skated toward Graham. And in that moment I learned two things: 1) the night could still get worse. And 2) the word “faggot” is the easiest English word to read off someone’s lips. I watched it roll off Eros’s ugly mouth.

Graham flinched so big that I could see it across the rink.

And then? Well… That’s when I really lost my shit. Because my teammates could not be called that word because of me. Shutting him up was the only thing that mattered to me anymore.

Eros went after the puck, and I went after Eros, choosing a vector across the ice that would put me at the same point along the boards where he’d arrive. It wasn’t rational. That spot on the ice wasn’t even mine to cover. But I just charged, both ends of my stick in my hands. I cross-checked him in the hip, and he did a Roadrunner-style splat onto the plexi.

The hit was blatantly illegal. But it didn’t matter. Because I already knew that the refs weren’t going to be my biggest problem.

It only took a couple of seconds for another Saint B’s player to power over to us and throw a punch at me. I ducked, so it only grazed me. I don’t even remember throwing off my gloves. But then they were gone, and I was swinging back at him. The arrival of Hartley at my side to back me up was just a blur on the edge of my consciousness.

Then the blur developed a distinct black and white color scheme, as the linesman and the ref jumped in to separate the four of us.

“You’re done!” the ref shouted, my right arm restrained in his grip. “Major penalty and disqualification. One game suspension.” He gave me a hard shove toward the bench. “Off the ice. Right now, or I’ll make it a two-game suspension.”

In the NHL, fighting was just part of the game. In college? Not legal.

I barely registered the sound of the screaming fans as I skated off, head down. And then Coach was yelling at me. At us, actually. Because Hartley was standing right beside me. “You fucking guys! Dumber than posts, both of you. We have to play fucking Union next week, and you won’t fucking be there. Thanks for that…”

He was still yelling as I limped down the chute. The roar of the arena died when the door shut on us. And then it was just Hartley and I, alone with our shock.

The captain collapsed, defeated, onto his locker bench. His voice was so low that I almost missed what he said. “I have never been ejected from a game before.”

“You’re welcome,” I spat. Not that I was making any sense. Another guy might have even thanked Hartley for throwing down like that.

But I didn’t want anyone to throw down for me. That was the fucking problem. I didn’t want to be that guy who brought down humiliation on the backs of his teammates.

I tossed my pads onto the floor one after another, and then stomped into the showers, staying under the water as long as I dared. But before the team came off the ice, I was out of there. I got dressed and snuck out of the building. Like the loser that I was.