The Rookie's Weakness

Puck drops and Finn Malloy is already moving, skates biting into the ice as he cuts left toward the blue line. Krause feeds him the saucer pass, sweet and flat, landing on his tape like it was born there. The arena smells like frozen rubber and ambition, and sixteen hundred people have paid to see blood and goals, not necessarily in that order. Vance winds up on the point. The slapper is deflected. The puck squirts loose toward the corner, and Finn chases it. That is the last thing he remembers clearly. Something takes him from the blindside, shoulder to jaw, and the boards catch the rest of it hard enough to rattle the Plexiglas. He comes up on his knees with two goalies standing in one net. The referee has already seen this a thousand times and is counting him out. *Fine*, Finn says, because that is the word. Then he takes his next shift. Then he scores. Because rule one in the minors is that the second you look hurt you are scratched, and the second you are scratched you are forgettable, and there is a line of kids behind him who are all hungry and all ready to take his spot. Dr. Nellie Thorpe does not care about rule one. She is not angry with him, which is worse. She is clinical. Two weeks minimum on concussion protocol. No contact. No skating. *You had to risk permanent brain damage for a regular-season game in December?* What comes out of him before he can stop it is the thing nobody on the team knows. His sister has cystic fibrosis. Insurance covers the treatments; it does not cover the trial that is her actual chance, and the deposit on that is forty-two thousand dollars, due at the end of the month. The only road he has to forty-two thousand dollars is a call-up, and you do not get called up off a trainer's table. Nellie has her own reason for keeping a wall between herself and the people she treats. It has a name, and a date sitting in her phone calendar that she taps away without explaining to anybody. Finn was twelve when he stood in a kitchen doorway with a phone cord stretched across the room and watched paramedics work on his father. He promised himself that night he would never be that helpless again, that he would build somebody who could carry the weight. The weight now is his own skull, and the only person who can clear him is the one who will not lie about it. This is a first-person contemporary hockey romance about a minor-league rookie who cannot afford the injury he has, a team doctor with a rule and a reason for it, and a sister at the other end of a phone call. Closed door.