The Centerman's Penalty

Grayson McCallister is a veteran centreman, a man four seconds away from overtime, and the last teammate a twenty-one-year-old call-up should have been relying on tonight. The puck is still in the net. Gray watches the replay on the centre-ice scoreboard. Watches it slide past the glove. Watches the red light spin. Watches the official's arm go up, and feels something inside him crack clean in half. Four seconds left in regulation. Four seconds and they take it to overtime. Four seconds and he is not standing in a silent locker room with sweat cooling on his skin and the stink of a blown game coming off his gear like smoke. He slams his stick against the stall. The shaft snaps, carbon fibre splintering across the concrete, and the sound goes off the cinderblock like a gunshot. Nobody flinches. Nobody looks at him. That is worse. Cooper sits three stalls down, still in his pads, gum frozen mid-chew like he has forgotten how his jaw works. Twenty-one years old, called up six weeks ago, watching his first real chance evaporate because a veteran could not keep his stick down. Gray's hands are shaking. He presses his palms flat against his thighs. What follows: a wall he has to climb in public, the breath before a hit that does not come, a scar under the helmet that predates all of this, a kid who skates like somebody he used to know, a photograph that never should have existed, a trivia night that goes badly and then extremely well, and a contract that binds more than a salary. *His hands were steady now, and that almost made it worse.* *Yes. We can start over. Slowly.* Will slowly hold when the photograph surfaces and the league office wants a statement from him by Friday? Or does Gray do the thing he has always done under pressure, which is take the penalty himself and let Piper walk out of the building clean?