The Linemate's Confession

Leo Galloway should not be at an empty practice rink at six in the morning. The night before was a loss to Tampa Bay in which he took two penalties and generated exactly zero shots on net, and his shoulder still aches where a rookie put him into the boards. But the ceiling in his apartment had been doing that thing again, holding him hostage at three in the morning with the crack that runs from the light fixture to the wall like a vein. He counted it seventeen times before giving up. Thirty minutes of shooting, then. No thinking, no remembering. He is ten shots in, three goals and seven misses, when the arena door groans open and he hears the limp. Coach Mike O'Shea wants to talk about his line. Kowalski is on LTIR, shoulder done for the season, and the replacement is Derek Marchetti: twenty-two, three weeks on the roster, faster than anyone on the team, freckles scattered across his nose like rust flecks on fresh ice, a gap between his front teeth. Their first drill goes badly. Derek takes the pass at full speed, cuts across the blue line and fires a shot that beats Leo cleanly before Leo can get his stick down. Tommy Huang has opinions about all of it. He has watched the tape. The kid is a puck hog, he says, and the captain should remember that some of them have been here long enough to know what the standards are. What nobody in the room knows is that Leo keeps a notebook, and writes lines in it, and deletes most of them. Or that his younger brother Finn died of leukemia while Leo was at a party letting his mother's calls ring out. Or that Finn's old journal is sitting in his sister Emma's apartment, with things in it about Leo that he has never read. An MM hockey romance about a captain who cannot want anything without bracing for losing it, a rookie who has spent his whole life trying to prove he belongs, and the distance between a confession and a poem read out loud. It ends on centre ice with the lights going down and nobody hiding; closed-door.