Sophomore Surge

by K R Collins

  Coach Butler has already come in, yelled at them, and stormed out. Matty’s doing the we’re in this together shit which, when it works, works well. But when it falls flat, it falls really flat. Sophie isn’t the only one who can’t meet her captain’s gaze for long.

  It’s only two goals for them to tie it. It’s three to win it.

  They haven’t posted three goals in a game since Seattle.

  She hangs her head. It’s bad body language, especially for someone with a letter on their jersey, but she can’t summon the energy to pick her head back up.

  Cleveland scores off the opening faceoff.

  It’s only three goals, she thinks and almost bursts into laughter. She bites down on her glove, hard, to keep it in.

  Lindy makes an easy save on the next play and the crowd mockingly cheers for him. Immediately, her hysteria and her frustration whoosh out of her, leaving her with a cold fury. No one’s allowed to jeer her goalie. It isn’t his fault his team has fallen apart around him. She can’t fight the fans and she isn’t supposed to fight any players, but she does put an edge in her game.

  She finishes her checks with an extra elbow or jab of her stick. She boxes out in front of the net and doesn’t let anyone push her around. She exchanges shoves and heated words after the whistle blows, but she’s careful to keep everything on the right side of the line.

  At first, anyway.

  The second period is dwindling down when Hayes finds her. Lindy bobbled the puck, managing to save a goal and draw a whistle. Hayes skates by Sophie and bumps his shoulder into hers. “I’m glad I got off this garbage heap of a team.”

  Sophie’s stick is up before she knows what she’s doing. “They didn’t want you.” She cross-checks him across the chest. She wants to hit higher and make him bleed. Fuck him and his fucking face and stupid fucking team. She hits him again, higher this time, her stick glancing off his chin.

  He grins as she’s hauled off him by two of his teammates. He presses his fingers to his chin as if he’s trying to make himself bleed. She rips herself away from the two Cleveland players only to be caught by an official who nudges her in the direction of the penalty box.

  The crowd cheers as she skates to the open door, and they cheer even louder when it closes, shutting her in.

  She takes off her helmet and draws a deep breath. She wants to put her head in her hands or maybe scream. She can’t do either. She shouldn’t have let Hayes get to her. They’re down by three and now she’s in the box, giving Cleveland an opportunity to score again.

  “Gatorade?” the attendant offers her. The red Gatorade he holds out already has the seal broken.

  “I’m good but thanks.”

  Her team goes to work on the PK. Lindy makes a flurry of saves, kicking the puck out and then fighting off the second chance with the knob of his stick. Her team gathers the puck long enough to send it down the ice. The puck skips to temporary safety and something hits Sophie’s head and bounces off. It’s light enough she thinks she imagined it until it happens again.

  “Enjoying the show?” someone calls down at her.

  Someone else slams the glass behind her. She doesn’t turn around. She keeps her eyes glued to the ice. Something hits her again and then it’s like little paper balls being rained down on her head. No, not paper, she realizes as she glances at the floor of the penalty box. Popcorn. Someone is throwing popcorn at her.

  She puts her helmet back on and the kernels stuck in her hair crunch.

  “Sorry,” she tells the penalty box attendant.

  “Could be beer.”

  Farage, Cleveland’s captain, scores with ten seconds left on the power play. She’s released from the box as Cleveland celebrates. She skates back to her bench and sits down on the far end where Coach Butler can’t see her.

  Coach Vorgen pats her shoulder. “We’ll get it back.”

  They’re down 0-4 going into second intermission.

  Coach Butler yells at them some more while Sophie picks popcorn out of her braid.

  They’re three minutes into the third period, still down by four when X skates to the bench for a change. It’s a routine defense change until Donny fucking McGuire barrels into him. It’s knee-on-knee, and X goes down hard.

  Sophie’s breath catches in her throat. Like the rest of her teammates on the bench, she stands up as if there’s something she can do. But she’s stuck here and X isn’t getting back up. He isn’t getting up.

  Matty glances at X, still face down on the ice. He shakes off his gloves. He grabs McGuire by the front of his jersey and hauls him away from the growing crowd. He gets in two big blows before McGuire fights back. They whale on each other as two of the officials hover nearby, waiting for their opportunity to jump in and separate them.

  It takes Kuzy and two trainers to help X to his skates and off the ice. The Cleveland fans cheer because they’re classless pieces of shit. Sophie doesn’t know what she wants more, to jump in and help Matty with McGuire or to vault into the stands and fight everyone there.

  The trainers take X down the tunnel.

  The bench is silent.

  Their captain is escorted to the box and their oldest player, their rock, won’t be back in this game. From the looks of it, he won’t be back for a long time. Sophie glances down the ice at Lindy. She wishes he was here on the bench. They need him here to settle them.

  There’s an A on Sophie’s sweater burning through her skin. She doesn’t know what to say. Their captain is in the box, X is down the tunnel, and their goalie is at the far end of the ice. She needs to pull herself together so she can pull her team together.

  Coach Butler’s lips are pressed so tight it looks as if he doesn’t have a mouth. He sends her over the boards for the first shift.

  “Hayes is better!” the crowd chants.

  She skates up to the faceoff dot, and Hayes smirks at her. She pops her mouth guard into her mouth. “You’ve never been better than me.”

  She wins the faceoff and then charges into the offensive zone. Merlin carries the puck in and drops a pass back for her. She shoots, no pause to overthink her shot, and the puck whips past Strindberg.

  The crowd hushes, stunned. Then they recover and chant “Scoreboard” as loud as they can.

  Despite Sophie’s best efforts, they lose 1-6. Matty lingers by the bench, ushering them down the tunnel, his gaze far away as they troop to the locker room. Sophie falls into step with Lindy.

  “Sorry,” she tells him. They should’ve played better in front of him. They played a shit game which devolved into chaos after X went down. They hung their goalie out to dry, and Lindy will take the brunt of the blame for the loss.

  He shrugs. There are dark circles under his eyes. His pads, bigger than hers, don’t make him look like the towering goalie she’s used to seeing. Instead, they weigh him down, his shoulders slumped and his blocker tucked under his arm. “Been here before, kid.”

  But did you get out? She doesn’t need to ask him. She knows Concord’s record.

  The locker room is silent as they strip out of their gear. Everyone knows they played a terrible game. It’s another loss in a long string of losses, but this one is more than an L on the stat sheet. X is out long-term, and no one knows how to react to it. They all stay quiet, hunched in on themselves.

  They can’t—how are they this bad? When they lost to DC, she was pissed they couldn’t pull off the win, but losses happen. In an eighty-three-game season, they’re bound to happen quite a few times. But the losing streak gained steam, taking on a life of its own. Maybe they aren’t better than this. Will they limp through the next sixty-four games until the season is mercifully over?

  Her entire life, all Sophie has wanted was to play hockey and right now, she wishes she didn’t have to lace up and practice tomorrow. She tosses her jersey into the laundry bin, unable to stand wearing anything with their team logo on it. She doesn’t deserve it. None of them do.

  She’s down to her Under Armour and her pads wh
en Matty stops in front of her stall. He has the same dark circles under his eyes Lindy does. There’s no teasing tug of his lips, no friendly shoulder punch. He looks exhausted, as if this game wrung him out.

  She knows why he’s come to fetch her so she doesn’t make him say anything. “Let me finish changing.”

  She unbuckles all her padding and leaves it in a pile. She switches her skates out for her sliders. She pats her hair, damp from sweat and with bits of popcorn still in it, but she doesn’t grab her ball cap. No team logos for her right now and no brim to hide behind. She’ll face the media and take every criticism they lay on her.

  She, Matty, and Lindy head outside the locker room. Normally, Mary Beth invites the media in, lets them swarm the stalls, but today they’ll answer questions out here so they can shield the rest of their team the best they can.

  They’re barely through the doors when the reporters surge forward. Marty Owen elbows his way to the front and shoves his phone in front of Lindy’s face. “Do you think you could’ve stopped a few more pucks and given your team a fighting chance?”

  “I always want to stop more pucks.”

  Matty’s grilled on whether he’s losing control of the room and if a better leader could turn the season around. Sophie’s hands start to curl into fists before she remembers all the cameras around her right now. She flexes her hands instead and then links them in front of her to eliminate the temptation.

  “November hasn’t been a good month for you,” Rossetti says and everyone’s attention swings to Sophie.

  “It’s early. We can still turn things around.” Sophie’s voice sounds dead, even to her own ears. Her go-to media strategy is bland soundbites, but usually she at least has to work for it. She’s monotone, distant as if she isn’t standing in front of a crowd of reporters. She tries to summon a spark of something so she doesn’t wake up tomorrow to articles accusing her of being catatonic but she can’t. There isn’t anything in her to spark.

  “Do you think you’ll win a game before November is over?” Marty Owen asks.

  She can’t even drudge up her usual distaste for The Concord Courier’s resident hockey writer. Her gaze slides over the assembled crowd in front of her. “We will. Obviously, we have a long list of things to work on, but we have an experienced coach and a veteran captain. It’s a rough patch, but we’ll make it through.”

  The reporters put them out of their misery quicker than Cleveland did, dispersing once they realize they won’t get anything worth reporting.

  No one speaks on the plane ride home. It isn’t unusual for late flights to be quiet, but often there’s at least one card game going on or one cluster of guys watching a movie. Tonight, everyone sits in their seat, headphones in and staring straight ahead. Sophie doesn’t even have music on, but she wants to appear unapproachable.

  It works.

  When she arrives home at her apartment, she drops her bags next to her shoe rack, a problem to deal with in the morning. She turns the lock on the door and then shuffles over to her couch. She wants to drop face down on it, but she knows she won’t get back up if she does. She isn’t quite pathetic enough to spend the night on her own couch.

  She shuffles into her bedroom and hangs her suit up in her closet. It’s all the effort she can manage and she flops down on her bed wearing a tank top and her underwear. She wiggles until she’s under her covers. She stares at the ceiling, exhaustion pressing down on her, but it isn’t enough to sleep.

  She turns onto her stomach and plants her face in her pillow. It’s pitch black now, but it’s also hard to breathe. She moves so she’s stretched out on her right side. Then she flips to her left. The red numbers on her clock shine at her, judging her for being awake. She needs her sleep. Experience shows Coach Butler will put them through a brutal practice, and she needs her energy for it.

  Does it even matter?

  What has her energy and effort gotten her lately? A string of losses. Her chest aches as if there’s a weight pressing down on it. She pulls her phone off her nightstand and opens up her contacts. She wants to call her mom. She’s always made Sophie feel better, but it’s the middle of the night, and she can’t wake her mom up and make her worry. Dima? No, Boston’s doing well right now. He won’t understand.

  She scrolls through her whole contacts list and then scrolls back up again. Her thumb hovers over Elsa Nyberg. Before she can talk herself out of it, she hits call. Two rings in, she remembers time differences exist. It’s early morning in Sweden, early enough she hopes Elsa doesn’t sleep with her phone. What would she even say if Elsa picks up?

  The phone rings and rings and rings.

  Tears fill Sophie’s eyes. They lost a lot last year, but it’s supposed to be better now. They paid their dues. This isn’t what her dreams of the NAHL were like. She saw herself lifting the Maple Cup the same way Bobby Brindle did. She saw herself scoring slick goals like Gabriel Ducasse. She was the hero of her dreams, the one who swooped in and transformed her franchise from a League-wide joke into a Cup contender.

  But the reality is she’s alone in her apartment, crying because her team is on a seven-game losing streak, and she isn’t good enough to snap them out of it.

  She doesn’t realize Elsa’s phone went to voicemail until it clicks off. She pinches at the bridge of her nose as she realizes she left an entire voicemail of her crying into the phone. Crying to a teammate who isn’t even a teammate because she chose not to come. She’s probably glad she stayed in Gothenburg. Their team is much better than Concord.

  She sends Elsa a text—delete voicemail, didn’t mean to call—and sets her phone on the nightstand.

  She turns away from her clock so she won’t have to see how long it takes her to fall asleep.

  In the morning, everything is marginally better. They have another sixty-four games to play, and they won’t suck for all of them. Statistically, it’s impossible. But more importantly, Sophie won’t let it happen. She played poorly against Cleveland, she will fully admit to it, but she’ll be better tomorrow against DC. Her entire team will be.

  With X out, she needs to step up, both as a player and as a teammate. When she shows up to practice, early like Matty’s group text asked, they’re told X has been diagnosed with a Grade Three MCL sprain. He’ll be out for at least two months, maybe more, depending on his recovery.

  It means Spitz is bumped up to the first d-pairing with Kuzy. It’s obvious to anyone with eyes Spitz is nervous about the move from the third pairing to the first, but no one does anything, everyone too focused on their own game. There are no letters on their practice jerseys, but Sophie feels the imprint of her A anyway, and she makes sure to find Spitz after practice.

  She took a quick shower so she wouldn’t miss him, and she nudges his knee as he pulls a sweatshirt over his head. “Lunch at my place.”

  He looks up, wary. “Are we ordering takeout?”

  “Are you saying you think I can’t cook?” They head out together, no one paying them any mind. Normally, a teammate would walk out with them so it didn’t look like they were going somewhere alone or Merlin would complain about how he wasn’t being fed.

  “But Witzer says you only eat healthy shit.”

  “We’ll do sandwiches. You can make yours however you like.” She’ll save the new recipes for herself.

  This morning, she decided today was a new day and she needed to get her life in order if she wanted to get her game in order. She cleaned her entire apartment, opened all the curtains, and went to the grocery store. She wrote out a week’s worth of recipes with two new ones making the list.

  Having a list always makes her feel better. Maybe it’s the years of playing hockey, but instructions settle her. Planning her meals and neatly writing out all the ingredients she needs to buy at the store is somehow more manageable than trying to force herself there because she knows she should.

  It’s why practice, even when Coach Butler is pissed, is a refuge for her. He tears apart their play during video r
eview, and he doesn’t go easy on them in drills, but he always explains how to fix what’s wrong after pointing out the ways they screwed up. Be faster, cut off the angle this way instead of that way. The directions seem so simple which is where her frustration bubbles up, when she can’t do something easy. She has to trust the system. The results will come.

  Hopefully before they dig themselves into a hole they can’t climb out of.

  They drive their separate cars to her apartment, and she’s more relieved than she wants to admit when Spitz pulls into the spot next to her. She was afraid he’d lose his nerve and head home, but here he is, climbing out of his front seat and narrowing judgmental eyes at her. “Yellow means speed up not slow down.”

  She laughs, surprised by the sound, but doesn’t stop because it feels good to laugh. She waves to her doorman as she ushers Spitz inside. “I try not to run yellow lights when someone’s following me in case it turns red.”

  “Is this a Canadian thing?” Spitz asks as he follows her up the stairs. “Because in Germany you hold onto the oh shit handle and pray for the best.”

  “Oh shit handle? I don’t remember those from my time in Germany.”

  Spitz shrugs. “Maybe because it was the Games? They probably didn’t want to break any of the athletes. I was able to see one of Team Canada’s practices. We couldn’t afford tickets to an actual game, and the Team Germany practices were packed, but me and some buddies slipped in while you were on the ice. I never thought I’d play with you.”

  Sophie opened her apartment door while Spitz talked and led him into the kitchen, but by the time she’s pulling sandwich stuff out of the fridge, he’s frozen up as if he’s a kid again watching the Winter Games practice. His smile fades, and he draws his shoulders up tight.

  “What if I can’t do it? Who would look at my game against Cleveland and think I belong on the top pairing?”

  She grabs the bread from the basket on the counter and motions for Spitz to make himself a sandwich. Then she leans back against her granite countertop. “They wouldn’t look at your game against Cleveland. They’d look at all the ones before it. You’ve played well this season. You and Kuzy will be a good match.”