by Cara Hedley
‘Could you guys just listen up for a sec, please?’
The sparse pattern of heads dotting the stalls turned toward her, the room draining to quiet. Practice had been cancelled due to the upcoming travel weekend, so we had open ice instead, no coaches. Some had opted out, some of us had come to shoot around, to savour the rare anarchy of no equipment, no whistles, no drills. Just pucks and skates and sweats.
Noisemakers trumpeted around the room as Boz cleared her throat. ‘Well, okay, um, most of you know about Duff and Hugo – about their relationship. There’s been a lot of talk. And they know that, so they asked me a couple of days ago to just kind of make it known, so it wasn’t this gossip, like, flying around behind their backs. They’ve kept it quiet for a long time, and that was probably really tough. So, anyways, there it is. But we thought – me and Toad – we thought that instead of just saying it, telling you guys, and then all of us just pretending it never happened, we thought we’d have a little celebration. Just to let them know that, well, that we know, and we’re happy for them. And we’re here for them. Okay? Um, if any of you don’t feel comfortable you don’t have to participate, of course. We’d understand. But I’m just handing out the noisemakers now and we have confetti. Toad’s with both of them in the gym right now, holding them up, so what we’re going to do is, when they come out on the ice, we’ll just give them a little surprise. Blow these, throw some confetti, say a couple words. Like a surprise party – ’
‘A coming-out party,’ Hal said dryly, lips curled. She rolled out the noisemaker absent-mindedly with her forefinger.
‘Exactly,’ Boz said, smiling uncertainly. I looked over at Pelly. She chewed gum placidly, unsurprised. She’d failed me. I’d thought Duff and Hugo were best friends, inseparable, a kind of odd couple: big Duff with her army boots and spiky hair, earrings like nail heads scaling both lobes up into the cartilage. A stay-at-home D, she planted herself in front of our net and flung members of the other team out of Tillsy’s way like she was shovelling the sidewalk. Stan called that cleared area the Duffer Zone. Hugo pulled strands of pale orange hair through her cage during games and chewed it like a rabbit. They wrestled, Duff jerseying Hugo after practice at centre ice, delivering flying elbow drops to her exposed stomach. Headlocks in their stalls across the dressing room. Hugo squealing, grinning hysterically, begging Duff to stop. ‘Say Uncle,’ Duff always said. ‘Uncle, Uncle,’ Hugo whispered in her kid voice. I pictured them kissing.
‘Are you sure they’ll be okay with this?’ Bitty piped up from across the way. ‘Don’t you, uh – well, Hugo’s so shy. They’re going to be embarrassed as hell.’
‘Sure they’ll be embarrassed at first. But, the point is, we’re their team, you know? They shouldn’t be embarrassed. I mean, Tillsy came out to us, right?’
She nodded toward Tillsy and Tillsy pointed at herself – who me? – and then smiled, clasping her hands victoriously beside her head.
‘Okay? Listen,’ Boz sighed, looked up at the ceiling. ‘They’re in love, you know? You can just see it. And what could be better than that?’
She sat back down.
‘How is Toad making them to stay in the gym?’ Pelly asked her.
‘You know Toady. She works in mysterious ways.’
‘I can just imagine the stupidity occurring down there as we speak.’ Hal snorted, shaking her head.
‘Oh – the hats. I forgot.’ Boz craned around and pulled another plastic bag from her stall. She handed cardboard party hats to Pelly, Hal and me. The hats bore the faces of girl clowns, different hair colours, winking long eyelashes. Crooked letters in red marker on the backs of the hats read Duff and Hugo are Gay!!! Pelly hiccupped a laugh and I touched the writing, red coming off on my finger.
‘Subtle,’ Hal said.
‘Do you think it’s too much, babe? I left Toad in charge of decorations and this is what she came up with.’
‘She wrote this on every hat?’ I asked.
Boz nodded, wincing.
‘Boz, you’re holding a party to stuff down their team’s throats – the team they’ve successfully been hiding their situation from – that they’re gay. You bought a cake. Relatively speaking, I don’t think you could say the hats are going overboard.’
‘You think we shouldn’t do this.’
Hal shrugged and blew on the noisemaker, eyebrows raised.
‘There’s cake?’ Pelly asked.
‘No, you know what?’ Boz tugged on a skate lace. ‘Toad had a good point. She said, what do we do to everyone else when they like someone? We bug them, right? You will get teased if you have a crush. Lord help you. And you know, Toad comes on to Dufresne every time we’re at the bar, because he’s Bitty’s boyfriend and she has to bug Bitty. She just has to. So the fact that Duffy and Hugo have been ignored by us, that they haven’t even gotten harassed, that’s just – tragic, you know?’
We huddled on the ice beside the gate, about ten of us, ridiculous in the clown hats, noisemakers clutched in our palms. Heezer and Tillsy performed a half-hearted sword fight. Duff and Hugo saw us, of course, through the glass as they walked up to the ice behind Toad. They smiled in a frowning way and Toad smiled modestly, the smug conductor. When she opened the gate and the three of them glided onto the ice, Boz yelled, ‘Surprise!’ She skated over to them and flung her arms around Duff’s and Hugo’s shoulders, squeezing them in.
We looked at each other and followed her lead, shouting weakly, blowing on the noisemakers. Pelly, Heezer and Boz launched handfuls of white confetti toward them, but it didn’t quite reach, and we watched their faces through the confetti falling in the middle of our circle, slow as snow. Then, quickly, silence.
‘I don’t get it,’ Duffy said. Hugo’s eyes flared green against her crimson face. I watched her gaze reach Heezer, who wore the hat on the side of her head, covering one ear, and backwards. I saw her read the red letters.
‘Oh my God,’ she breathed quickly, as though someone had jumped out at her just then, hand flying to her mouth. Heezer smiled, apologetic, and pulled the hat on top of her head.
‘Okay, you guys,’ Boz said, releasing their shoulders. ‘Okay.’ She cleared her throat. Pelly blew on her noisemaker in a nervous succession of lengthy honks. Toad snatched it from her hand and launched it over the boards. I looked to Hal. She stared grimly at Boz, arms crossed, hat resting against her back like a hood. I squirmed and prayed that Boz would make us seem less mean.
‘All right, guys ... so we’re gathered here today to celebrate the relationship between our girls Hugo and Duffy,’ Boz began, her voice ringing hollow against the ice, breath just visible in front of her face. She smiled brightly at them, and Duff’s scowl deepened, the tips of her ears flaming red above the nail-head earrings, Hugo spreading her fingers over her mouth until her hand covered half her face. Heezer trumpeted hopefully at Boz’s shoulder. But it failed, ringing out like a fart at a funeral.
‘Um, I guess we just want you guys to know that we love you both and we’re totally happy for you, and – ’
‘Sorry, Reverend Bozzo, but I feel compelled to interject.’ Toad stepped into the circle. ‘You aren’t marrying them, champ. No offence. Look, this is what it’s all about.’ She sighed and pulled her hoodie over her head. A pink T-shirt underneath read Lez-apalooza. She did a sloppy figure-skater twirl, and sprayed to a stop with her back to us, legs spread, hands on her hips. On the back of the T-shirt: Scarlet Gay Pride Day, 1998. 1 on 1 at the Crease. Quiet as we all read it and then Tillsy clapped her hands and laughed delightedly.
‘I want one of those, man!’
Boz’s mouth dropped.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Hal said.
Then Duffy began to laugh. She bent over, hands on her knees, shoulders shaking.
‘Oh my God,’ she said and stood up, wiping away a tear beside her nose, still laughing. ‘Oh my God, Toad. Holy shit.’
Pelly threw some more confetti, and I blew on my noisemaker with everyone else.
&nbs
p; Duff and Hugo glided toward us, Hugo ducking her head, a grudging smile. Toad stuck a hat on Duff’s head, snapped the elastic under her chin. It must have been the confetti – Hugo must have skated over the confetti. Her skates just flew out beside her, as though she was running across the ice in socks, and she went down, hard. Falling backwards, hands thrown out behind her to brace her fall. Breath hooked in my lungs, I watched her curl forward, clutching a wrist, rocking back and forth in the fetal position, orange hair brushing her knees.
‘Shit,’ Boz breathed, and it sounded strange to hear her swear. Duff crouched beside her, frantic, Hugo breathing deep in a disciplined pattern, gliding through the pain. In through her nostrils, out through her mouth, a rapid meditation. Rocking. We bunched in around them. Duff had her face down next to Hugo’s and was whispering something. When she turned to look up at us, her eyes were wild.
‘Someone do something! Please! Get someone!’
She held Hugo’s limp wrist carefully on her palm, just balanced it there in front of her, as though it had been given to her, while Hugo rocked, head down. Tears slid fast down Duff’s face.
‘Get someone!’ she shrieked again, but Boz had already gone. She tucked Hugo’s hair behind her ear, and stroked her back with clumsy jabs.
‘It’s okay, baby. It’s okay,’ she whispered. How quickly it all had broken. Toad shivered in her T-shirt. She crossed her arms over the words and watched them, off to the side, with tired eyes.
Hugo had fractured a bone in her wrist, but she returned to ice the following week with a blue playing cast. It matched Segal, who’d been wearing one since the beginning of the season, hers now ratty, trailing tattered pieces of cotton around the fingers like an old security blanket, giving off a smell of sour milk and rotten socks. But the point was, they could still play, Hugo and Segal, the casts fitting perfectly into their gloves. Segal came in with a new one, red this time, and she told me that while the plaster was setting the doctor got her to hold a stick in the palm of the cast, so the cast dried in that position, her broken hand frozen around a hockey stick for weeks. I pictured this, Segal clutching the stick in the doctor’s office, those long, meditative moments while the plaster dried. Like some misguided act of worship.
The team boasted an impressive roster of broken bones, pulled ligaments, strains, sprains, aching backs and knees. Our athletic therapist, tiny Greek Tamara, came in after games hauling a cooler full of ice packs. She stood in the middle of the room and threw them around the stalls like she was delivering newspapers. She laid players out on towels in the middle of the dressing room and pummelled muscle cramps into submission with sadistic nonchalance, her small hands finding the pain. There, there. Moans like a torture chamber, a brothel. Players were drawn to her, dragged themselves to her office whining like kids, seeking out her motherly aptitude, that calming ability to draw circles around the pain and then plaster over it.
In a scrum around the puck during practice, someone’s blade nicked my calf, just above the heel of my skate boot, right where the shin pads leave the well-being of your legs to fate. On the bench, Tamara snapped on latex gloves from her kit and wiped away the garish blood with impatient strokes of gauze, looking for the real story. In her sprawling kit, she located the perfect size of bandage. It was the same colour as my skin and, when she smoothed it over a reddening wad of cotton – a soothing undulation of fingertips – it disappeared into my leg.
I couldn’t believe Hugo came back so quickly. But they always came back, as quickly as they could, sooner than they should have. As though playing with pain might somehow make the team stronger, this act of limping back with the hurt parts displayed, proving their messy love for the game, for each other. The team shifting its shape around them, over the torn muscles, the fractured bones. Healing the hurt parts.
I tested myself: What would I do if I broke my arm? Would I make a comeback with the playing cast? I didn’t know. I’d probably go home.
Had I known that dressing-room geography would make my destiny for the rest of the year, I would have sat elsewhere, in the far corner with Duff, Hugo and Roxy, maybe, in the area Toad called Mime Village – it wasn’t that they didn’t speak there but that they spoke in normal volumes rather than the megaphone-for-mouths brand of communication favoured in our end, the vocal-cord workout demanded by the CD player that sat at Heezer’s feet. The Mime Village horizon seemed to shimmer like an oasis through the shower steam after practice. A haven, mellow and neat, their movements saturated with casual lethargy, or so it seemed from the North End, our tilt-a-whirl side. Our end remained loyal to each other, in restaurants, cars, buses. Hal and Toad could probably take or leave me, I thought; it was Pelly who had cemented me in.
‘Iz! Here!’ Pelly’s voice pierced through the thick morning air on the bus. Near the back, she waved a magazine in the air. I pushed through the aisle, stalling as my teammates in baseball caps and toques shoved their backpacks above the seats, everyone moving in slow motion, falling in next to their stall partners. They mumbled sleepy greetings as I passed.
Hal and Boz spoke quietly in the row Toad called Prime Real Estate, the only row of three seats, very back, next to the bathroom. Someone had transferred the No Kicking It sign – like a No Smoking sign, but with a boot instead of a cigarette – from the dressing-room toilet stall to the bus toilet door. I’d thought that kicking it meant dancing when I first started, and could easily imagine the reasoning behind the sign – Heezer getting carried away and dancing on the toilet one day after practice, slipping and getting a booter. This scenario grew edges, became logic, the boot entered my swelling dressing-room lexicon. Heezer dancing on the toilet could have happened; it was getting harder and harder to weed my own memories from team legend.
‘Shitting,’ Pelly had said to me out of the blue one day. ‘Kicking it is to shit, you know?’ I’d nodded like I knew. When Pelly offered me these morsels out of the blue – Shitting – I felt strange gratitude, a small seizure in my stomach.
Hal and Boz didn’t look up as I slid in ahead of them, next to Pelly, who was acting out a drama involving a bottle of Aspirin, her Scarlet water bottle and head pain. She moaned as pills spilled over her hand, into her lap, and rubbed her temple while she scooped up the excess.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked as she whiplashed the pills back. Toothpaste spit chalked one corner of her mouth.
‘Got my braces tighten yesterday,’ she grimaced. ‘They’re a bitch. But I’ll look this way when I’m done.’ She pointed to Julia Roberts’s horse teeth on the cover of Cosmopolitan.
‘Yeah, I can see it,’ I said.
Moon’s whistle scissored open the team’s morning drone. She was small at the front, her track jacket wrinkled like she’d slept in it the night before.
‘I had the worst dream ever last night,’ Toad had said a few days before. ‘I broke into Moon’s cromulent lair, and I was all excited, like, right on, let’s have a lookie here, let’s break some shit, whatever. But I get to her bedroom ... and I look in the closet ... and hundreds – thousands! – of track jackets fly out at me, like – like bats! And I go through her drawers, and there are these, like, self-renewing reserves of track pants, layer upon layer, no end. An infinity of track suits.’ She’d shuddered.
Moon’s eyes drooped. Stan handed her a Styrofoam coffee cup from the front seat and she took a hard swig.
‘Who’re we missing?’ she called. Pelly raised her eyebrows at me and formed a T with her hands, raising it high above her head. Moon’s cheeks dropped and she scanned the back, then heaved a disgusted sigh, flicking out her wrist to look at her watch.
Toad jogged in, holding a partially eaten doughnut out like a baton. The bus lurched away from the rink as she staggered oblivious down the aisle in flannel Barney pyjamas.
‘Prime Real Estate!’ she enthused, eyeing the empty seat at the back.
Hal snorted. Pelly and I angled ourselves around casually.
Toad struggled to fit her backpack overhea
d. She offered the doughnut to Boz, who shook her head, smiling.
‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ Toad clapped her hands. ‘Happy birthday, champ.’
‘It’s tomorrow,’ Hal said.
‘But the presents can’t wait!’ Toad pulled the backpack down again.
‘Oh Jesus,’ Hal breathed.
‘Why don’t you save it for tomorrow, Toady?’ Boz said.
Toad looked down at Pelly and me and waggled her eyebrows as she rummaged through.
‘Morning, youngsters. What’s wrong, Pelter? You look constipated.’
Pelly glared at her. ‘I got my braces tighten – I’m getting a migraine.’
‘That sucks – oh, here.’ She pulled a newspaper from the bag and flipped through, folding it back with a grin. ‘Hal’s first modelling spread. Happy birthday, totsi.’
Hal studied the paper for a long while, the crease above the bridge of her nose deepening, shadows thrown down over her eyes. Boz rested her chin on Hal’s shoulder to look, an unsure smile wavering on her mouth.
‘You’re kidding me. Where did you get this?’ Hal glared at Toad.
‘It’s next week’s Press, I just got it at U. Centre. What’s your problem?’
‘You’re kidding me,’ Hal repeated.
‘What is it?’ Pelly said urgently. ‘Let me see.’ She snatched the paper from Hal’s hands and I read over her shoulder. The headline, Scarlet Hockey Makes Its Mark, was bookended with an action shot of Ben Hardy, captain of the men’s team, a small triangle of tongue poised at the corner of his mouth, body leaning nearly parallel to the ice as he cut a sharp corner. In the neighbouring picture, Hal wore a black, low-plunging dress with jewel-studded spaghetti straps, her face and chest flushed red, eyes lidded down with dark eyeshadow, lips shining a hard gloss. Her hair was pinned up in dark snarls of curl, and a strand had escaped along her cheek, lending her a look of unravelling as she stared, smiling absently, away from the camera.
‘Is this from the athletic banquet?’ Pelly asked. Hal shook her head at Boz, speechless.