“Okay,” Dad said finally, his usually steady voice shaking as hard as I was. He trailed his fingers through my hair in the back, as though he needed to touch it one more time in case it never came back.
I couldn’t look away from Babs, and he didn’t look away from me. He was sitting on the bench at his stall, his hands fisted at his sides, as the cool plastic guard touched down against my forehead. It glided back along my scalp, and large clumps of my hair rained down onto the towel over my shoulders. I caught a piece of it in my free hand. The long, brown strands still felt vibrant and alive.
Not like me. I hadn’t felt vibrant in so long I almost didn’t remember what it was like, and I didn’t know if I wanted to be alive anymore if it had to hurt this bad.
I let the hair slip through my fingers and fall to my feet.
It didn’t take long for Dad to finish the first pass with the guard, even with being careful around my ears. He powered the clippers off and removed the guard, tossing it back into the shoebox behind him. A moment later, the now-familiar buzzing sound filled the room again.
This time, I could feel the metal against my flesh. It was warm from the motor and a little scratchy, but it was oddly comforting. My scalp had been sensitive for days—a sure sign, according to my oncologist, that the hair loss would start soon. Dad went over some spots multiple times, then he rubbed my bald head to feel if he’d missed anything.
He turned the clippers off again, picked up a few strands of hair from the towel, shoved them in his pocket, and kissed the top of my head.
“You’ve got to tell me,” I said. “Do I have any weird bumpy spots?” I needed some warning about things like that before I looked in a mirror. It was going to be enough of a shock to see myself without any hair. I’d always had a full head of long, thick brown hair, ever since I was really little. Even in my baby pictures I had a lot of hair. Mom said I’d come out that way.
“No weird bumpy spots,” Dad said. He sounded gruff. I knew this wasn’t easy for him. None of it was.
“Okay.” I carefully took the towel off, looking down for the first time to see the mound of brown hair at my feet and surrounding the chair.
Jonny brought over a damp cloth and handed it to Dad. It was warm when he wiped it over my head, neck, and face to pick up any loose hairs.
I got up and kissed Dad on the cheek. “Is there a mirror around? I need to see.”
Zee jerked his head to the side, toward another part of the room. “Over here.”
I went to where he’d indicated and stared in shock at my reflection. It was still me—still my blue eyes, even though they seemed tired and sunken in, still my nose and my dry lips, still my slightly hollowed out cheekbones. But I looked like an alien. If my friends hadn’t already dropped me, they definitely would now. Who would want to hang out with the weird alien girl? The lack of hair only seemed to emphasize the features that made it obvious I was sick. I let my hands run over my head as I turned to see myself from every angle.
No weird bumpy spots. Dad hadn’t lied.
The clippers buzzed to life again, and I raced back into the main part of the locker room. My dad was in the chair. Jonny was shaving Dad’s head.
“Oh, Daddy.” I’d been able to get through losing my own hair without crying, but this time I couldn’t hold my stupid tears back. “Mom really will kill you now.”
He winked and reached for my hand. I held it, watching as his salt-and-pepper hair joined mine on the floor around the chair. Jonny finished shaving Dad’s head a lot quicker than Dad had done mine.
“No weird bumpy spots?” Dad asked me.
I brushed away a tear and shook my head. “No weird bumpy spots.”
He got up and left without saying another word, heading toward the mirror.
Jonny started to put the clippers away, but Babs got up and said, “Not yet. Do mine next.”
“No!” I couldn’t believe I’d just shouted at him, but I couldn’t let Babs do that, even though the thought that he was willing to made my belly flip.
I loved his hair. It was this perfect blondish-brown shade, and he had it cut in a faux hawk lately that made me want to run my fingers through it. I couldn’t do anything like that. Dad would kill Babs if he even looked at me funny, whether he’d done anything or not—not that he ever would. I was just another girl with a crush on him. He had more than enough of those to choose from. There was no reason he should choose me over any of the rest of them.
Babs was only a couple of years older than me—only twenty—but I didn’t think age was really the issue for Dad when it came to the thought of me and a guy. He was stuck on the fact that I was still in high school, and he seemed to think I shouldn’t even date until I was about sixty or seventy, or maybe not even then.
It didn’t seem to matter to him that I’d already turned eighteen and was old enough that I could make my own choices. It happened two and a half weeks ago, actually, on the day that I’d started my first chemo treatment. Happy birthday to me. Here’s some cake you can puke up later.
Babs stood in the middle of the locker room, his hands still balled into fists at his sides, staring at me. “I want to,” he said. “I feel like it’s the only thing I can do.”
There wasn’t anything for him to do. I shook my head, this time feeling like I might actually get sick. “Please, don’t. I can handle losing my hair, but I don’t think I can take it if you shave yours off. Plus, all of Portland would hate me.”
He laughed, but it was an angry sort of laugh. Hurt. Like I’d hurt his feelings, which made no sense at all. He clenched his jaw, and it made his dimples come out. “Okay,” he said finally. “But only because you asked me not to.”
I took a couple of steps until I was standing right in front of him. “Thank you, Babs,” I whispered.
“Jamie,” he said. “Call me Jamie.”
As he spoke, I could smell the sweet-and-spicy cinnamon scent on his breath from the mints he was always popping in his mouth. I was that close.
I stretched up on my toes and kissed him on the cheek, right where his dimple always showed up. “Jamie…thank you.” I don’t know what made me kiss him like that, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
He brought his hand up, and I thought he might touch my cheek or my head. My pulse thundered like a wild stampede, and I couldn’t breathe for wanting him to touch me in some small way, even though it was a crazy thought in the first place.
“You’d better back away from my little girl, dipshit,” Dad said from right behind me.
Jamie dropped his hand to his side so fast you would have thought Dad had shot it.
I took a step back, almost bumping into my dad. “It’s my fault. He didn’t do anything.” I turned to face him, and Jamie backed away to busy himself with something else. “Really, Dad.”
“Your mother’s waiting for you,” he said, but I knew he was pissed. His eyes were more bloodshot than before, like he’d been crying. That was probably why he’d left for a minute—not so much to look at his own bald head.
I nodded. “Yeah. I’m going.”
“Are you two coming to lunch with us today?”
“If I can get her to stop crying once she sees me like this. I’ll text you to let you know.” I raced out of the locker room before either of us started crying again and hurried past the reporters before they realized I didn’t have any hair left.
My cheek still tingled where Katie Weber had kissed it.
I tried to push that from my mind because her dad was glaring at me from across the table at Amani’s Italian Restaurant like he wanted nothing more than to use his steak knife to cut off my balls and then feed them to me as my lunch instead of the chicken and pasta the waiters were serving us.
Amani’s was our go-to restaurant for a pregame meal. It was a family-style place, where we ordered a few big dishes and all helped ourselves, and the staff always knew to expect us on the day of a home game. They made it feel homey—even if right now, Webs was doin
g his best to prevent me from feeling any sort of comfort.
Self-preservation seemed to be the wisest course of action after I’d almost fucked up and touched Katie. The last couple of months had really screwed with my head, with her being sick—mainly because there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. That was the only excuse I could come up with for whatever idiocy had caused my lapse in judgment. Well, that and the fact that I’d completely lost all grip on reality when she’d kissed me.
Not that Webs would give a shit about my excuses. As soon as he had seen Katie take the seat directly across from me at the restaurant, he’d plopped himself down right next to her, and he hadn’t stopped glaring at me since.
She had a scarf tied around her head now, a soft blue silky one that matched the color of her eyes. For some reason, without any hair on her head, her eyes stood out even more than usual. I didn’t know if she’d chosen to put the scarf on or if her mom had insisted once she’d seen that all Katie’s hair was gone. It didn’t really matter, I supposed. But I liked how it made it easier to see her eyes. You could see a lot in Katie’s eyes, if you knew to look.
Liam Kallen jabbed me in the ribs with his elbow to get my attention, and I snapped out of it long enough to take the bowl of pasta he was trying to pass to me. Kally was new to the team, and he was living with me now. He’d joined us at the trade deadline about a week ago along with Riley Jezek and Viktor Ellstrom. Kally and RJ had been playing for the Islanders, and Eller came over from Winnipeg.
Kally used to be one of the most prolific goal-scorers in the league—until his wife died. Everyone said that when she’d died, he’d stopped living, too. I wasn’t so sure about that, but he was still trying to figure out how to score again, even though it had been more than a year since she’d been killed.
I put some of the pasta on my plate and passed the bowl on to my best friend on the team, Ray Chambers. Razor loaded his plate with about three times as much as I had and then reached for the salad in the middle of the table. I’d never met anyone who could put away as much food as he could, and that was saying something since I had six younger brothers and every single one of us played hockey and ate like a pig according to my mom.
Once I stopped staring at Katie and started eating, Webs finally focused more of his attention on his meal instead of inventing new and exciting ways to torture me.
Razor stuffed a massive forkful of pasta into his mouth. He had barely chewed and swallowed when he said, “So, Katie…you going to prom with the same guy as last year? It’s coming up pretty soon, eh?”
Not only did Razor eat more than anyone I’d ever known, he was also quite possibly the most fucking clueless guy on the face of the planet when it came to tact. I kicked his shin hard under the table.
“Fuck, Babs!”
“Watch your fucking mouth in front of my daughter, asswipe,” Webs grumbled at him.
Razor shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry, Katie.” But he didn’t sound sorry.
I couldn’t make myself look anywhere but at Katie, though. She’d ducked her head down to stare at her plate and was as red-faced as she’d been while Webs had shaved her hair off a little bit ago. “I don’t think I’m going to prom this year,” she said quietly. She sounded sad. She always sounded sad lately.
Most of the guys started up their own conversations, turning their attention away from her. They probably didn’t want to embarrass her any more than Razor already had. But not all of them turned away. Zee was sitting on Katie’s other side, across from Kally. He handed her a basket of bread and asked, “Why aren’t you going?”
“Who would want to take the bald girl to prom?” She tried to laugh it off, but I could see the pain in her posture, just like I’d seen her fear through her bravery when she’d asked Webs to shave her head. She passed the bread to her father without taking any. “Besides, I’m not even going to classes right now. Out of sight, out of mind. They don’t even know I exist anymore.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.” Kally took a sip of his water and used his napkin to wipe his mouth. She gave him a dubious look, but he didn’t let it stop him. “You should go anyway. You could show them what they’re missing. Make yourself some good memories.”
Katie gave a tiny shake of her head. “I don’t think I have that kind of courage.”
“You have a hell of a lot more courage than you give yourself credit for,” Kally replied. When she gave him a questioning look, he pointed at the scarf on her head.
She blushed. “That wasn’t courage. That was fear of looking stupid with bald patches.”
“Courage,” Zee said slowly, but his eyes were on me and not on Katie while he talked, “is doing something you know you need to do even though you’re scared to do it.”
What was he getting at? I took another bite and stared down at my plate. That was better than looking at Webs with his ball-busting glares or at Zee and his meaningful glances that didn’t really impart any meaning, at least.
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.” But then she started eating her meal and stopped talking, and that was the end of the conversation.
After we finished eating, everyone headed home. We had a game against Colorado tonight, and most guys take an afternoon nap on game days.
Kally had moved in with me when he’d been traded here because I had an extra room. I’d been living with Brenden Campbell—Soupy to the guys—but he’d moved across the hall to live with his fiancée, Rachel, and her two kids on trade deadline day.
It was nice having Kally around, even if he was closer in age to Webs than he was to me. He was a quiet guy, but he could cook, which was a definite bonus for me, and he didn’t care if I had Razor over to play video games. Plus, he was a deep thinker. At first I’d thought he was a little weird, which wouldn’t be too out of the ordinary considering he was Swedish. It felt like half the team consisted of Swedes these days, so I should know about how weird some of them could be. They tended to stick to themselves and not hang out with the rest of us, and I’d never met one who didn’t have some crazy habit like sleeping naked with the windows open in January. But Kally usually had some pretty insightful things to say—the sort of things that would fuck with your head. At least he did on those rare occasions when he decided to open his mouth and say something.
Since the three of us—Soupy, Kally, and me—were all headed the same place, we’d driven in for the morning skate together in Soupy’s SUV. When we were about halfway home, Kally turned around in his seat and looked at me with that intense stare he got when he was about to spout off something profound and life-altering and mind fucking.
“You could give her that good memory,” he said. Okay, so maybe he really was weird.
I had always known everyone could see straight through me, and Zee and Soupy had been giving me shit about my crush on Katie for over a year, but Kally hadn’t been around very long. How was it that he could already tell?
“Take her to her prom?” I shook my head. “Webs would kill me.”
“This isn’t about Webs. It’s about Katie.” Kally shifted even more in his seat, so much that he was practically in the back with me and had to be breaking the law sitting that way. “Hopefully she’ll be fine in a few months or a year, and she can make a lot more good memories—but she might not be fine. She deserves to have this one, and her dad will see that eventually. He’ll come around. But he can’t give it to her—that kind of memory. You can.”
“He’s right,” Soupy said, his eyes flicking up to the rearview mirror to meet mine. “And she needs a reason to fight. She looks like she’s giving up.”
I knew Kally was right, at least some part of me did, and what Soupy said about her giving up made me feel physically ill. But still… “How the hell am I supposed to get Webs to let me take her to her prom?”
Soupy turned into our parking garage. “You listen to what Zee said. You do what you know is right even though you’re scared.”
“You never know how long you’ll have with
her,” Kally said. He turned around in his seat, facing forward again. “Don’t put things off, because you might regret it someday.”
* * * *
Aaron Ludwiczak didn’t see the Colorado player cutting across the middle of the ice toward him, not even in the half-second before he got hit.
I didn’t notice who ran him over. All I could focus on was how hard Luddy’s head hit the ice when he dropped. The impact snapped his helmet off, and it went skidding across the ice in the opposite direction of his suddenly prone body.
“Fuck!” Scotty Thomas, our head coach, paced behind me on the bench while the trainers and medical staff headed out to check on Luddy.
The boys and I were all on our feet, trying to get a better look. After a minute, they had Luddy up on his knees and were helping him stand. That was a good sign—Luddy getting up—even if it wasn’t completely on his own. That meant at least they weren’t going to take him off on a stretcher. They’d had to do that with our starting goalie, Nicklas Ericsson, a few months back. Nicky had only returned from his concussion a couple of games ago. Not that you could tell anything about a concussion based on whether a stretcher was needed or not. And Luddy could still have one.
Hard to imagine that wasn’t the case when you saw the way he hit the ice. The arena crew kept replaying the impact on the Jumbotron overhead, making sure we wouldn’t be able to erase it from our memories.
The trainers brought him past the bench on the way to the tunnel, and he nodded at us. “Give ’em hell, boys.”
Seduced by the Game Page 21