Checked

by Cynthia Kadohata

  Next he has me skate up and down the ice while keeping my feet close together. I do some ladders, which are every hockey player’s least favorite drill. You skate up and down the ice, going a shorter and shorter distance each time. Your legs start to feel more and more sluggish, like you’re pushing through mud. After that I pull Aleksei up and down the ice as he hangs on behind me. We do this six times.

  When it’s over, I collapse to the ice like I always do. I lie there a few seconds feeling gratitude that it’s over. Then I get up and go wait at the other rink to start stick time with Aleksei. My frenemy, Ethan, is already there waiting. Ethan pretends he can see right through me, like I don’t even exist. I say hey to him, but he doesn’t acknowledge me. He’s probably still salty ’cause he didn’t make the Grizzlies.

  The Zamboni finishes up, and we glide onto the ice. Ethan is a very good hockey player, but he’s not like the best guys. ’Cause of his size, though, he’ll probably do okay in bantam. That’s when everything changes. Size matters from then on. It’s not the most important thing, but it’s more important than in peewee.

  Sometimes when I pray for Sinbad, I’ve taken to also praying that I grow to be six feet minimum. Dad’s six-two, so there’s a chance I’ll be big. But my mom was only five-two. Dad says she was the most flexible person he ever met. She was practically a contortionist. That’s probably why I can do yoga, but I never do it ’cause it’s so boring. Being flexible is just something Mom gave me without knowing that she was giving it to me. Sometimes when I think about that, it seems pretty cool.

  There are seven of us here for stick time. Aleksei sets up the cones, tires, and danglers into a maze and shows us how he wants us to skate through them with the puck. It’s kind of complicated, and unfortunately, I’m first in line. So I give it a try, and I hear “CONOR! TEN PUSH-UPS!” I do the push-ups, thereby missing the next person so that I still don’t know how to do the drill correctly. I get up, and the next two guys get it wrong and have to do push-ups. Finally one of the bantams does it right, and now I get it.

  We do drills for forty-five minutes before Aleksei starts the scrimmaging. In the very first scrimmage, Ethan checks me hard, banging me against the boards when I steal the puck from him. I rest on the ground, my bell thoroughly rung. Aleksei roars, “Ethan, go sit on bench!” Then he pokes me with his stick, and I know what he’s going to say before he says it. “Conor, get up! It’s hockey!” I get up and see that my aunt has opened the door and stepped onto the ice. She’s one of those relatives who are kind of really great and really embarrassing at the same time—not that I have so many relatives.

  “I’m fine!” I call out, and she steps off the ice again.

  Later, in the car, she says, “That boy really hit you hard. Is that allowed?”

  “It’s not allowed for peewees like us,” I say.

  “I remember him from once before. He wasn’t always that mean.”

  “He is now.”

  “His mother should have a talk with him. Was that her sitting near me?”

  “Yeah. She’ll never have a talk with him. She thinks he walks on water.”

  She pauses, then smiles and ruffles my hair. “Well, we all think that of our boys.”

  Like I said, really great and really embarrassing at the same time. But mostly great.

  We do the drive-thru at In-N-Out, where I get protein burgers—they’re just the meat and lettuce, since I decided to stop eating white bread for the season. When Aunt Mo drops me off, she says, “Did you know I never knew my mother’s parents? They were in a feud with my mom.”

  “About what?”

  “They didn’t think her husband was good enough for her.”

  “Grandpa? He’s great!”

  “I think so too. Later they wanted to make up, and my mother said no. Sometimes I think she should have said yes, but maybe there were other factors. But I’m just thinking that you might want to see your mother’s parents on Thanksgiving. I don’t know them extremely well, but your mother was a really lovely, sweet person, and they raised her.”

  “Maybe they’re not as nice as her.”

  “Maybe they’re not, and maybe they are. It must have been devastating for them when your mother died. Why not try to see them this once? I wish I could have known my grandparents.” She tugs on my ear. “Okay?”

  I squirm. “But I like just chilling on Thanksgiving.”

  “Okay, I don’t want to push you.”

  I sit still, staring down at my hands in my lap. And, I don’t know, I feel like digging in my heels. So I say, “Thanks for the ride, Aunt Mo. You’re the greatest.”

  She pulls me over and holds me to her, then nuzzles her nose in my hair and says, “Oooooh, you’re such a little cutie.” Great. And embarrassing.

  Sinbad does his usual crazy dance when I get home. After lunging into me a few times, he settles down and sniffs at the bag of In-N-Out. Dad’s having his poker game in the living room. I think about eating on the couch, ’cause I like listening to cops talk, but somehow now that Sinbad’s sick, I’d rather spend all my home time alone with him. So I go into my room to sit on the floor and eat. First I close my eyes for a second and give my head a quick shake. I know it’s hockey, but whenever I get clocked, I always need to mentally reset. I truly hate getting laid out, back on the ice, trying to breathe.

  Sometimes in a game I’ll be playing great, and then I suddenly think about getting hurt, and I start to play worse, not aggressively enough. Most of the players aren’t like that, but some of us secretly are. I mean, we all act like it’s a secret, but we know some players get a little intimidated out there sometimes. I never used to be like that, so I hope this is just temporary.

  Sinbad’s nosing at the bag, so I hand him a piece of lettuce. His teeth come down hard on my fingers. “Ow!” But I give him more, with a piece of meat this time. When we’re done, I write down what I’ve eaten for dinner, for Coach Dusan’s food report. So far today I’ve had four bowls of whole milk with no-added-sugar cereal, two bowls of whole-milk yogurt with bananas, seven glasses of water, three apples with a ton of sugar-free peanut butter, plus dinner. More than three thousand calories.

  Dad and his poker buddies are talking super loud, laughing about a mouth beef one of them got. A mouth beef is when a member of the public complains that you were rude to them. Mouth beefs go into your permanent record, even if you’re exonerated, so too many of them can influence promotions.

  I hop onto my bed over and over thirty times, then do thirty push-ups. Then that’s it. It isn’t as much as Coach Dusan wants, but Dad, Sinbad, and I jogged in the morning and physically I’ve had it for the day. Note the word “physically.” Mentally, I’ve got work to do. I open up the dreaded playbook and randomly see page 57, near where the diagrams of plays start. I look at the squiggly lines and straight lines, at the red arrows and blue arrows, at the purple circles and the red circles and the triangles. “ ‘For example, if the L forward has the puck, the forward on that side shall be in the (red dotted) shooting lane of the L defense while making sure a pass can’t go through the box to the high slot forward.’ ” Does that make sense? Then I laugh out loud and close the book. ’Cause it doesn’t make sense, and it’s not gonna make sense, I realize, without Dad finding film that relates to it. Realizing that liberates me for the rest of the night. “We’re free!” I say to Sinbad. “Going for a walk,” I call to Dad, and Sinbad and I go out into the warm Canyon Country air, just like we have a thousand times before. Maybe more like two thousand. Not sure—you do the math, it’s not my thing.

  CHAPTER 31

  * * *

  THE TEAM HAS two assistant coaches. Coach Kyle is ten feet tall and makes a lot of jokes and encourages everyone to work hard, but he never yells. He’ll just be like, “Come on, Conor, you can do better than that!” He cracks jokes to you after you get yelled at by Coach Dusan, to balance things out. Coach Brendan is the most serious person I’ve ever met. If you mess up, he leans forward and l
ooks at you super intensely as he explains what you should have done. So like the actual mistake might have taken less than three seconds, but he’ll spend five minutes explaining it. Everybody else will be on to a new drill, but he’ll still be explaining to you. But he’s cool, I like him.

  When we mess up on a drill once, Coach Dusan corrects us like we’re his own sons, but by maybe the third time we mess up on the same drill, his face turns red and he yells really loudly. “WHY ARE YOU STANDING FIVE FEET AWAY WHEN I SAID THREE FEET?!” Sometimes me and the other guys discuss whether he’s really mad, or if he’s just trying to scare us. We haven’t figured that one out. One time I didn’t understand something he said about a drill, so I skated up, super scared-like, and asked him about it. He told me really nicely what I was supposed to do, and when I got back in line with the other players, they all surrounded me and asked what he’d said, ’cause they didn’t understand the drill either but were afraid to ask. We hate getting yelled at, but at the same time it would be a fate worse than death not to be on this team. Like I said, we’re all in awe of him. He’s one of those people who go full-out on everything they do. Even when he’s just standing there doing nothing, he’s doing it really intensely. He’s literally the only person I know who I never see standing around looking at his phone.

  Early on, the Grizzlies hold testing. Slap-shot velocity, snap-shot velocity, pull-ups, high jump, long jump, forward skating speed, backward skating speed, endurance, and push-ups. I’m pretty shocked when I come in second in forward skating speed and first in slap-shot and snap-shot velocity. When my dad gets the e-mail about it, I literally pound my chest and yell, “Yoooooouuuuwwww!” Dad just chews his gum and says, “It’s what I figured.” The test scores give me some swagger, and I don’t feel like I’m one of the worst ones on the team anymore. I ignore the fact that I came in ninth in push-ups and eleventh in endurance. All that shows is what beasts we’ve got on this team.

  Until school starts up again, life is pretty much perfect. Yeah, some days I got my doubts about my standing on the team, but I get to spend all the time I want on hockey, exercise, and Sinbad. Then school starts after Labor Day, and I can tell Sinbad really misses me every day. He just seems more depressed. I take Mr. Falco’s writing class again—we have a couple of special programs and teachers that kids in sixth through eighth can take once a week if they want. I just kind of drift through the rest of school all day, and then perk up for his class. He picks up right where he left off, riffing on family this and family that. He’s full of energy, striding back and forth in front of the room. He apologizes, ’cause he never sent us our stories over the summer. Says he had a family emergency. But he hands me my story first thing.

  It says, You need to write more about cops killing people unjustifiably. That’s all it says. I take the paper, immediately crumple it up, and put it in my backpack. He said it was supposed to be a family story, not a political story. I feel anger rising up in me, but I just walk out. He calls after me, but I don’t turn around. I sit on the curb outside until the bell rings to end school.

  Some kids gather, a couple of them drinking sodas as they wait for their parents. Coach Dusan practically thinks soda should be illegal. Dad only allows me to drink it on three holidays: Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July. I always pour it over ice and savor it like I have since I was seven years old and had my first can one Christmas.

  When our old Volvo pulls up, I hop in. As soon as I see my dad, I feel like I have to protect him from the world, even though he’s twice as big and strong as me.

  “How was your first day at school?” he asks.

  “You know” is all I say.

  “Yeah. But try hard anyway, okay?”

  “I did.”

  “Great!”

  I think about how he’s seemed better since he took off those two weeks. I ask, “So how was your day?”

  “Aw, man!” he exclaims. He pulls slowly into traffic. “Paperwork. A woman refused to give me her driver’s license, so it took four hours to deal with her.”

  “How did you find out who she was?”

  “We finally had to arrest her. We gave her an hour, and then we arrested her.”

  “Your partner was there?”

  “I called him over. When things start to go sideways, you’d like someone else there for a witness, backup, whatever you need.”

  “So you had to put her in handcuffs?”

  “Yeah, but then after we cuffed her, she spit at me. We put her in the car kicking and screaming, and then she suddenly got perfectly calm and said she would give me her license.”

  “So then you took her license and wrote her the ticket?”

  “No way, you spit at me, I’m arresting you.” Someone runs a stop sign and almost hits another car, but my father’s face stays perfectly blank. Usually he comments on stuff like that. Now he just rubs at his nose and looks after the car that ran the sign. And something about the way he’s so blank when he’s usually so emotional makes me realize that he’s not so okay after all, that maybe all that crying has just morphed into something else. So I still gotta protect him. I gotta take care of him. I don’t know how, but I gotta.

  CHAPTER 32

  * * *

  ON SATURDAYS WE have three hours of practice: an hour of ice, an hour of dryland, and an hour of theory. Before theory one day, Coach gives us a speech about the kind of effort he expects. Any perceived lack of effort will result in benching during games. At every level, he says, there will always be someone to replace you if you don’t give full effort.

  “How many of you want to make it to the NHL?” he asks.

  All our hands shoot up.

  “That’s what I thought,” he says.

  He talks about sacrificing your body to guard the slot—the slot’s the area in front of the goal. To do that, you need to be diligently working on your dryland muscle work. Otherwise your opponent will simply push you out of the way.

  “How many of you have been working on your dryland this summer?”

  We all raise our hands.

  “Don’t lie, because I saw some of your test results,” he says. “Most of you did great, but not every single one of you.” Nobody puts their hand down.

  Then we dress for the ice and begin doing drills. Coach Dusan skates up to me. “Great skating, Conor. Didn’t I see you with Ivan one day?”

  “Yeah, I just started up with him again,” I say eagerly. We all love it when he pays attention to us.

  “Good, you doing your push-ups? You’re going to need a strong upper body once you advance to bantams next year. I want you to start doing more push-ups. Let’s try to get you up to fifty before the end of the season. In fact, start right now. Do fifty.” He gives my helmet a couple of almost affectionate thumps, then moves on to talk to Ryan.

  I’m glad he talked to me, but I kind of want to laugh out loud too, ’cause I know exactly how many true push-ups I can do: thirty-three. I manage thirty-five! For a second I think he’s glancing my way, though, so I make a big effort to do another. He shouts, “You call that a push-up, Conor?” But he says it like he thinks I’m funny, and then he moves on.

  After talking briefly to us individually, Coach Dusan starts the drills. You can feel his eyes boring into you when you skate. It takes a while for me to get used to that, so that I’m focusing on what I’m supposed to be doing instead of focusing on him staring at me. When we mess up, he keeps telling us to act like professionals. “Come on!” he’ll yell out. “Is that the way a professional skates?” I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even realize we’re only eleven and twelve years old.

  We’re all resigned to getting yelled at. That is, we’re resigned and kind of terrified at the same time. Like I’ve said, almost all my coaches have yelled a lot, but for some reason Coach Dusan’s yelling shakes you up more. Like Dad said before, “appropriate fear” is key. It only gets more intense each year, Dad says. He also says most kids quit hockey by bantam, and then a bunch more quit
after bantam. There are more injuries in bantam, due to the checking, so that’s one reason kids drop out. And the kids who quit aren’t only the ones who aren’t good enough—some real good players quit as well. Jae-won and I make a pact that we’re going to see this thing through to at least eighteen and reevaluate then if we have to.

  CHAPTER 33

  * * *

  IN SEPTEMBER WE play four preseason games and win them all. We win by 10–1, 9–3, 13–7, and 6–0. That gets the coaches thinking we might be hockey gods, and Coach Dusan says we should aim high—for the CAHA championship. California Amateur Hockey Association. Every month we have what are called CAHA weekends, which is where you play several other teams, sometimes from Northern California. With preseason games, scrimmages, regular season games, Minnesota and Chicago tournaments, and CAHA weekends, we’ll end up playing at least fifty games this season, more if we make the play-offs. But the CAHA games are the only ones that count in the standings.

  My speed has gotten me onto the first line for a couple of games. Coach says the lines are temporary while he fiddles around, but my dad is so proud he’s been telling total strangers. Like he told a waitress, “He’ll take five tacos. He needs a lot of food because he plays first line on a AAA hockey team.”

  And I have to admit, it’s all I can think about. I can’t believe I’m AAA this year. I feel like I just made the NHL. Sitting in school is pure torture. Every season the coaches talk about how your GPA is the most important thing in your life. So there’s that. But even before I got serious about hockey, I was a below-average student. I used to try hard, but when I still got Cs, I started slacking off a bit. And I still got Cs, except for that one F I got in social studies. Teachers don’t like to give out Ds and Fs unless you have a bad attitude in class. All that stuff literally everyone tells parents about GPA being so important is kind of offensive to kids like me, who just can’t get good grades even if we try. Teachers think if you’re not heading for college, you’re not being the best you can be. They always say stuff like that. That’s an insult to people like my dad, and sometimes it makes me mad . . . but how did I get on this?