Page 79 of Jaded

And it’s all because of Olli. Somehow, after a few short weeks of being in this broken-down town, he’s figured out what it needs. Figured out how to bring it together, give it just that.

I wasn’t lying when I said I thought he could turn the team around. That he could be the one to do what so many others in the sixteen years since Jesse left could not—bring back the Dingoes.

I’d doubted him at first. Until that first practice, when I’d started to wonder. And then at the Ice Out, something inside me, some unwilling piece started to believe. After this game, I know he’s got something nobody else does, something nobody else has dared to bring to the table.

He might actually be able to save this team.

Obviously, saving the Dingoes is what I want. I want to see the team, the rink, and the town flourish. I want to see them restored to their former glory, just like the days when Jess was around.

My hands clench tightly together.

But what happens after? Olli saves it, catapults his own career. The scouts come looking, stardom finds him and . . .

He admitted it himself. His goal is the NHL. He doesn’t plan to stick around here. Neither did Jess, and I can’t fault either of them for that.

Shit. I shouldn’t think about this.

I should go to Brenda’s—she and Syd are planning some kind of celebratory dinner. But Syd mentioned her friend Maggie, and Brenda will probably invite Mary . . . and that’s a lot of girl talk.

So here I am.

I head back into the Dingoes’ locker room. I’ll give it a quick clean, then hit the lights and head over to Brenda’s.

I pause at the janitor’s office—also my office, since we haven’t had a separate janitor for months now—to gather my backpack. I dig out my headphones, jam the buds into my ears as I dip into the locker room.

The plus side of playing janitor to a bunch of guys whose skates you sharpen . . . most of them try not to make a mess. So cleanup takes just a couple of minutes, and then it’s just me and the music and those two jerseys hanging on the wall above my empty cubby.

R. Taylor, 14

J. Taylor, 15

Father and son.

I plop down in the empty cubby, let the music wash through me. Call it a strange post-game ritual, but there’s something about being here after everyone else has left that makes me want to write songs.

I dig through my backpack again, open a notebook against my folded knees, and let the music take me away.

My fingers itch to perch on the strings of my guitar, to dance their way through tangled notes and weaves of melody twisted into poetry. Ifeel those notes, pulsing in my blood, lingering in my eardrums beneath that life beat. I crave to capture them.

I let my fingers trail over the notebook. The pencil scratches.

I start by transcribing the song in my headphones, tuning my ear. Hearing the notes and laying them down, but as always it deviates, as the melody in my head, in my blood, in my imagination, whites out all other sounds.

The music in my headphones becomes a throb of background noise, meditation music, the soft pulse of the ocean.

My fingers and imagination start to write of their own accord.

There are never any words, just the notes, the sound, because I don’t bother with the poetry of it. It’s the music that’s got me in a chokehold, that owns me.

But today, I can’t help but hear the words beneath the trickle of melody. Words I didn’t write, words that crave music, words that call out to be woven into a song.

I didn’t want the world to see my true colors

The true darkness of my soul

So I shattered that image

Into a million tiny shards

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