Page 7 of In the Net
I roll my eyes, shaking my head. Tuck may have moved out of the house, but his spirit lives on. “I assume I’d have to swallow?”
“Of course,” Carter supplies.
“Shit, I dunno.” I push my tongue against my inner cheek thoughtfully. “This is a hard one.”
“In more ways than one,” Jamie pronounces solemnly.
“I mean, definitely more than ten, if I have to swallow …”
I’m mulling over the prospect when I sense someone walking into the yard behind me.
“There he is!” Felix exclaims. “Veikko the Viking!”
I turn to see our new defenseman, Veikko Eskola, regarding Felix with a flat expression. “Why Viking? Viking is Sweden. I am from Finland. Very different places, though Americans think they are similar.”
“The alliteration just works too well, brother,” Felix says, getting up to pat the big Finn on the shoulder. “You gotta run with it.”
Felix and Veikko are a real pair. While Felix can’t go a minute without making a joke, Veikko is insanely literal. Jokes, sarcasm,and irony fly right over his head. They remind me of Hudson and Tuck, though in a lot of ways they’re very different.
“Hey, Veikko, add your perspective to this conundrum,” Carter says.
“Conundrum?” Veikko asks.
“Alright, so there’s this really ugly guy,” Felix begins to lay out the scenario for him. I excuse myself, saying I need to head out to a coffee shop to focus on some schoolwork for a while.
It’s not exactly schoolwork that I’m working on, though. It is an essay, but it isn’t for a class.
The English department is holding a competition where students submit essays on a literature-related topic of their choice, and the winner gets to present their paper at a major literary conference.
That opportunity itself is cool enough, but the thing that compelled me to work on a submission iswherethis conference is taking place: Paris.
If I win this competition, I get a free round-trip flight and a free hotel room for a week, and the opportunity to explore the city I’ve always wanted to see while attending the conference.
That opportunity is enough to make me want to pile even more work on my shoulders, trying to perfect this essay while I already have my pre-season hockey schedule and my full slate of classes keeping me busy.
Once I settle in at a table at Last Word, I glance around to see if I can spot the girl who Jamie might have been talking about, but I don’t recognize any workers who weren’t here last semester. So, I open my notebook, grab my pencil, and get to work organizing my thoughts so that the next couple paragraphs of my essay are as good as they can possibly be.
With a trip to Paris riding on it, I’m demanding perfection from myself.
As I start to think about how I’m going to transfer these thoughts into words on the page, Harper’s criticism about my writing style plays in the back of my mind.
I wish that were the only thing about Harper preoccupying me as I try to focus.
3
HARPER
I’m in the zone working on this essay.
Call me a dork, but I love writing essays. And the potential payoff for this one isn’t just a good grade.
I’m writing this essay for a competition the English department is holding, and the award is a trip to Paris to present it at an international literary conference.
For as long as I can remember, if I could choose to go anywhere in the world, it would be Paris. The culture, the history, the fact that every street is teeming with a literary legacy … thinking about it only fuels my fingers to dance faster around my keyboard, every sentence I’m hammering out feeling perfect.
Free flight, free hotel room, and a whole week to experience the cultural capital of Europe.
And being able to actually present a paper at a major conference as an undergrad, when what I want to do with my life is get a PhD and work in academia? It’s an incredible opportunity.
