Page 30 of Rookie Move
“I’ll get ’em.” He turned to leave the room.
“Thank you!” she called after him.
There was the usual commotion in the hallway outside the room. Georgia stuck her head out to try to convince reporters to come into the pressroom instead of waylaying players in the dressing room or the corridor. She needed those soundbites to happen in front of the Bruisers logo rather than a scuffed-up hallway wall. “Let’s go, guys and gals!” she called cheerfully. “We’ll bring you the players.”
A couple of heads turned, but nobody moved. It was the same routine every game night.
When O’Doul and Castro appeared, moving toward the pressroom, the reporters closed in with their microphones, hoping for an exclusive comment. The slow-moving parade of journos followed the players toward the pressroom.
Georgia stepped out of the way, allowing everyone to pass her. When the horde was through, she stuck her head out into the hall, looking for stragglers. But it was the usualcrowd of wives and girlfriends with VIP access. The locker room door kept opening and shutting again as players came out to greet family or retreat inside. Then Georgia saw Leo emerge for a split second before he was promptly tackled. This time, the tackle did not come from his shrill girlfriend, but from Leo’s mom.
At the sight of Mrs. Trevi, Georgia’s heart tripped over itself almost as clumsily as it did whenever she saw Leo himself. The look of joy on Marion Trevi’s face was so pure and lovely that Georgia felt a tickle at the back of her throat. And there was Leo’s sister, Violet, grinning beside her. Georgia was startled to see how grown up she looked. When she’d broken up with Leo, Vi was headed for her freshman year of high school, and had a mouth full of braces. As she watched, Leo grabbed his sister and squeezed her, while their dad beamed from a few feet away.
Georgia made herself look away. This was Leo’s moment with his family. She stepped back inside the pressroom, where her own father was taking the podium with his two players. But her heart was still out in the hallway.
There’d been a time when Georgia had considered the Trevi clan to be her family, too. She loved how loud and happy the Trevi household was. Three kids. Three hockey practice schedules (because DJ and Violet played, too). A refrigerator full of leftovers, homemade cookies on the counter. While Georgia and her father had always been close, Leo’s home was lively with affection. She’d spent many a happy Sunday in their den watching football, or on the back patio in the warmer seasons. When she’d cut herself off from Leo, she’d cut herself off from her second home, too.
They were never hers, anyway.
Georgia focused her attention on the podium, and did not look into the hallway again.
EIGHT
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6TH
23 DAYS BEFORE THE NHL TRADE DEADLINE
TOP TEAM HEADLINES:
Brooklyn Falls to New Jersey in First of 3-Game Road Trip
—NBC Sports
It didn’t matter how old he got—Leo was never going to forget that first game.
The memory fueled him through the rest of a very long week. Coach Worthington’s piercing whistle continued to object to half the plays he made during practice. And then Coach benched him for the game against New Jersey.
The Brusiers lost that game, which left the whole team grumpy.
Not Leo, though. Because he had an assist on the winning goal against Tampa. And nobody was ever taking that away from him. His family had yelled themselves hoarse in the stands that night. Afterward, his mom and sister got a photo with his sweaty jersey, reading T R E V I on the back.
And—most important—he’d gotten to show a coach who didn’t want him that he could be valuable, given the chance.
It was going to take a lot more than some more grumbling from Coach Worthington to bring him down. Every hour he spent as a member of the team cemented his chance to stick around. Leo figured that if there was an easy way for Coach to invalidate his new contract, he would have done it already.
“It looks like you might be stuck with each other,” his agent had said, chuckling.
Thursday night they played their last home game before a three-game road trip across the country and Canada. Leo played that game, against Pittsburgh, because “we’re resting Bayer’s shoulder for the road.”
Whatever, Leo thought to himself as he’d tied his skates. If Coach wanted to make it sound as if Leo was just a stand-in, just let the man try to talk him down. Whether Coach was happy with him or not, he’d play his second NHL game with everything he had.
They battled Pittsburgh to a tie. Leo wasn’t entirely impressed with himself. He missed a few opportunities that he should have capitalized on. And he couldn’t always anticipate his new teammates’ moves the way he’d learned to do with the Muskrats.
If it takes time, it takes time, Leo coached himself. If only he had more of it.
On the morning of the black-tie benefit the team had a morning skate and then a good, heavy workout in the weight room. After grabbing lunch in a deli, he went back to Silas’s apartment—he still didn’t quite think of it as his own—and took a nap. While he was sleeping, his tux was dropped off with the concierge of the apartment building. He’d had to rent one from a formal wear company that had come to the practice rink to fit him. Leo’s own tux was in a box somewhere, packed up by the movers he’d hired to liberate his stuff from his place in Michigan.
Padding around the apartment as the afternoon slid into shadow, he still felt exhausted. It had been exactly eight days since he’d landed in the middle of the team’s regular season play. The Bruisers were finishing up a Februaryslate of twelve games, while March promised an astonishing sixteen matchups. Dropped feetfirst into this brutal schedule, he was supposed to get to know his teammates, contribute to their scoring power, move from a thousand miles away,anddevelop as a player.
