Page 13 of Player Misconduct
Theo takes over the checklist. I answer like a good boy. Kendall watches my eyes, then my hands, then my eyes again, as if my pupils are trying to tell secrets. I want to tell her a thousand things. About the phone and the forest app and how she sleeps when she finally lets herself, about how I will sit on any plane on earth if it means she won’t be afraid for two hours, but she is my doctor right now and I am her problem and the ice is still out there eating minutes. She still has a job to do.
“Stay with him,” she tells Theo, and then to me, “Don’t move unless you need to puke, in which case, do warn Theo first so we can jump out of the way.” The last part she’s teasing, Theo’s already got a puke bag ready just in case.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She hesitates at the doorway, half a breath and no more, then she’s gone in a gust of cold air and a flash of teal and back team colors, back into the chaos we came from. I let my head thump back against the cinderblock wall and listen to the game as if it will tell me a story about myself I couldn’t hear on the ice.
The story it tells is short and unfriendly.
We lose… by one.
I don’t see the goal. I hear the horn and the building’s joy and our bench’s stunned quiet and I hate everything for a second: my timing, my skull, my dumb beautiful sport.
Theo squeezes my shoulder. “We’ll get them at home,” he says, and I believe him because the alternative is unthinkable.
I close my eyes and see the light haloing Kendall’s hair again, the moment I woke up to her voice and the way she made the world small in the way that doesn’t hurt. I will not say angel. I will not.
But if I did, no one would hear it here.
The locker room smells like loss.
Not the bitter kind just yet—it’s the dull version, wet gear and frustration under the hum of the vents. Every player moves slower than he means to. Equipment bags hit the floor with the quiet thud of a collective hangover.
I’m half dressed, still in compression pants and one sleeve of my undershirt when Kendall reappears. She’s traded her sideline jacket for the navy team hoodie, which means she’s ready to get to work, hair twisted into a knot that’s trying to escape. Her expression is pure calm—the kind you only get when you’re barely holding your own adrenaline together.
“Light sensitivity?” she asks.
“Yeah.” I say.
“Headache?”
“Only when I think about the scoreboard.”
That earns me a look that isn’t a smile but isn’t not one either. She steps closer, shining her little penlight, checking my pupils. I can smell the faint coffee on her breath from between periods. The sound of the team behind us fades to a low static.
“Are you still dizzy?” she asks.
“Only when you’re this close.”
She exhales through her nose, and then gives me a side-eye with a head tilt. “Real answers would be more helpful right now, considering your condition.”
“Which is technically concussed,” I say. “It explains a lot.”
Her hand hovers near my jaw, the light moving between my eyes. “You scared us for a minute.”
“I scared me too,” I admit. “Did Wolf go nuclear?”
She purses her lips like, as a doctor, she can’t condone his behavior, but asourteam doctor she has a biased opinion that she won’t be sharing with me. “He did his job,” she says, which means someone on Colorado’s team is probably icing bruises in interesting places.
Theo calls from behind her, “He’s cleared to fly, Doc, but he’s not playing until the neurologist signs off.”
“I heard,” I say.
Kendall answers without turning. “He knows.”
The way she says it—gentle but final—hits lower than any hit I took tonight. She finishes the last of her chart notes and looks at me again. “We’ll re-evaluate tomorrow after the neurologist has a look at you.” She holds up a hand between us. “Don’t argue. I already know you want to.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I object.
