Page 12 of Player Misconduct
“Hi, Mäkelin,” she says, low, steady, not soft. The Doctor voice she uses with all the players when she’s in doctor mode. Not a great sign for me. There’s a hand on the back of my helmet, anchoring, and another near my jaw. “Don’t move yet. Eyes on me.”
Her eyes are very green. It’s important information and not important at all. I swear there’s a sprinkle of hazel in them too. I try to focus harder on them but my eyes feel blurry and heavy.
“What period is it?” she asks.
I blink. I catch sight of Theo kneeling at my hip, the world narrowing to our circle and the scrape marks around us. “Third,” I say. It feels true. I hope it’s true.
“Score?”
The drum in my ear is my pulse.. “One-one?” I offer, and the moment it leaves, I know I’m wrong.
“Okay,” she says, in the same even tone. No judgment. She moves a penlight, and it becomes a comet with a tail. “Follow my finger.” The light shifts left and I try to make my eyes do the thing but they lag like a streaming game on hotel Wi-Fi.
I try to grin because that’s what I do when anything hurts. It makes my cheek feel like glass.
Slade is a looming shape at the boards, murderously quiet, and then I see Scottie skate up next to him. I can’t see Wolf and that either means he is hunting someone or serving penance. I want to tell everyone it’s fine. I want to sit up and demonstrate fine. My body sends a memo that says nope.
“Don’t try to move,” Kendall says before I even twitch. Her hand presses briefly, a reminder, not restraint. “You’re doing well. What’s your full name?”
“Aleksi Henrik Mäkelin,” I say, and the syllables click in that familiar path my tongue learned at six.
“Team?”
“Hawkeyes,” I say, like she doesn’t know.
“Give me a fun fact, Mäk,” she says using the nickname the team calls me.
“Did you know that Saturn is big enough to hold the earth one-thousand times?”
She leans into my field of vision, blocking the neon cyclone, and for a second, she is the whole world. It's not the halo light, it’s her. She smells like cold and peppermint and that stupid orange sanitizer. I could be twelve and have a scraped knee. I could be thirty-four and bleeding. Either way I’d listen.
“Any neck pain?” she asks.
“No.” It’s honest. My neck is a rubber band, but it isn’t breaking.
“Headache?”
“Little,” I admit, and that earns a tiny nod like I passed a test by not lying.
“Good. You’re coming off,” she says, already signaling. Somewhere in my line of sight, the stretcher option is a question mark, but she shakes her head at Theo—no board, not needed. “Scottie and Slade,” she calls without looking, and there they are, two walls with legs. “We’re going slow. Aleksi, we’re going to roll to your side and up. On my count. One—two—three.”
They could lift a truck. They lift me like I am a net full of fish I forgot I was carrying. The world tilts and then steadies. My skates find ice in a way I don’t trust. Kendall’s hand is on my elbow, not for show. I wish I was faking this for drama, but I’m not.
We move toward the gate. People pound the glass—three angry thumps, three sympathetic ones, twenty idiots with beers sloshing. The PA announcer is saying something that floats above us like a bad cloud. The bench parts, coaches lean, I swallow. It doesn’t change the taste of metal in my mouth.
In the tunnel, the sound turns to the squeak of my blades on rubber matting and the echo of the crowd getting further away. The adrenaline finally gives up a little. My legs realize they are attached to my body. Kendall’s voice shifts gear to her concussion checklist. It’s now all about lights, nausea, dizziness, any ringing?—”yes”. She and Theo slot me onto the little bench in the quiet room like they’ve done it a hundred times… and they have. She palms the back of my head again when she checks my helmet ridge for blood. I close my eyes because it makes the world less like a tilt-a-whirl and more like a dark room where someone left the door open.
“You got clipped high,” she says, narrating so I stay with her. “We’re going to run through orientation and symptoms and then you’re staying with Theo. No arguments.”
“Wasn’t planning to,” I say, which is a lie I used to tell. But I don’t lie to her. “What’s the score?” I ask, like I didn’t just fail that test.
“Two–one, them,” she says. “Eight minutes. Your line’s eating up minutes and not letting anything pretty through.”
“Sounds right.” My tongue feels thick. “I’m fine,” I add, because some habits die very, very last.
She arches a brow the way she did when I was bleeding last night and flirting like a moron. “You’re concussed,” she says. No apology. No sugar coating it. A diagnosis and a wall to lean on at the same time.
I think I smile but I only know that because it hurts.
