Chapter Two
“Hey man, you coming out tonight?”
As I pulled off my pads and stripped out of my sweaty clothes, I shook my head.
“Nah,” I replied with a shrug. “Boss wants to talk to me.”
“What have you done now?” Derrick rolled his eyes teasingly at me and closed his locker, leaning up against the cold metal and observing me with amusement.
“Nothing!” I protested.
“That you remember,” he flashed me a smile, and went to grab his stuff. “I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah,” I waved him off. “Catch you then.”
I slammed my locker door shut and stared at my distorted reflection in the metal in front of me. I flashed myself a smile, trying to psych myself up- boss wouldn’t want anything serious with me. I was killing it in training, and I’d scored four times in our last couple of matches.
I wondered if this had anything to do with the guy in the stands I hadn’t recognized- he’d sat in at training today, and seemed to be paying plenty of attention to me. I didn’t think much of it at the time, too focused on the game at hand, but now I thought about it, it was kind of out of character for Boss to let anyone else see our training methods. It must have been something big.
I made my way through to his office, pausing for a moment when I found myself face-to-face with the plaque on his door- Johnson Mapplethorpe, Coach. We always joked amongst ourselves that he had two last names for a name, and I smirked slightly at the memory- I wiped t hurriedly from my face. Last thing I wanted was to be caught out grinning like an idiot at some joke at his expense. He wouldn’t take kindly to that.
I pushed open the door, and Johnson looked up- his glasses were pushed to the top of his head, and he quickly whipped them off. He never liked to be seen with his glasses on.
“Sam, come in,” he nodded to the seat opposite him. “Take a seat.”
I did as I was told, glancing down at the paperwork on his desk- it was covered up by an enormous unfolded newspaper, something called the Herald. He had it open to the sports pages, with a column circled in blue pen. I looked back up at him and managed a smile.
“What’s up?” I asked, hoping that I was going to like whatever answer he gave me.
“Sam,” he steepled his fingers and looked over the top. “I’m not going to beat around the bush here. An offer has come in.”
“Huh?” I wrinkled my nose. We were barely out of the local leagues. Surely, no-one was paying that much attention to us?
“A scout from the Philadelphia Soars was in the stadium today,” he continued matter-of-factly. “He liked what he saw, and they’d like to make an offer for you.”
“What the fuck?” My eyes widened. The Soars? They’d been around for decades, one of the best teams in the country. I had to be getting screwed with. Johnson cocked an eyebrow at my language, and I lowered my eyes apologetically.
“You don’t have to go,” his voice was a little softer, hopeful, as though he didn’t want me to leave. “But they’ll need a decision by the end of the month.”
“This month?” I exclaimed, parroting every word that came out of his mouth in my surprise. He nodded.
“That’s right,” he affirmed. “If you go…they’re offering quite a price for you, Sam. It would be a big boost to the team’s finances if you went…”
My jaw hung open, and he quickly dismissed that line of reasoning.
“But it’s up to you, Sam,” he promised, reverting to the Dad-like kindness and sympathy that he could occasionally display for his platers.
“Is that it?” I asked. I needed to get out- felt as though the walls of this office were closing in on me and I might be trapped forever unless I got out now.
“That’s it,” he nodded, and I got to my feet.
“Sam?”
I turned to look at him, my fingers already wrapped around the door handle.
“Take your time with this.”
I nodded sharply but didn’t answer, opening the door and heading out into the corridor. I could hear the squeaking of the shoes of the kids who came in to practice after we did. I headed to my locker to grab my stuff, and then out to my car. I sat there for a few minutes, my brain spinning. How had this happened?
I looked over to the doors of the stadium and thought back to the first time I’d walked through them. It had been almost ten years ago, when I was in middle school, that I first picked up a hockey stick-and I loved it at once. I got picked up for the high school team, and, when I left, I declined college and went instead to join the Kingstown Crows. Back then, we were a tiny team- hardly even notable on a local level, known by practically no-one. We barely even existed- I had always hoped to move up from them one day, as did everyone who had started out there. And then, something strange happened- we started to win.
It started with just a few games here and there, enough to land us in the upper half of our state-wide league for the first time in a few years. Though I wanted us to go further, I put it down to luck, used my bonus to move into my own place and go out for way too many nights of the town. The next year, we ended up at the top of the state league, getting promoted to a tri-state table that we hadn’t seen the likes of in more than two decades. And now, we were slowly crawling our way up that- where other teams seemed hung up on what they might lose, we were focused on what we could gain, and it was thrillingly exciting to watch our stock slowly increase as we put away goal after goal, to see our stadium begin to fill out as coming to watch us play on a Saturday night became a legitimate pastime for the people of Kingstown. We turned from town-wide punchlines into something people could be proud of- and I wasn’t ready to leave that behind.
The thought of going had long since drifted from my mind after we started doing well. This was the town I grew up in, the place my family lived, my home. I didn’t want to go. But could I, in good faith, turn down a role at a place like the Soars? It was so far away. My chest felt hollow at the thought of the distance between me and here if I went. I started the car, and pulled out of the parking lot- instead of heading down to the bar to join the guys, I found myself driving across town to my Mom’s place. And I wasn’t even sure why.