Top Ten(21)

Mahopac’s team was solid, and Colson had practiced hard for this game, running drill after drill at practice all week until Ryan’s legs ached and his hands cramped up inside his gloves. Still, he found he didn’t much mind. He’d been skating for as long as he could walk, and he loved hockey: the rush of speed as he whizzed across the rink, the solid thwack of the puck against his stick on a particularly nice pass. The feeling of being a part of a team, useful for something besides a dumb good time.

By the middle of the second period, though, his dad still hadn’t showed. Ryan tried to pay attention to the game, not to scan the rickety bleachers at the ice center for his familiar jacket and cap. He wasn’t surprised, exactly—he knew I’ll be there meant more like I might be as far as his dad was concerned. Still, it was hard not to feel a little bummed.

He wasn’t trying to think about his dad—he wasn’t trying to think about anything except his hustle, actually—but he must have been, and it must have been enough to break his focus, because just then one of Mahopac’s defensemen, a senior who’d been crawling up Ryan’s ass all game long, glided up on his left to try and block his pass, his stick somehow getting caught in the path of Ryan’s skate. Ryan corrected, then corrected again, and in the moment before his head slammed into the ice, there was a fraction of a second in which he thought, Shit.

He came to a moment later, flat on his back on the ice and feeling like a bunch of cartoon birds were fluttering around his skull. Coach Harkin was already skating out toward him, a bunch of his teammates clustering around. “There he is,” Harkin said as Ryan got to his feet on the ice. “You all right, McCullough?”

“Um,” Ryan said, blinking. “Yeah, no, I’m good.”

“You get knocked out, there? You wanna sit for a bit?”

“No, no,” Ryan lied. He shook his head, trying not to wobble. “I’m fine.”

The rest of the game passed by in a smudgy blur, Ryan’s head and neck aching and his reflexes the slightest bit slow. By the time the thing was over, he mostly just wanted to lie down. When he came out of the locker room, though, he found his dad standing in the parking lot next to a beat-up station wagon he’d never seen before, smoking a cigarette. “Hey!” Ryan said, grinning dumbly, his mood swinging sharply upward. “Did you see the game?”

Ryan’s dad shook his head. “Hit traffic,” he explained. “I’m sorry, kiddo. Come on, though.” He swung an arm around Ryan’s shoulders, the air cool and damp with spring rain. “I’ll take you to dinner.”

They went to a Chinese restaurant his dad liked in a strip mall near the highway entrance, greasy plates of shrimp lo mein and sesame chicken and beef in a thick brown garlic sauce. “I’m okay,” Ryan said when his dad tried to sneak him a sip of beer across the table. He’d felt a little out of it since he’d hit the ice earlier, and he still needed to go to this party tonight. He would have bailed, probably—damn, his head really hurt—but when he’d gotten back to the locker room after the game he’d had a weird text from Gabby wanting him to take her out tonight. He had no idea what that was about—Gabby had never asked to go to a party in her entire life—but whatever it was, he didn’t want to disappoint her.

“You okay over there?” his dad asked now, squinting at him across the table. “You look like you just saw your girlfriend in Playboy.”

Ryan didn’t even really understand what that meant, exactly, besides the fact that he didn’t seem happy. He shook his head. “No, I’m good,” he said. “I got hit earlier is all. My brain’s a little fuzzy.”

His dad rolled his eyes. “Poor baby,” he said, but he was smiling with something that looked like pride; Ryan felt himself flush a little, pleased. “I ever tell you about the time I knocked out three teeth in a fight against the Jackals in the quarterfinals?”

His dad had told him, as a matter of fact; he’d played in the minor leagues back in the ’90s but talked about it as vividly as if it had happened last week, getting together with his old buddies every year to rewatch grainy footage of their playoff games on somebody’s big-screen TV. Normally Ryan loved his stories—the day he’d led his team back from a 4–nothing deficit in the last period or the time they’d snuck live chickens into the other team’s hotel room—but tonight he was having a hard time paying attention. “This was kind of different from that, I think.”

Ryan’s dad frowned. “Well, don’t be whining about it too much,” he said. “You don’t want your coach to be benching you because he thinks you can’t handle getting knocked around a little. Here, how many fingers am I holding up?”