Archive of Our Own

PART ONE: INITIATION

Yuna Hollander taught her son three things before he was old enough to tie his own skates.

One: finish what you start. Two: never let them see you bleed. Three: the room is always watching, even when it looks like it isn't.

She didn't call them lessons. She just lived them, so Shane absorbed them. He grew up watching his mother walk into rooms. Rink board meetings. Parent-teacher nights. The arena at five-forty in the morning when the ice was still dark and nobody'd scraped it and the Zamboni fumes hung in the cold air like incense. He didn't study what she did—he studied how she moved through a doorway. She never paused at the threshold the way some people do, checking if they've been invited. She sat at the head of the table. When men talked over her—and they did, constantly, from the first minor hockey board meeting she walked into with a spreadsheet that made everyone else's preparation look like napkin doodles—she let them run out of air.

Output before input, she told him. Mind to muscle. You see the play two seconds before it happens or you don't see it at all.

He was six. She was talking about hockey. She was talking about everything.

His father, David Hollander, had played at McGill. Decent defenseman, not exceptional, and he'd made his peace with that distinction a long time before Shane came along. He was the one who first put Shane on skates at three, who drove him to five-thirty morning practices while it was still dark and Yuna was already on her first work call of the day. He taught Shane edges and footwork and the mechanical basics when Shane was small enough that the equipment drowned him, and when it became clear by the time Shane was six that Shane had outgrown what David could give, David simply stepped back. He didn't make it a thing and he didn't cling to it. He just moved into the stands with this enormous, unguarded pride that Shane still, years later, cannot look at directly.

David was warm and soft and genuinely good—as baseline rather than performance, as the thing they started from. Shane loved him completely. He also learned, slowly, not to be him.

Nobody told him to. It happened by watching what happened to boys around him who weren't being careful enough, what was rewarded. By the time Shane was nine he realized his father's softness was safe because it existed inside a structure Yuna built and maintained. David could be what he was because she was what she was. And if there was a choice, well.

Shane grew up in Manotick, in one of those quiet Ottawa satellite towns where every driveway seemed to have a hockey net tipped onto its side and every winter someone flooded a backyard rink. The boys moved through the neighborhood in packs. In the summers they played road hockey until the sun went down and tennis ball baseball until someone cracked a siding panel hard enough to get yelled at. In the winters they migrated to whichever outdoor rink had the best ice that week, faces pink with cold, skates slung over their shoulders, gloves drying on heating vents overnight so they could do it all again the next day.

Hockey consumed Shane earlier than it consumed the others. The other boys still treated it like a game sometimes, interchangeable with soccer or baseball or whatever season they happened to be in. Shane treated it like a problem to solve. He shot pucks against the garage until his wrists ached. Timed himself doing edgework in the driveway. Rewatched games on his father's laptop late enough that his mother started taking the charger from his room before bed. Adults found this charming when he was small, like it was unusual for a child to care that much about anything.

The problem with being really good at hockey when you're a child is that other people hate you for it before you understand that you've done anything wrong.

Shane started in Manotick minor hockey, where nothing really existed outside of Manotick minor hockey. There was no AAA track in the way people later talked about it, no layered system of private skills coaches and development programs and off-ice regimens. There was just the rink, the same kids every winter, the same parents in the same bleachers, and a general assumption that this was what hockey was supposed to be.

You played with whoever was in your age group. You didn’t move for better competition because “better competition” wasn’t a concept anyone used. You just played more hockey if you were good at it.

The coaching was whatever adult had volunteered that year. They did their best, which meant drills that mostly involved skating in circles until your edges stopped feeling optional and your lungs stopped cooperating. If you wanted to get stronger, you showed up early and carried your own bag. If you wanted to get better, you shot pucks in your driveway until the garage door started to feel like a second net.

Shane was good almost immediately.

He didn't really understand it as exceptional at first, just that the puck went in more often for him than it didn’t, and coaches started saying his name more than other kids’ names. It happened repeatedly enough that it just became normal. By the time he was seven, he was scoring enough that no one really bothered counting cleanly anymore. It was just “a lot.” Four, five goals in a game weren’t unusual in certain stretches. Eight or nine in a weekend happened often enough that nobody noticed until they looked at the scoresheet afterward.

In one season he scored something like 180 goals across league play and tournaments combined. Nobody was counting carefully enough to be sure. The number passed from parent to parent, coach to coach, until it settled into fact.

He was not embarrassed by it the way some kids eventually learn to be. That kind of self-consciousness hadn’t arrived yet. He was neutral about his own production, always aware it could be better, always already moving toward whatever the correction was.

Practice harder. Skate faster. Fix the mistake and then fix the next one before anyone else noticed it existed. Adults glaring at a nine-year-old for scoring goals was harder to make sense of.

Some coaches loved him immediately, already imagining newspaper articles and draft years and what they'd tell people later about having seen it first. But other adults watched him with a different expression entirely, one tight around the mouth and calculating. As if every goal he scored rearranged something unpleasant in their own lives.

He would come off the ice flushed and exhilarated after scoring four or five goals and walk directly into conversations that stopped when he approached. Parents in the lobby lowering their voices half a second too late. Someone muttering that one kid shouldn't be allowed to dominate a division like that. Someone else saying his parents were pushing him too hard, while glancing toward a son who spent practices chasing snowbanks instead of pucks.

Shane started leaving arenas with his eyes fixed downward. Helmet dangling from one hand, skate guards clicking against the concrete. If he didn't look directly at adults, they were less likely to say anything to him.

His mother noticed this long before his father did—and then did something about it. Small things first: volunteering, organizing schedules, quietly correcting people who spoke about children as though they were investment portfolios. Then one season she was everywhere: board meetings, fundraising discussions, registration disputes, tournament planning. The rooms where decisions gathered weight, she was already in them when the decisions arrived.

Shane observed all of this with the unnerving attentiveness of a serious child. He rarely asked questions. He noticed which referees called games tighter when he played. Which coaches complained about him before warmups had even finished, planting ideas in officials' heads before the puck dropped. Which parents encouraged their sons to finish checks a little harder against him than against the other kids.

Once, during a tournament game, a grown man behind the glass spent an entire shift shouting that somebody should "teach him a lesson." Shane was nine. He remembered glancing toward the stands afterward, trying to understand how an adult could look so furious at a child for scoring a goal in a hockey game.

On the drive home, he asked his father why people got so angry.

His father paused for long enough that Shane knew the answer before it came.

"People take hockey personally," David said finally.

Which was true, but not the whole answer, in Shane's opinion.

There was one tournament, U11, where a parent from the other team said something to his mother in the parking lot after Shane had scored six goals. His mother's face didn't change. She said something back in a voice Shane couldn't hear from where he was standing. The man walked away. She never told Shane what either of them had said, and he never asked, and they drove home without talking.

By ten, both his parents understood they were dealing with something beyond recreational hockey.

His mother started researching in the systematic way she researched everything—the pipeline, the costs, the return on investment, who to call and in what order. His father quietly sold his first car. There were conversations Shane was not supposed to hear, sitting at the top of the stairs in his socks, about money and what level of commitment made sense for a kid who might be good at Manotick hockey versus a kid who was going to the NHL. Shane sat there listening and understood two things: his parents were betting everything on him.

He went downstairs the next morning, sat at the kitchen table, and told them: I'm going to play in the NHL.

His mother looked at him over her coffee for a long moment. She did not smile or comfort him or say of course you will, honey. She looked at him with her inventory look, checking everything against her internal reference. Then eat your breakfast, she said. You've got power skating at six-thirty.

The money shaped the early years in ways Shane understood before he had words for it. He knew his maternal grandparents were in Japan and distant in every sense. He knew David's family had money and that David had chosen Yuna at twenty-three and broke, and that this had cost him something significant with his parents, though nobody said what directly. He knew his father had sold a car.

So they bootstrapped it. Yuna negotiated rates with skills coaches, researched every grant and scholarship program, found the edge cases and exceptions in minor hockey funding structures that other parents didn't know to look for. David drove Shane to every practice, every early morning session, every tournament, and never said a word about the car or the gas or the Saturdays he wasn't getting back.

They had help eventually—a modest inheritance from David's aunt when Shane was twelve, which went directly into hockey and nothing else—but the early years were survived through Yuna's organizational capability and David's willingness to do whatever was asked of him without asking why.

Shane made himself useful by being excellent and then more excellent. Morning power skating four days a week. Individual skills coaching on weekends. Spring hockey in the gap. He had an extra shooting pad in the basement where he worked on release and accuracy alone for an hour every night after homework. He curved his sticks over the kitchen stove when Yuna wasn't home, which David pretended not to notice. He watched NHL tape with his father until David fell asleep on the couch, and then watched more tape alone on his laptop, pausing and rewinding and sometimes stopping on a single frame to understand what decision was being made and why.

He was not a normal child, but he never found it distressing. Normal children were not going to the NHL.

Things changed for Shane when he was eleven.

By then, Manotick minor hockey had become its own small world. The same families ran registration every year. The same fathers coached. The same people sat on committees and decided tournaments and ice time and who got the benefit of the doubt when there was a disagreement. Everyone knew everyone. Everyone had known everyone for years.

The Delaneys were part of it. Registration nights, disciplinary meetings, tournament planning—the small rooms where how things worked got decided without anyone ever writing it down. They rarely argued. They didn't need to. Most outcomes in that system didn't come from argument anyway.

It was never one thing. A joke that got a little quieter when he walked up. A coach praising another kid for a play Shane had made twice already. Adults discussing him as though he wasn't standing three feet away. Nothing anyone would admit afterward. When he scored too much, someone would say he should be playing somewhere else. When he played physically, a coach would start watching him a little too closely. When he kept to himself, adults supplied explanations on his behalf. He was the only Asian kid on the ice. This was a fact nobody mentioned and everybody knew.

He was also, undeniably, the best player anyone in Manotick had seen at his age.

Then his mother asked for him to be moved up an age group. It was framed as procedural. Approved without visible resistance.

After that, nothing changed in any official sense. Hooks he hadn't been called for before started sending him to the box. Scrums he barely participated in somehow ended with his number in the referee's notebook. The same collisions that drew shrugs one month drew conversations the next. Not every time. Just often enough to notice. The Delaneys' sons started officiating some of his home games.

Nobody remarked on it. Nobody had to.

But before that—before any of it had weight, before anything had consequence—there was only hockey.

Road trips where the back seats of cars turned into half-asleep ecosystems of snack wrappers and trading cards and arguments that ended as quickly as they started. Winter afternoons when the whole neighborhood flooded a rink and nobody bothered distinguishing teams, just kids moving until they were tired. Driveway games until the streetlights came on, sticks cracked and taped and cracked again. The feeling of skating until your legs didn't belong to you anymore and then still wanting to go back out.

Shane didn't register the change when it happened. If something went against him, he kept playing. If a call didn't make sense, he stopped asking why. If a shift felt heavier than it should, he filed it away and kept moving. He scored. He went to the box when he was sent. He came back out and scored again.

He watched his mother navigate the same rooms—the board meetings, the parent politics, how certain conversations stopped when she walked in—and took notes he didn't write down. Voice. Hands. Posture. Eyes—watching how they shifted when adults stopped being certain of themselves. He started checking these things in the bathroom mirror before school, before games, before any conversation that mattered. Shane liked to think of it as preparation. His mother would have understood completely. She would have called it smart. But she never saw him do it; he made sure of that.

Years later in the NHL, long past Pees Wees and the small gravity of Manotick, Shane would sometimes think about this—that he had learned to be a man from his mother instead of his father—and wonder if that was why he had become the sort of person he was. But the thought always dissolved almost immediately. Too large. Too dangerous for a Friday night with practice again in the morning.

Besides, by then there were whole arenas full of people willing to tell him exactly what kind of man he was.

The OHL draft was in Belleville when Shane was fourteen. Most players went at sixteen, but he had been tracked for two years and the scouts were not waiting. Yuna drove him down in the morning. She'd picked his suit—charcoal grey, fits correctly, says serious young man making a serious investment in his future—and they drove and didn't talk much because neither of them talked much when something important was happening.

He went third overall. The first round first overall pick was sitting two rows in front of him when his name was called, and Shane looked at the back of that kid's head for a long moment, finally with clarity: that's the gap. That's what I gotta close. He walked up to shake hands and get his picture taken in a jersey that swam on his fourteen-year-old frame.

In the end, neither of the players picked ahead of him finished with more career OHL points than Shane did, but who was counting, right?

He got placed with billets in Kingston full-time, when he was old enough to play without exceptions. He signed a contract that Yuna's agent had already reviewed and marked up and negotiated several additional clauses into. He called his father from the arena parking lot, still in his gear, bag on the ground, and explained that he'd made the team and wasn't coming home again and school started in two days and he needed more than three days of underwear.

His father was silent on the phone for a moment.

“Okay,” David said. “Okay, yeah. We'll get everything to you.”

His voice sounded off in a way Shane didn’t recognize at first. Shane looked at the arena.

“Dad, I made it,” he said.

“I know you did, kiddo. I know.”

Two days later, everything arrived in two sealed boxes marked for expedited shipping. His things were inside them, folded too neatly, rolled with a kind of care that felt slightly out of proportion to the urgency of the move. There was a note taped to the top in David’s handwriting. A smiley face. A small doodle of Shane in skates, stick too big for him, freckles dotted in uneven constellations, hair sticking up like it refused to lie flat.

Shane stood there for a moment before he opened anything.

It felt like the first time something had been decided for him without him being in the room where it happened. It would not be the last.

PART TWO: KINGSTON

Shane was sixteen and living with strangers in Kingston and it was fine. The billet family was good at what they did—professional warmth, practiced routine, a room that was decent and a refrigerator he had access to and a family that understood the contours of a junior hockey player's schedule. It was fine. It was not home. The quiet of his own room in Ottawa, the sound of his parents' house settling at night, the smell of his mother's coffee in the morning—none of this existed in Kingston. He lay awake the first week listening to someone else's house breathe and adjusting to it.

The Broussards had a dog that slept at the top of the stairs. Shane had to step over it every morning at five-fifteen on the way to the bathroom, and every morning it opened one eye at him with the expression of an animal that has seen a lot of temporary boys and has no strong feelings either way. There was a family photo on the wall of the upstairs hallway: Manon and her husband and two daughters he never saw because they were at university, everyone in matching Christmas sweaters, grinning at the camera. He walked past it twice a day for eight months. He learned their names eventually. He never felt like he was supposed to be in it.

The first night in Kingston he lay in the Broussards' spare room and ran the inventory for the first time in a new space.

Voice: he'd sounded too eager at dinner. Fixed it by the end of the meal, pulled the register down, made it drier. Hands: fine. Posture: fine. Eyes: he'd looked at Manon Broussard's husband too directly when the man had made a joke Shane didn't find funny, and the directness had read as judgement. He'd caught it and smiled two beats late. It would not happen again.

Shane did this in the dark with the strange house breathing around him—someone's water heater cycling, the dog repositioning at the top of the stairs, a car going past too slowly in that way of residential streets where traffic was an event. He was two hundred kilometers from the sound of his father's TV and his mother's early-morning phone calls and the silence in his own room, and none of that was the point, which was that he was here, which meant he had to be good enough to stay here. He adjusted easily. He put it in the category of things that had been difficult and were now done and moved on.

Coach Darrell Morrow ran practice. Everyone called him Switch, for reasons that predated anyone on the current roster and that Morrow declined to explain. He was compact, always moving,  with the language of someone done apologizing for it. He yelled a lot. He was good at hockey. He coached everyone identically hard, which Shane found clarifying—nobody was getting a free pass and nobody was being made an example of for being too good, and these were the two things that had caused most of the friction in Shane's childhood hockey life. Switch just wanted excellence, and made his disappointment public when it wasn’t delivered.

Unlike Manotick, there were team nutritionists, video staff, systems meetings that ran after practice. There was a structure that felt like it had weight behind it.

Switch sometimes called players “Sally” if they lingered too long getting changed, or if they missed a drill rep by half a step. He said it quickly, without emphasis, like it belonged to the air in the room rather than the person hearing it. Shane understood him as a good coach who produces results. Switch wanted him better. Switch saw him. Switch was the first person in years who didn’t treat his success like something that required explanation.

So Shane did what he had always done. He worked. And he was, in the simplest available sense, lucky to be there.

Before every game, without fail, Switch planted himself in the middle of the dressing room and delivered the same speech like liturgy. Small ice decides hockey games, boys. Nobody remembers the pretty rushes. Games get won in ugly little pockets of space. Along the boards. In corners. Half a second faster than the other guy willing to be faster. That's where people decide what they are. He said it with absolute conviction, as though he'd personally watched civilizations rise and collapse over missed puck retrievals. Somewhere in the middle he'd usually bring up a player from years ago who had “gone soft in a corner battle” during a playoff run and supposedly cost the team everything. He never said what happened to the player.

Shane added small ice alongside his mother's output before input, mind to muscle.

The older players were a different calculation. The team had guys as old as twenty-one, which meant Shane, at barely sixteen, was sometimes looking across the dressing room at a man with a car payment and a girlfriend who might actually be pregnant. This range—sixteen to twenty-one—contained within it more variation in actual experience than any adult range Shane had ever been around. Some of them were excellent. Some of them were here because the OHL was as far as it was going to get and they knew it and were extracting whatever they could before it ended. The twenty-one-year-olds were not angry exactly, but resigned, an economy of energy that comes from knowing the ceiling. Shane had no ceiling.

The hierarchy operated through rituals, mostly unspoken. Rookies sat at the front of the bus. Rookies got their meals last on road trips, which Shane found counterproductive but accepted as ritual and said nothing about. Rookies carried the equipment trunk and the skate sharpener and the water cases to and from the arena on every road trip, which was more humbling in February cold than in October. You carried the bags, because the alternative was being the rookie who complained about them, and that was worse.

There was also the ritual of public ridicule, which every team in Juniors seemed to independently invent and which always operated according to roughly the same principles. Once a week, usually on the bus or after practice, somebody got put on trial for a social offense against the room. The crimes were rarely serious and always revealing: wearing too much cologne, texting a girl back too quickly, getting caught carrying shopping bags while your girlfriend walked empty-handed beside you through the Rideau Centre. Anything that suggested excessive self-consciousness or romantic sincerity or insufficient masculine control became available for communal processing.

The details changed team to team, but the structure never did. Someone played prosecutor. Someone else acted scandalized. The accused defended himself while everybody shouted over him and laughed too hard. Punishments were performative and harmless—buying coffees for a week with an already meager wage, taping a ridiculous poster to your stall, carrying equipment you didn't want to carry.

Twenty teenage boys trapped together for most of the year required systems for regulating intimacy and aggression before either one got unmanageable. Mockery worked because it converted vulnerability into theater before vulnerability could become genuinely dangerous. The room could tolerate almost anything as long, but only as long as it transformed quickly enough into a joke.

Shane participated when expected. Laughed at the right moments. Occasionally contributed something sharp enough to keep suspicion from drifting toward him instead. He became very good at identifying, within seconds, what version of masculinity the room was rewarding and mirroring it.

Shane did not feel false when he performed these things. He simply experienced personality like equipment.

Instead he felt, mostly, the ongoing background process of the inventory. Voice. Hands. Posture. Eyes. He ran it in the locker room, on the bus, at team meals, at the parties he attended because not showing up to certain parties was its own kind of visible. He ran it everywhere he went. And it eventually it had been running for so long it felt like a normal way to be.

Preseason came and Shane learned quickly that skill wasn’t the only thing that mattered here.

There was a walk-on at camp, a guy named Carter Briggs, eighteen years old and built like something compacted under pressure—not tall, but dense, all weight and no wasted space. He was apparently planning to compensate for whatever was missing through sheer willingness to fight anyone in the building. Shane watched him go four, five times in a single week of camp. It wasn't out of anger, or because anything had even happened, but because making the roster was the only thing he wanted and fighting was the clearest argument he had for why they should keep him. It was hard not to respect it, even when it made Shane uncomfortable.

The Peterborough team had a guy doing the same thing.

Shane caught a couple of their exhibition tilts and watched these two players—both walk-ons, both fighting for the same narrow margin between staying and going home—go at each other with everything they had. Two guys with nothing to lose and one thing to gain. Like a job interview conducted at full volume. Both of them made their teams.

Shane skated back to the bench after one of those games. Good wasn't the same as safe. Good had to be demonstrated, repeatedly, on someone else's timeline.

Shane didn’t have a problem with fighting. Hockey was physical and emotional and when you played the same division teams over and over you built up real animosity, genuine, earned dislike, and sometimes that came out the way it came out. There were moments in games when something happened and the only proportionate response was to drop the gloves, and Shane could respect that version of it. It served a function. It kept a certain kind of player honest, the ones who would otherwise take liberties without consequence.

He couldn't, however, believe in the staged version, the assignment fights. The guys who had to check the game notes when they arrived at the rink just to find out who they were supposed to fight that night—sitting in the hotel room the night before, knowing it was coming, having to manufacture the aggression from scratch because there was nothing real underneath it to draw from. He'd heard older players talk about it. The anxiety that lived in that role, that had nothing to do with hockey. And that was disgusting, to Shane.

Shane already knew he wasn't going to be an enforcer. He just didn't know yet what that would cost him.

Shane didn't make the opening night roster.

He'd known it was possible, probable even. The coaches had been clear that young guys would rotate in and out, but knowing didn't fully prepare him for the deflation of watching the lineup get posted and finding his name in the scratch column, no matter how good he was. He called his mom that night from the billet house kitchen.

"It's normal," Yuna said immediately.

"I know."

"First-year guys sit. You know this."

"I know," he said again.

She told him to stay ready, stay sharp, and not to get weird about it. He said he wouldn't. She believed him because she'd raised him to mean what he said. He hung up and sat in the kitchen by himself for a while.

That same night, in the Broussards' living room, past midnight when everyone else had gone to sleep, Shane found the first Rozanov clip.

He hadn't been looking for it. He'd been watching CHL game tape on his laptop, footage he watched before bed the way some people read, and it appeared in the sidebar—adjacent, unasked for, already there. A forum post. HAS ANYONE SEEN THIS KID. A compilation, someone's father with a decent camera, footage from the Russian MHL system—Krasnaya Armiya, the CSKA Red Army junior team, a player moving through the ice in a way that made Shane sit forward without deciding to.

His name was Ilya Rozanov. Same age as Shane.

Shane watched the compilation once and called it research, because it was research. Rozanov was going to be a rival at some level, certain names converging toward the same space. Watching tape was work.

Rozanov was obviously incredible. Shane could acknowledge that easily.

Except there was something. He couldn't name it cleanly. It wasn’t jealousy. Shane was good, he knew he was good, jealousy implied he was worried. It was more like. Irritation. The way Rozanov looked doing it, that ease, total unconscious confidence, like he'd never had a moment of doubt in his life, like the world had always arranged itself around him. Girls lost their minds over him. Shane had seen the comments, the posts. He's so— whatever. Did you see the way he— whatever. All of it oriented around Rozanov like a kind of gravity.

Shane didn't understand what the girls were getting from it, not really. Rozanov wasn't even interesting. You watched the tape and yes, fine, generational talent, sure. But he didn't hit. He floated. He made these little aesthetic choices with the puck that were more like showing off than playing. It was hockey that made clips, not championships.

Shane told himself this in his billet family's basement watching a Rozanov clip for the fourth time.

He closed the laptop.

Opened it.

Watched the hip position on the puck switch one more time.

He turned off the laptop and went to bed, and if some part of him was storing Rozanov away in a category he hadn't labeled yet, he didn't notice.

Scratched players had their own culture.

It felt like a parallel team inside the real one—same bench, different experience. You left your skates half-loose so your feet didn't go completely numb by the third period. You kept your helmet unbuckled just enough to ease the pressure. Some guys smuggled food.

The guy next to Shane—another rookie, a kid named Poulin who was seventeen and handling the whole thing with suspicious cheerfulness—had invented a scoreboard game where you each picked a digit and tracked the game clock, a dollar a win, running tally in your head to give yourself something to count. Shane got reasonably good at it.

Underneath, you were managing the low-grade anxiety of sitting cold and stiff through sixty minutes and knowing that if the score got out of hand you might get tapped. Lopsided games had their own tradition—find the rookie on the other bench who also hadn't played a shift, send your guy out to fight their guy, call it setting the tone. Two kids who'd been sitting in equipment for two hours, haven't touched the puck once, don't have any heat in their legs or their blood, go out and fight each other for reasons that had nothing to do with the game. Shane sat there and hoped the score stayed close.

There was a guy named Karim Diallo.

Seventeen, winger, from somewhere east of Montreal. Second-year player, which meant he'd been through his version of all of this already and come out the other side with the composure of someone who'd done the math and found it survivable. On the ice he was genuinely fast—burst speed that could tear a gap open in half a second—and smart about when to use it. Off the ice he was funny in an observational way that Shane recognized as a form of intelligence, the kind that sees exactly what's happening and translates it into something survivable.

Karim was Black. Shane was half-Japanese. The rest of the roster was white boys from Ontario and Quebec. That part didn’t need explaining.

Around Karim, things happened that Shane learned not to react to. Kangaroo Court charges that landed on other guys were about ego—visible softness, romantic sincerity, insufficient masculine control. The ones that landed on Karim had a different center of gravity. They were about legitimacy. About whether he'd earned the space he was standing in. One charge in October cited him for celebrating too hard after a goal in practice, which got a big laugh because it sounded almost reasonable, and Shane laughed too, and registered while laughing that it had nothing to do with the goal.

A comment from a veteran the same week, said loud enough to carry across the locker room and quiet enough to require nobody to respond to it directly. Not a slur, exactly—just something shaped so Karim had to take it without responding, and everyone else could stay unbothered.

Shane made the calculation and got the usual result: speaking up created friction, and friction got you managed out. He filed it under structural, ongoing, cannot address without compromising position.

What he and Karim had wasn’t friendship so much as alignment. Two different ways of being outside the room, arriving at the same awareness. They talked about hockey. They talked about Swiss Chalet's inexplicable OHL road trip monopoly. They talked about whatever was on TV, even though Shane didn’t watch much and struggled to keep up. They didn't talk about the other things.

Film sessions were Tuesdays.

Shane ate before film sessions now. He’d learned not to sit through them hungry. Switch ran the tape from the front of the room with a laser pointer and approximately no mercy. The pointer would find the offending player on screen and just—stay there, tracking him up the ice, while Switch asked the question he always asked in the same flat voice he used for everything: What were you thinking.

It wasn't really a question. It was a ritual. The correct response was silence, or something quiet and self-flagellating, and then it moved on. Shane had been the red dot enough times in his first year to understand it. Your mistake always looked worse on tape than it had felt in real time. Slow motion was a form of punishment. You'd be sitting there watching yourself make a read that had felt reasonable in the moment and on screen it looked like you'd done it on purpose, like you’d chosen wrong on purpose. He'd stopped taking it personally. Or he'd gotten better at performing not taking it personally, which was close enough.

Switch did something different to Karim.

Shane noticed it in pieces before he let himself see it as a whole. The pointer lingering. The what were you thinking coming out with a different texture. The way Switch would run the same ten seconds of Karim's shift back two, three times, not to analyze it but to let it sit in the room. There was an audience feel to it. Like the point wasn't instruction. October, a home game, Karim had turned the puck over in the neutral zone on a read that Shane would have made the same way. It happened. Turnovers happened. Switch ran it back twice and then said something under his breath that Shane almost didn't catch.

Except he did catch it.

The word landed in the room and Shane felt it in his chest first, that half-second where the body knows before the mind catches up. He looked at the screen. He looked at his hands. Around him he could feel guys going very still when they need to not have heard something.

Karim didn't move. Shane watched him not move from two seats over—watched him hold his body exactly where it was, expression neutral, eyes forward—and accepted that this was not the first time and that Karim had a system for it.

The session moved on. Switch clicked to the next clip. Someone's defensive zone breakdown, somebody else's name, the pointer tracking across the screen.

Shane said nothing. He let himself be briefly aware of it and then he moved on because the alternative was a door he didn't know how to open—not here, not in front of everyone, not to Switch, who would look at him with that flat expression and find seventeen different ways to make him regret it before the week was out. He told himself this was practical. He almost believed it.

Switch had a thing he did. It wasn't subtle. Nothing about Switch was subtle, which was either his greatest flaw or his primary coaching philosophy depending on the day and your mood and whether it was currently being directed at you. If you did something he didn't like, or said something he didn't like, or existed in a way he didn't like at a moment when he happened to be paying attention, he would stop whatever he was doing and say—flat, sequential, like he was reading from a list—you can fuck off, fuck off, and fuck off. Three times. Always three. The repetition was the point—like once wasn’t enough to finish the sentence.

The first time Shane heard it he'd nearly laughed, which would have been a catastrophic error. He'd bitten down on it and kept his face still.

After a while it became almost comfortable. Predictable, anyway. You could feel it coming—the quality of Switch's attention shifting, the pause before—and there was almost a relief in knowing exactly what form the explosion was going to take. Connolly, if you ever turn it over in your own end like that again, you can fuck off, fuck off, and fuck off.

Okay. Clear. Understood.

It didn't stay on the ice. The lineup thing, for example, was its own separate cruelty. Switch didn't post scratches in advance. You boarded the bus, you rode for however long it took to get there, and when the bus pulled into the visiting arena parking lot and guys started filing down the aisle, Switch would look up from whatever he was holding and deliver the news. You're not dressing tonight.

Shane got it twice that season. Both times he spent the entire bus ride trying to figure out what it was, running the previous game through his head trying to figure out what he'd done, whether it was the third period shift, whether it was something in practice, whether Switch had just decided arbitrarily and there was nothing to decode. You couldn't ask. Asking was its own problem. So you sat with it for three hours and then found out in a parking lot.

The second time it happened to him his mom was already in the arena. She'd driven two hours. He had to find her after the final buzzer, still in his gear, and explain in the concourse that he hadn't played. She nodded in that way she had, not making it worse by making it into something. She didn't coddle him about it, which was for the best, probably, because he didn't want her to. But he'd thought about it on the bus home anyway, the indignity of it, the way Switch had looked at him and said it like it cost nothing.

He thought about Karim, who'd gotten it four times already that season. Who’d done the same bus rides. The same parking lot moments. Tape Tuesdays. Shane didn't know what to do with that. He was sixteen and still believed that if he was good enough none of the rest of it would matter, so he held onto it and looked out the window and watched the highway go dark all the way back to Kingston.

The OHL locker room had its own language.

Outside these four walls they were boys—some still doing homework, some calling their mothers on road trips. Inside, that didn’t matter. Everything got smaller. The slurs were punctuation. That's so gay, bro, that's so fucking gay, the same register as nice pass, bro, nice fucking pass—not meaning anything at all, just fitting. Don't be a pussy. Don't be a bitch. Don't be a faggot, fairy, fruit.

By week two, it was already in Shane’s mouth as much as anyone’s. It came easily. He said them and his voice sounded correct saying them and nobody looked at him sideways and it was fine, it was just the language of the room, and he was lucky enough to be in the room.

The older guys in the room were the ones he studied most carefully. The veterans—nineteen, twenty-one—who moved through the locker room like they owned it. Some guys didn’t have to think about it. Shane still did. He could perform it by now. He'd been practicing for years.

He studied it like tape.

There was a veteran player—twenty, in his final OHL year—called Theatre, because he had once attended drama camp at thirteen, and it became part of his name whether he liked it or not. The room followed him without agreeing to. He was the one who decided what was funny and what went too far, and mostly those two things were the same, because Theatre had a generosity about him that kept the room from becoming something worse. He was the reason Kangaroo Court stayed a game instead of a weapon. He was the reason the bus rides had a certain controlled chaos rather than genuine menace. Shane watched how Theatre managed this without seeming to manage anything, how he laughed at something first to indicate it was okay to laugh, how he went quiet at the precise moment when quiet was needed, how the whole room recalibrated around him.

Shane watched this and didn't look away.

Theatre's real name was Marc-André Lévesque, which nobody used. He was from Laval, played wing, had the ease of someone who'd always been liked without trying and had therefore never had to think about it. In the second week of practice Theatre made a joke at Gauthier’s expense—small, surgical, nothing Gauthier could directly object to—and the room laughed, and Gauthier laughed too, and Theatre had moved on before anyone could locate the edge in it. Shane replayed this in the shower that night. He had not known you could do that. He had been doing it wrong for years.

PART THREE: THE CURRICULUM

The initiation in October was the one that mattered.

Every player knew it was coming. You picked it up somewhere between signing your contract and your first skate. It wasn’t written down. It wasn’t officially sanctioned. The coaches had a long tradition of being unavailable on the Friday nights it happened. The stories changed depending on who told them. Happened to a guy I know. Heard it was different on other teams. Heard they cleaned it up.

The rookies were told, on a Friday in late October after practice: shower last. Shane showered last. He dried off, got dressed, and stood with the other first-years. Bouchard and Therrien from Windsor were best described as a unit. They'd grown up playing together, finished each other's sentences, handled the whole thing the way experienced travelers handle a delayed flight: resigned, mildly put out, fundamentally okay. Petit-Rouge was twenty, technically, up from the AHL affiliate on a conditioning stint that everyone accepted was a courtesy, a big body to fill a slot, and he was someone who already knew how this chapter ended and was simply waiting for it to be over. Rouquin—the red-haired kid from Timmins, whose actual name Shane would genuinely never be able to fully retain—was perpetually nervous. Shane had seen guys like this before. The nervous ones either toughened up or gave the room something to circle. Rouquin had already pissed himself once, trying and failing to hold it between periods. This did not help his case.

The veterans arranged themselves. Theatre and two others ran the actual initiation; the rest of the team drifted in the background, present enough to witness.

The sex interview came first.

The rules of the sex interview were not explained. That was the point. You answered. You answered in front of the whole room. You answered without flinching. What the room needed to see was a kind of heterosexual performance that was evidence of being the right kind of boy—the kind of boy who has done the expected things and will continue doing them and who does not have anything to hide.

Shane went second.

He had the girl ready. He'd built her in the shower a week ago, just in case, because he had prepared for it the way he prepared for everything else.

Name first. Something French enough to be plausible for the Ottawa area, common enough not to be memorable. Jess. Then the connection: parents in the same golf club circuit as the Hollanders, which gave it the texture of an introduction rather than a pickup, which was safer, less traceable to a specific lie. Hooked up twice. The second time better, which was the right narrative shape—implied ongoing interest without suggesting anything embarrassing like feelings. He'd rehearsed the ear redness in the billet house. He'd tested it on himself the way he tested everything. With the cold efficiency of a boy becoming an NHL star. Three seconds, a real memory, the specific humiliation of being called on in Mme. Pelletier's grade eight French class and blanking on a word he knew, the whole class watching him not know, the heat rising in his face before he could stop it. He’d found it at thirteen and kept it. He'd used it when he needed to seem real.

It worked every time and it was the most disgusting thing he knew about himself.

In front of the guys, Shane hit every mark: the right ratio of detail to vagueness, the offhand pride that signals I'm comfortable enough to tell this and relaxed enough that I don't need your approval. The red ears. The veterans laughed in the right register. Theatre gave him a nod. Good boy. The relief of it was so much larger than it should have been.

Nobody had said anything yet. Shane said, easy and offhand, directed nowhere in particular: "Karim's up next, should be interesting." He said it the way you say something when you already know the answer, and a couple guys laughed before Karim even spoke.

Everyone looked at Karim. Karim said, “I haven't yet.” Said it flatly, without apology, without looking away.

The room went that specific kind of quiet.

One of the veterans—not Theatre, a nastier piece of work called Desjardins who had been waiting all night for someone to stumble—said: “what?”

Karim said it again. “I haven't. I'm seventeen.” And there was something in his voice more level than defiance, that said I understand this room and I'm telling the truth anyway and I know what it's going to cost me—and Shane watched it cost him in real time, in the half-second that followed, the way the room turned toward him.

The veterans structured everything after as comedy. Desjardins piled on in the locker room register—oh shit, little virgin, better fix that, we know some girls, you fucking gay or what—and other guys joined in and it went on longer than it needed to, and Karim took it without reacting, which was the correct call, and eventually Theatre redirected and it moved on. But the file was opened. The drawer existed now. Shane could see it: the way Desjardins would look at Karim for the rest of the season, the quality of a tool in a drawer.

Shane thought: there but for the grace of God, go I— He'd gotten through by performing. In that room, it was the only answer. 

Rouquin had to go twice because his first answer didn't satisfy Desjardins on some technical point. He went red to the scalp both times. Shane watched this and kept his face exactly right and did not look at Karim.

The hazing started a week later. For real.

Theatre had been watching the rookies for a week, deciding when it would hurt most. At the time he just knew: Friday after practice, veterans told the rookies to stay again, everyone else cleared out.

The six rookies sat on the bench in the equipment room—Shane, Karim, Therrien, Petit-Rouge, Bouchard, red-head Rouquin—and waited. The overhead light was fluorescent and had been flickering for weeks. Somewhere in the building a Zamboni was running its post-practice resurfacing. The smell of rubber and ice and equipment was so embedded in every locker room he'd ever been in that it wasn't a smell anymore, just what everything smelled liked.

The veterans came back in with a bag.

Shane didn’t think about it afterward. Not clearly. Not because it was the worst thing that would ever happen to him. It wasn't. But because everyone had to take part. There was no outside position.

The bag had props. There were cold, fluorescent-lit forty-five minutes that required performance—the right laughs at the right moments, the right amount of surrender and the right amount of resistance, reading the room in real time to calibrate which mix they wanted from you. By the end of it, Shane was better at it than anyone else in the room. He gave them what they needed. He laughed. He said two things that got genuine laughter from Theatre, which shortened the thing for everyone.

Petit-Rouge cried a little. He tried to hide it and couldn't. The room’s reaction to this, Shane noted and didn’t think further about.

Rouquin laughed in a high, gasping way that didn’t seem fully connected to him. Bouchard went quiet and stayed quiet and would not make eye contact with anyone for three days afterward. Therrien took it and shook it off with the practiced ease of someone who'd been through something similar before, which worried Shane in a different direction.

Karim went somewhere else, like managing a physical exam by deciding to be somewhere else for the duration. Shane watched him do it and recognized the technique because he was doing his own version of it. The difference being Shane's version required staying fully present and performing. Karim's version required leaving.

They were different versions of the same problem and they had both been solving it their whole lives and they didn't talk about it. When it was over they got their clothes back. They showered—again—and dressed. Shane's legs felt heavy from doing something he didn't entirely choose and getting through it anyway.

In the parking lot, Karim bummed a handful of cigarettes from the equipment manager's son, who was also seventeen and lurked. He offered one to Shane without saying anything and Shane took it even though he didn't smoke and stood next to Karim in the cold November air holding the cigarette and not smoking it and feeling stupid about it, the two of them not talking, not looking at each other, just standing.

“See you Monday,” Karim said.

“See you Monday,” Shane said.

Shane's billet mom was in the lot with the radio on, not looking at him in the careful way of someone who has hosted enough hockey boys to know that certain Fridays probably shouldn't be asked about. He got in the car and buckled his seatbelt and looked out the window at Kingston going past in the dark.

He thought about the game on Saturday, a positioning error he'd made in the left-side coverage on the power play, what he wanted to do differently. At sixteen, he learned how to put the lid on things and skate away.

PART FOUR: THE ROZANOV FILE

By November Shane had been watching Rozanov for weeks.

Everyone on his team had seen a clip or two at least, if they were serious about hockey. Ilya Rozanov, as old as Shane and already playing like the game had been designed specifically for him—some kid in Russia who moved through defenders like they were suggestions, who scored the kinds of goals that made you pause the tape and watch again just to confirm what you'd seen was real. Shane watched his clips with the same attention he gave opponents, except Rozanov wasn't his opponent, wasn't even on the same continent.

He pulled up the Saint Petersburg clip one more time and opened a new document.

He titled it: Rozanov IL—tactical.

The notes were honest with themselves. Tactical. Hip position, faceoff tendencies, shot mechanics, how Rozanov held his stick in warmup that was different from his game hold—slightly more casual, like the game hold was armored and the warmup hold was what happened before the armor went on. There was a forty-five-second sequence from a Saint Petersburg showcase where Rozanov won a faceoff, switched his hand positioning without breaking stride, and made a pass behind the net that was geometrically impossible by any model Shane could construct—and yet the puck went exactly where he sent it and led directly to a goal.

Shane watched those forty-five seconds eleven times.

He also kept, under a heading he didn't title, a list of things that weren't tactical. The footage caught Rozanov in the moment after a goal, before the teammates arrived—a half-second of pure satisfaction that didn't perform itself for anyone, just the face of someone who expected this to happen and it happened. In background footage from other players' games, Rozanov was identifiable in a crowd because he took up exactly as much room as he wanted.

Shane didn't give the second list a title. He kept adding to it anyway. Thinking of it as under not available, do not open.

It was past two in the morning. He closed the laptop.

He thought about the parking lot. He thought about Karim's cigarette, unsmoked, getting cold in his hand. He thought about the forty-five-second sequence from Saint Petersburg, the hand positioning switch before contact, what it meant about how Rozanov processed the game.

He thought: the play begins before the play begins.

The rookie party had been looming over Shane's head since the first week of October, whispered about in the dressing room like some kind of dark folklore. He wasn't losing sleep over it, though. He figured it was just part of the deal. You went through it and then you were the one who'd gone through it.

They were told to show up at the Lakeview Inn, a motel that looked like it had been giving up for years. Two rooms, dirt cheap, somewhere off the highway where the only other guests seemed to be long-haul truckers and people who paid in cash and didn't make eye contact. Shane arrived on time—he was always on time—and joined the line of other rookies waiting to have their heads shaved.

The instructions had been clear: show up already shaved, everything, or the veterans would do it for you. Shane had followed instructions. He stood there in the October chill covered in razor burn, which made him feel worse than the cold. One of the older guys carved something into his hair with the clippers—some rival team's logo, done badly on purpose—and Shane didn't flinch. Stage one. Fine.

Stage two was harder to handle with dignity.

They stripped down to their underwear and got loaded into someone's car. Shane didn't ask where they were going. He was (almost) six feet of nothing, all limbs and no muscle, freshly shaved and sporting a haircut that looked like a dare. When the car pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store in town, his stomach dropped.

This town. The town where he knew practically everyone by now.

He was handed a task—go in, grab a couple cases of something, come back out—and somehow the instructions didn't change the reality of what he was about to do. Shane walked through those sliding doors in his underwear, razor-burned and ridiculous, and grabbed what he needed off the shelf. He stood in the checkout line. He recognized the woman behind the register. He smiled at her, because the only thing worse than looking like an asshole was acting like one, asked how her night was going, paid, and left. He didn't run. Running would have been worse somehow.

Back at the motel, he thought the worst was behind him. It wasn't.

Stage three happened in the smaller of the two rooms, the one that stayed quiet while everyone else drank in the other. Shane was called in. He took off what little he still had on and went into the bathroom. There was a cup on the floor with beer in it. He was told to drink it, and even though he didn’t drink, he did. Then came the pushups—five of them, hips positioned over the cup. The goal was obvious and humiliating. He focused on his form. He hit the mark. It wasn't until he walked back out that he registered the cup had already been through this whole routine with the guy ahead of him. That was the moment Shane had his first real drink, of his own volition.

He went back to the main room and kept going after that first one, because the alternative was standing there sober with that thought in his head. The veterans clapped him on the back and called him a good rookie, and he laughed when they laughed, and he didn't say a word about any of it. Some of the other guys had it worse. Shane could see that. He watched Rouquin staring at the carpet and looked away, and drank more and more and more.

At barely sixteen, he threw up in the parking lot behind the Lakeview Inn and listened to the veterans laughing somewhere behind him. He already knew he was going to keep saying yes.

Shane called his mom from the billet family's kitchen the night after the rookie party, sitting on a stool at the counter while Manon—his billet mom—pretended not to listen from the living room.

His mom picked up on the second ring, like she'd been waiting.

"How was it," she said. Not quite a question.

"Fine," Shane said. "It was fine."

There was a pause and he could hear her smile in it. She'd grown up around hockey. Her husband had played, her college roommate’s dad had coached. She knew what fine meant coming out of a rookie party. She didn't ask him to elaborate, which was one of the things he loved about her. She wasn't soft about it, like the other moms. Before he left for Kingston she'd looked him in the eye and said prove them wrong.

"You hold your own?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said. "I held my own."

"Good." And then she asked about his wrist, and his line chemistry, and whether Manon was feeding him enough protein, and they talked for twenty minutes about everything except what had actually happened, and when he hung up, the knot between his shoulders had loosened. It helped that she didn’t ask.

The North Bay road trip was five hours.

After the game they boarded the bus. Swiss Chalet boxes were handed out—the standard road meal, chicken that had cooled into itself and fries that had congealed and stopped pretending to be edible. Shane ate because eating was part of the job. Around him, guys put in headphones, watched clips on cracked phone screens, leaned into seats in the practiced exhaustion of a long season and tried to sleep.

About an hour outside North Bay, the veterans moved.

They didn't move all at once, just the energy shifting first. Then the back of the bus opened up in that quiet way it always did when something was about to become official.

Rookies were called one by one. Like always. Like doing it any other way might give them ideas.

Shane was fourth. He walked to the back and did what was required. What was required: clothes off, as always, which was—and he'd clocked this from the first time and never said it out loud—gay as fuck. The lace around the genitals business. The cold bus air. The twenty seconds to make the veterans laugh or be sent into the bathroom with whoever was in there before you. Nobody ever actually made the veterans laugh in those twenty seconds. It wasn't designed to be passed. Shane understood this and still tried anyway, out of the same reflex that makes him shoot on every possible opportunity even when the angle is bad. He didn't make them laugh. He went into the bathroom.

Rouquin was already in there. Then Petit-Rouge, then Therrien, then Bouchard, then Karim.

Six guys in a bus bathroom. Heat cranked to the max. Clothes knotted together in a pile that was genuinely impossible to sort through in a small dark hot space while also being a human body that needed air. Someone had gotten the small window cracked, two inches at the top, and they took turns standing near it.

Three hours.

Shane spent the three hours watching the metal of the room around him, pushing down vomit, and trying not to think about the Rozanov clip.

The hip positioning on the puck switch—always slightly early, before the puck fully arrived, like he was already committing to ownership of it before contact made it official. The faceoff tendencies: not strength-based, but angle-based, turning his lower body half a degree before the drop so the win was already decided in the space behind the puck rather than on it. The off-wing positioning when he wasn’t the primary, never drifting passive into space but arriving into it at speed, as if space was something he could only trust if he entered it violently enough to define it.

He worked through the forty-five-second Saint Petersburg sequence frame by frame in his memory.

Speed wasn't it. Skill wasn't quite it either. But that he never looked surprised. Even when something went wrong in the clip—lost draw, broken play, puck sliding past his stick—his body had already started adjusting before the outcome fully existed. The mistake had been accounted for, absorbed as part of the design rather than corrected after it—prediction-based, not reactive. Nothing that came from drilling.

Karim was next to him at the window. They didn't talk. They stood there in the small available air and breathed.

When it was finally over—Theatre banging on the door, time, boys—they stumbled out, untangled their clothes, and dressed in the cramped dark before filing out into the bus. The veterans were watching hockey on the overhead screens, casual, like nothing had happened.

Shane sat down. He opened his notes on his phone. He added two lines about the Rozanov footage. He was already somewhere else.

A forum post appeared in November. Rozanov off-ice lol and something else in Russian. Someone had grabbed a video from VKontakte—Russian social media, grainy and dark, a party in someone's basement that could have been anywhere not in Canada, as far as Shane knew.

Rozanov was in the middle of it, exactly where everyone expected him to be. He did a keg stand.

Two guys grabbed his legs, hauled him up, looking grateful to be the ones holding him. The room was already loud with it before he was even inverted. Shane couldn't stop coming back to it, not after the first watch, the second, maybe even the third. There was this thing: Rozanov didn't rush. He was upside down, beer going into his mouth at a difficult angle, two guys holding his legs, the room chanting, and he just took his time. Like this was a thing that happened to him regularly and he had no objections to it. Shane watched his back muscles in the clip, which were relaxed. His hands, which hung loose at his sides, not braced against anything. He was hanging upside down in front of a room full of people with no tension in his body.

He came down after twelve seconds. The room erupted.

Shane watched the crowd in the clip. The way they were all pulled toward him, angled in his direction without appearing to have decided to angle. A girl near the back was on her toes to see over the people in front of her. A guy Shane didn't recognize had his phone up but was laughing too hard to hold it steady, camera shaking, and he kept it up anyway because he wanted the footage—wanted evidence that he was here for this, in the room when this happened.

Rozanov wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Said something to the two guys who'd caught him. They lost it. He was already moving on, already somewhere else, the keg stand already behind him and not behind him in the way Shane would be—that crawling feeling, did that land, did I look stupid, was that okay—behind him already.

Then a girl, older, maybe eighteen, put her arm around his neck and said something close to his ear. They went through a door in the background together.

He came back twelve minutes later—Shane timed it—fixing his belt, hair wrecked, face doing a thing that had a name that Shane was not going to think about. He grinned at the camera. Made a gesture that didn't require translation. The crowd responded.

Shane put his phone down. He opened his laptop and watched the Saint Petersburg footage and added two new lines to his tactical notes about the hip position on the puck switch and went to sleep.

He did not think about the keg stand. He did not think about the door. He did not think about what it would feel like to want something and just walk through a door to get it, like the whole room watching didn't change anything at all.

Under the heading he hadn't titled, he did not add anything. He went to sleep.

The next Friday he walked into the dressing room and knew immediately.

It was the energy—that crackling static of guys who'd already decided and were just killing time until they could act on it. Someone had a plan. Shane could read a room by now; it was one of the first things you learned, how to walk in and know what kind of night it was going to be before anyone opened their mouth.

They filled him in. Warm-up brawl. Fire a shot into the other team's end, catch somebody, let it all come apart naturally. Everyone picks a guy, everybody goes.

Shane listened. Something under his ribs objected. He looked around the room—Mercer laughing in the corner, Thibodeau taping his stick for the third time because he did that when he was amped, the veterans leaning back against the stalls with that easy authority that came from knowing exactly how things were going to go, Theatre laughing at his own stupid fucking joke—and the objection dissolved before it reached his mouth.

Except then it did reach his mouth. He heard himself saying it, reasonable and careful: they were in third, the game mattered, suspensions would cost them more than one brawl was worth.

The veteran in the corner didn't even look at him.

Rook. Shut your whore mouth.

Shane shut his whore mouth.

He wasn't angry about it. Or he was, briefly, like the anger of stubbing a toe—sharp and immediate and then gone, because being angry at the doorframe is pointless. But he knew how it worked. You didn't get to have opinions until you'd been here long enough to earn them, and you proved you'd earned them by not complaining about not having them yet. That was the system.

He'd been thinking about it the right way for months. He picked up the game notes and started going through the other roster methodically, looking for someone in his weight class, low penalty minutes, didn't seem to love contact. He found his guy. He memorized the number.

He folded the game notes in half. The number was already memorized. Whatever happened in warmups was going to happen. And he was still here, so.

Warm-ups. Shane went through the motions, kept one eye on his guy, waited.

The shot came. Found somebody in the back. The ice opened up.

He went straight for his number and didn't think. Thinking was the wrong gear for this. They grabbed each other, held on, stayed upright until the whistle. Shane's pulse was loud in his ears the whole time. When it was over he went to the sin bin and sat and that was that.

Hockey usually rewarded thinking—reading, modeling, staying two steps ahead. This didn't. This was thirty seconds of grabbing hold and not letting go. He'd grabbed the guy and felt the animal satisfaction of it, the realness of it, weight and resistance.

It was the most uncomplicated thing he'd done in months. He wasn't hurt. He'd covered himself. By every metric that mattered in that room, he'd done what was required.

Later that season, some of the guys got into something after a road game. Shane wasn't there for the start of it, he'd been in the trainer's room getting his knee looked at, and by the time he came out to the parking lot there were raised voices and the laughter that meant someone had decided something was funny that wasn't. A girl near the opposing team's bus, some of the older guys leaning into her space in that way, saying things Shane half-heard. She wasn't laughing.

One of the guys looked back at him when Shane came out. Expectant. You see anything?

Shane looked at the girl. She looked at him. Not the others. Him. He looked away first.

"See what," he said. He walked to where his teammates were standing and didn't look back. She said something behind him. He didn't hear it. Or he did and filed it away. He knew what the correct answer had been before the question was asked. Later on the bus Desjardins called her a crazy whore bitch and a couple guys laughed.

Shane looked out the window and thought: she shouldn't have been there.

After the initiation, something shifted.

The veterans started treating him differently. It wasn't warm, more like he'd passed through a gate and was now on the other side. Theatre clapped him on the shoulder in the locker room the following Monday, not about anything, just—a gesture that said you're in. Desjardins stopped looking for angles.

He was still a rookie. Rookies carried the bags, rookies sat at the front of the bus, rookies ate last, rookies stood up at team dinners and told jokes or did challenges or made themselves ridiculous in whatever way the veterans came up with that week. Faux Court found him twice in November—once for having a too-clean stall, which apparently communicated insufficient dedication to chaos, and once for being seen in a grocery store with his billet mom buying what Desjardins described as a lesbian quantity of vegetables. Both guilty verdicts. Both resulting in stupid things for a week. The vegetable verdict required him to use only French during practices, which was fine, his French was good. Better than anyone expected, which he counted on people underestimating, when they saw his face.

He did all of this without complaining and mostly without visible resentment, which was something he'd had to work on, the visible part. He felt the resentment. He kept it out of his face.

He didn't do the Tuesday night extended-curfew movie runs in a jock and helmet and gloves, standing in line at the Cineplex asking the concession worker if they had any blade tape. He wasn't above it, Shane knew, but he had a very clear sense of which obligations were load-bearing and which were optional and this one was optional. Theatre noticed this and said nothing, which told Shane he'd read the situation correctly.

He kept score privately, in the running tally he kept of useful decisions and stupid ones. He didn't know exactly what he was building toward. He just knew every choice either helped or hurt.

There was a game in November against Guelph—broadcast game, the team's one scheduled regional television appearance—and two minutes into the second period Shane took a stick to the face. He was looking around a defenseman's shoulder and felt an explosion in his mouth and his lip went completely numb. He hit the ice and blood shot into his visor immediately, which told him it was bad, and he got up as fast as he could and skated off because it was on television and he was not going to be carried off anything while there were cameras in the building.

In the training room the doctor cleaned him up, said something calm about the cut, about how hockey players always thought things were worse than they were. The anesthetic went in, and then there was only the methodical work of closure—needle, thread, skin, repeat. Partway through, the rink lights failed. Not dramatically, just a total collapse of power that rippled outward through the building until even the hum of the ventilation system disappeared.

The stitching continued by phone light and a borrowed flashlight that shook slightly in the hand holding it. The cut ran from the edge of his nose down toward his upper lip. No one in the room would later agree on exactly how many stitches it took.

He went back out for the third period anyway. It was still a televised game.

His mother, when she saw it, did the inventory look. She did not say anything about the scar. She drove him to the follow-up appointment the next morning and sat in the waiting room with her work notebook.

Shane tucked her face into the same place as everything else that didn’t change what he had to do next. He got back up and scored again. They won anyway.

That spring, in a game against Soo on home ice—his parents had driven down, forty people from Ottawa in the stands—Shane had a game that made coaches stop talking. He scored twice, one of which was a tap-in on the power play that barely counted, and one of which was something else: a rush where he took the puck at the right-wing half-wall and went end-to-end through three defenders, which he hadn’t planned. His body just did it, what happens after enough tape that the read comes before he thought.

Switch kept him after.

The locker room emptied. Shane sat in his stall with his skates half-off.

"That thing in the third," Switch said. He was looking at the whiteboard for some reason. "What were you thinking."

"I saw the defense was cheating right because I'd been going right all game," Shane said. "Went left. The second guy tried to angle me to the boards, which opened the lane to the net. I just went."

Switch was quiet for a moment. "How often is it like that. That you just go."

"More and more," Shane said.

Switch nodded. "Okay," he said. "Get out of here."

In the parking lot, his father grabbed him in a hug before he could say anything, the full thing—miss you, proud of you—said in David’s only available language. Shane let himself be held for a second before remembering there were probably vets prowling somewhere nearby. Then stepped back.

"I watched that rush about eight times on the replay," his father said, shaking his head. "I genuinely don't know what you just did."

“I'm not completely sure either," Shane said.

His father laughed. Shane let himself laugh. It felt like being a kid again, before hockey became a job.

His mother, standing by the car with her phone already out, looked at him with the inventory look and said: good game. Two words. Same weight as a paragraph.

Thanks, Mom.

Your left-side coverage on the second period power play was wrong.

I know. I'm fixing it.

She nodded once. Got in the car.

PART FIVE: SECOND YEAR

Second year. Seventeen.

By the second preseason Shane was the best player on the team, and nobody argued it anymore. Nobody tested him anymore. He didn't have to think about it anymore—that had stopped being a question.

His numbers were outstanding. The coaches knew it, the veterans knew it, and the rookies who came in that fall figured it out inside the first week.

Theatre was gone, and Gagnon had the C. That was right—Gagnon was twenty, had the coaches' trust, knew how to run a lineup meeting without making it weird. Shane didn't want the C. What Shane had was harder to name and in some ways more useful. When the room went sideways in a bad third period Shane said the one thing that straightened it, and he never looked like he was doing anything except talking. Guys just listened.

The new rookies went through initiation in October. Gagnon had quietly retired the worst of it—the bus bathroom still happened but shorter, more controlled, nobody was getting actually hurt—and Shane watched from the back of the room with his arms crossed and said nothing. He thought it was probably fine. Rookies needed to understand they hadn't earned anything yet. That was just true. The room didn't owe them comfort before they'd proved themselves and the sooner they understood that the better players they'd be. He believed this cleanly.

Shane ran a Kangaroo Court charge on a kid named Fortin in October—rookie from Sudbury, sixteen, had apparently told a girl he missed her in a text that Beaulieu had gotten hold of somehow and printed enough copies for the whole locker room. Shane stood up and read it aloud in the flat procedural voice he'd been practicing since he watched Theatre do it the first time. I miss you too, he said, in a voice that somehow landed softer than the words required, and the room came apart. He kept his face straight. He knew exactly what he was doing. He had been watching someone do this for a year and now he was the one doing it and the room was laughing in exactly the right register and Fortin was going red to the scalp and Shane thought, briefly: Fortin is sixteen. He is in a room full of people who are laughing at him and he cannot leave because leaving is worse than staying and he knows it and everyone knows he knows it.

Then he finished the bit, because that was what you did, because the room needed the ending and Shane was the one who knew how to deliver it, and when the room came apart it felt exactly like what he'd been practicing for—the management, the satisfaction of reading a room correctly and giving them the laugh at a sixteen-year-old's expense.

Karim was back for his second year, too. They'd worked out something functional between them over the summer without ever discussing it—video games at Shane's billet place on off nights, Swiss Chalet on the road, a comfortable enough silence about everything that had happened the year before. Desjardins had been traded in February. Nobody mentioned him.

On a Tuesday in November, Switch was running tape from a game against Sudbury. Second period, penalty kill breakdown in the neutral zone, two-on-one against. The pointer found Karim at the blue line and stopped on him.

What were you thinking.

Karim said the correct thing—the self-flagellating thing: I was late reading the weak side, won’t happen again. Switch ran it back anyway. Twice. The pointer stayed on Karim the whole time.

Shane had seen this enough times to know what it was. He'd been watching Switch do it to Karim for a year and a half. The pointer lingering, the extra runs. He knew what it was and what the room needed, both at once.

Switch said something under his breath. Not the word from last January, but adjacent to it, requiring the listener to complete the thought themselves.

The room went very still.

Shane felt it as a physical thing. He'd felt it before. He knew what happened next. Someone had to move the air or it would stay like that, suspended, and Switch would run the clip again.

Shane said: "He was puck-watching on the first pass. That's why he's late."

Switch looked at him. A half-second, flat. Then: you can tell me what he was thinking but I don't think he was thinking about hockey.

The laugh from the back row came before he processed it. Small. Two guys. His own exhalation followed—soft enough to disown—and he heard it leave his nose before he could stop it. He didn't look at Karim.

Switch ran the clip again, using Shane’s note. The pointer moved. Someone else's name.

He told himself he'd helped. He'd de-escalated. He'd given Switch a way out and Switch had taken it and the session had moved on and nothing worse had happened, and all of that was true. He put it in order and filed it and didn’t ask what Karim had needed instead.

After the session Karim packed up his notebook without looking at anyone, including Shane, and left first, which was unusual. Shane watched him go.

Later he realized Switch hadn’t taken the redirect. He'd used it. Shane had handed him a frame and Switch had put something worse inside it, and the room had laughed, and Shane had laughed with them, dug the grave with his own two hands, and Karim had sat two seats over and held his body exactly where it was.

He knew what it was and didn’t call it that. Then Beaulieu said something about dinner and Shane said yeah, let's go, and he went.

The Lakeview Inn still happened to the rookies. The locker room. The court and charges. The bus bathroom. Shane had ridden in the main cabin and listened to it through the door and thought about the North Bay trip the year before, the weight of the air in there, the window cracked two inches. He thought about it briefly before Petit-Rouge fell out of his chair, collapsed like fucking Bambi, making Shane laugh, and that was that.

The Rozanov interview surfaced in October, three weeks into the new season.

Small regional publication, bad video quality, the kind of thing that covered MHL showcase games for local audiences and wouldn't normally appear in Shane's search results except that he'd set up a notification on the forum for any new Rozanov content, which he'd done over the summer.

Four minutes and twenty-two seconds. Female interviewer, pleasant and professional. Rozanov at seventeen in a team jacket that was slightly too big, hair doing something chaotic, his English functional but delayed—arriving a half-beat after intention.

He wasn't embarrassed about the English. This is what Shane kept noticing. He didn’t compensate for it. He didn’t rush or apologize or signal awareness of the gap. He just used what he had and expected it to be sufficient.

She asked how his season was going.

Rozanov grinned. Shane had looked at this grin in a lot of footage now and had taken notes on it, but they didn’t explain it. It wasn't the professional smile. It was the grin of someone who keeps being right and finds it funny rather than surprising. Shane had a professional smile. He'd built it carefully, maintained it, knew exactly which register to deploy it in. He didn't have this other thing. He wasn't sure this other thing could be built.

Is very good, Rozanov said. Team is—and then Russian, fast, something Shane didn’t understand—back to English: best I play. Ever. Yes.

She smiled, unbothered. Either she understood Russian, or it didn’t matter. And your linemates, how is the chemistry?

They understand what I need. He tapped his temple.

She laughed. He grinned again, slower.

What are you hearing from scouts?

Everyone want Ilya Rozanov. Flat. Then the slower grin, the kind that didn’t feel like it should belong to a seventeen-year-old: I am not complaining.

Confident, she said.

Is not confidence. Is just truth. Why I pretend otherwise?

Shane watched the exchange from everyone want Ilya Rozanov through why I pretend otherwise twenty-three times. He knew this was twenty-three times because he kept a count in the margin of the untitled document.

At the very end of the clip, after the formal interview wrapped, the camera was still rolling—they always let it run a few extra seconds—and the interviewer said something off-record that the mic barely caught. Rozanov's answer was in a lower register, and his face did something slightly different—the grin still there but with something specific in it, something for her, not the camera. She laughed off-camera.

Shane watched those twelve seconds eight times. He put his phone down. Picked it up. Watched them three more times.

One night in November—a Tuesday—Karim said, not looking up from the controller: you ever feel like this whole thing is insane.

Shane thought about five a.m. skates and his mother’s voice on the phone from what felt like another planet and sitting awake in the billet family’s basement at midnight listening to a man upstairs call his wife a whore loudly enough that something slammed into a wall afterward, everyone at practice the next morning pretending not to notice the bruise on her wrist, and the fact that nothing about wanting it had ever made it feel closer.

Yeah, he said.

Karim nodded. They kept playing.

Shane thought about that conversation for three days and kept doing nothing with it.

By December Shane knew the Rozanov interview like a play he’d memorized.

He knew the exact word where Rozanov switched languages—chemistry, always chemistry—the last English word before the border. He knew what the interviewer’s face did three frames before she laughed, her composure softening at the edges, forgetting she was the one conducting the interview. He knew how long it took the grin to fully arrive. He’d timed it. Four seconds from first movement to fully open, which sounds slow but doesn't look it, looks like the most natural thing in the world, looks like a door opening because someone on the other side turned the handle.

He's tried to figure out what the Russian sentence means. He's typed phonetic versions into search bars, gotten nothing.

What he can hear, even without the meaning, is that it comes out of Rozanov the way his English does—owned, unhurried, like a word that has never once given him trouble.

Shane thinks about every word before he says it. His mother calls it thoughtfulness. His father calls it composure. Shane doesn’t correct either of them.

He watches the presser again. There’s a moment near the end of the formal section that Shane hadn’t registered on the first several watches. The interviewer asks something about the World Juniors program, about which players from the Russian junior system scouts were watching most closely. She names two or three names and then, as a kind of afterthought, appends: and of course there’s you.

Rozanov looks at her when she says it. Not with the grin, more even and more private. Like the confirmation was never in doubt and he’s decided to let her land on it herself rather than hand it to her.

Yes, he says. And of course there is me.

The interviewer laughs. The camera operator laughs. Someone off-screen laughs.

Rozanov waits for it to settle. He doesn’t perform patience. He just has it.

There's a guy in the back of the room Shane hadn't noticed on his first several watches. Older, notepad on his knee, a reporter who's been doing this for twenty years and has the look to prove it. He's not the type to lean forward. Shane can see it in his posture before the Russian sentence. Deliberate stillness, professional distance, not here to be charmed.

He catches himself doing it and sits back. But he did it. He leans forward, then corrects himself. But Shane still sees it—the way the pen touches the notepad like that was the plan all along.

Shane watches this portion eleven times on a Wednesday night in December, in the dark, with practice at six the next morning.

He adds a line to the untitled document.

He deletes it.

The girl was at a party in January.

Beaulieu dragged him there. Beaulieu was social the way some people just are, liked everyone and expected it back. The party was at a guy's house, a guy whose older brother had played three years of OHL before an injury sent him back to Barrie. The older brother was there, twenty-four, washed, still wearing his gear sometimes in the parking lot outside the rink because he didn't know what else to do.

The girl's name was Amélie. She had dark hair and talked fast and grabbed Shane's arm when she laughed. She wasn't intimidated by him. Most girls at these parties were either intimidated by the hockey thing or performing not being intimidated, and both versions showed. Amélie was just actually not intimidated. She had opinions. She told him his team was boring to watch when they were up two in the third and she was right.

Later in the night the party got smaller and Shane found himself in a hallway with Amélie leaning against a doorframe looking at him the way he’d been noticing since September. It happened the way it was going to happen.

Afterward, he thought of it as something he technically had now, and didn’t feel any different. He didn't add it to the category of things that made him feel alive the way hockey made him feel alive. He didn't add it to the category that contained the Saint Petersburg clip, the VKontakte footage, the untitled list.

He stopped the thought before it got all the way to the end.

The following Monday in the locker room he mentioned Amélie at the appropriate moment with the appropriate casualness, and the room received it the way it needed to, and he ran his inventory and everything passed.

He thought about it sometimes: the freedom of it. Being a girl at a party. Wanting something and just—wanting it. In a way that everyone around you would help you get. In a way that wasn't a liability. He’d watched them his whole life—girls at parties—moving through rooms without checking themselves the way he did, without running anything against an internal list. They got to want things and it was fine, it was expected, it was practically a personality.

He’d spent seventeen years turning wanting into something else entirely and didn’t think about why that bothered him as much as it did. There was something almost insulting about it. The ease of it. The way wanting was just allowed to be a thing girls did, like it cost nothing, like the whole room didn't have to be managed around it. He'd watched Amélie grab his arm when she laughed and thought: she has no idea. No idea what it takes. And then he'd kissed her and not thought about it again, or tried not to.

He was driven home after practice and watched the Rozanov interview on his phone, and then the twelve seconds at the end—the ones the camera was never supposed to catch.

In February, a party clip showed up in the group chat. lmao this fucker again. Two skull emojis.

Shane opened it. Forty seconds. Someone's house, Moscow probably, early in the season by the look of it—the looseness of people who don’t have standings to worry about yet. Bad audio. The camera is shooting the room in general, not Rozanov specifically, and Rozanov is just in it, off to the left, talking to a girl.

Shane couldn’t see her face. She has her back to the camera. Dark hair, one hand around a red cup. She's saying something. Rozanov is listening.

That’s the first thing he notices, and he spends several subsequent watches trying to figure out what exactly it is he’s seeing. It's not that Rozanov is standing still. It's not eye contact. It's the angle of his whole body—weight shifted toward her, shoulders turned in. Like he’s decided, quietly, that this is where he is, and nothing outside that radius matters.

She finishes talking. Rozanov says something Shane can't make out.

She laughs. Loud. Genuine, unguarded. It carries over the music. Three people near them turn to look, and she doesn't seem embarrassed by it, and Rozanov doesn't move to smooth it over or make it smaller or give any indication that a girl laughing loudly at something he said is anything other than the expected outcome.

He just watches her laugh. Easy. Like he expected exactly this.

Then he leans in.

The camera swings away.

Shane sits with his phone for a moment after the first watch. He sends a skull emoji into the group chat. Then he watches it again.

He watches the interview and then the party clip. He’s been doing it for a week, both of them, twice each, until the sequence is as familiar as morning skate.

He thinks: Rozanov never looks like he's trying.

Then he thinks: that's not it. That's not specific enough. Trying isn't it. Shane has been around players who made not-trying their whole personality, who were so committed to looking effortless that the effort was all you could see. Rozanov is not doing that either.

He watches the party clip again. Rozanov's body angles toward the girl. The laugh. The lean.

When the camera swings away and comes back, they’re kissing. She has her hand on his jaw. The audio catches something under the music—brief, soft, a sound she makes that has no business being audible over the speakers but is, somehow—and Shane has watched the clip enough times now that he knows where to brace for it. He still doesn't quite brace in time.

He puts his phone down.

He picks it up. His mouth feels dry.

He watches the interview. Is not confidence. Is just truth. Why I pretend otherwise? The woman's composure going soft three frames before she laughs. The grin coming open like a door.

Shane thinks about what he looks like when he smiles at someone. His smile is correct. It arrives when it should and it does what it's supposed to do. It has never made anyone forget they were being professional.

He watches the party clip again. Second watch: the laugh, loud and real. The lean.

Third watch: he notices Rozanov's free hand—his right, not the one holding a drink—is at his side for the first twenty seconds, and then at second twenty-two it rises, brief, and settles at the small of her back. Not pulling her in. Just there. Like a question with an obvious answer.

She doesn't move away.

Fourth watch, the camera swings back at second thirty-one and there's the sound under the music, that brief soft sound, and Shane lies in the dark in his billet room and watches it. He rewinds. Watches it again, and again, and again.

In February, a couple of veterans were gone for a morning. By the time Switch got on the bus, the room had already gone quiet in a way that meant everyone knew.

He didn’t sit down. Just stood in the aisle, one hand on the back of a seat, looking at the room like he was checking what kind of shape the story had already taken.

“Rule fucking one,” he said. “You don’t do stupid fucking shit where it becomes public.”

No one moved.

“Doesn’t matter what started it. Doesn’t matter what was said. Doesn’t matter who thought what they thought they heard. Once it stops being contained, it stops being yours.”

A pause.

“And when it starts with somebody running their fucking mouth about someone else’s fucking girl, or somebody else’s fucking situation, or whatever it was,” he added, like it was just one possible category among others, “you already know how it’s going to end if it gets out. So you don’t let it get out, got it?”

He said it plainly. Not defending it. Not condemning it. A couple of the veterans nodded once, small and automatic, like they were acknowledging rain they’d already dressed for.

Switch finally sat down. “Now move the fuck on. We’ve got practice.”

The bus stayed quiet. Nobody picked it up.

Shane watched the backs of seats in front of him. People stopped talking when Switch talked. Started again after. He tried to map what got said twice and what didn’t get said at all. Tried to figure out how fast something stopped belonging to the person who said it. He thought about how quickly a story could be reshaped depending on who repeated it first. He thought about the way Switch had said somebody else’s girl like the important part was the reaction, not the origin.

Shane sat in his stall later and thought about what that story would look like in a scouting report. He thought about the kind of stupid that required you to be twenty years old in the OHL and still getting arrested outside bars and whether you would ever not be twenty years old in the OHL to someone whose opinion of you was formed on that exact night.

The scouts started appearing with real regularity this year—clipboards, quiet eyes, sitting slightly apart from everyone else, not looking at their phones. Shane started noticing them in how everything else shifts.

The Hockey Canada evaluation report appeared with his name in the first section—players of note, national level:

Hollander, Shane, C, Kingston Frontenacs, DOB 10/05/1991. Physical profile: 5'10, 172 lbs, project to 6'0, 185-190. Skating: elite. Shot: elite. Hockey sense: elite. Compete: elite. Intangibles: strong. Leadership: developing.

Note: exceptional hockey IQ, generational. Anticipates second and third actions before first unfolds, allowing him to dictate entry points into structure rather than react within it. Does not rely on physical separation to generate advantage; creates advantage through timing displacement and early commitment to lanes. Ranked P1 nationally.

He read it twice. Then he found the section on international players of note.

Rozanov, Ilya, LW/C, Krasnaya Armiya, DOB 15/06/1991. Physical profile: 6'1, 192 lbs, project to 6'2, 210. Skating: elite. Shot: elite; measured 105+ mph in September evaluation. Hockey sense: elite. Compete: elite. Intangibles: inconsistent internal read; varies by usage/context.

Note: rare combination of size, pace, and touch, generational. Wins space through contact engagement rather than evasion. Plays through pressure rather than around it. Offensive decisions appear instinctive rather than structured; does not show visible hesitation in congested ice. Read progression not clearly trackable. Debate: instinct vs lack of readable patterning. Ranking: P1 internationally across major agencies (consensus talent; stylistic evaluation variance noted).

Generational.

Shane read this word three times. Generational. He put the report down. He called his mother.

The Rozanov mention, she said, before he brought it up, because she had already seen it before he called.

Yeah.

Accurate?

From what I've seen.

Are you going to be better?

Yes.

Then don't let the comparison become the story. Because it was already starting with Worlds looming. Pause. Are you watching his tape.

Some.

Some.

A lot.

Good, she said. Just make sure you're studying the right things.

What does that mean.

You'll know when you need to.

He hung up and opened his laptop and watched Rozanov's footage for ninety minutes, and he knew she meant something else, but he didn’t stop.

Shane watches the party clip on a Wednesday night with dinner going cold next to him on the coffee table. He’s on his sixth watch of the evening. He doesn’t count anymore.

He notices, this time, something he hadn't caught before: Rozanov, at second eighteen—before the hand rises, before anything—glances once at the room. Brief, almost nothing. A check. Shane has watched this frame a dozen times now trying to figure out what it is, whether it’s vanity or something else. He thinks it's something else.

He thinks it’s counting, quick and automatic. Shane does it too. All the time. He just thought it was only him.

Second twenty-two. The hand rising. The small of her back.

Second thirty-one. The camera returning.

The sound.

Shane watches it again.

He thinks about Amélie. He thinks about the hallway and the look he'd recognized and everything that had followed and the way it had just become something he had and didn’t think about. He thinks about whether Amélie's laugh had carried over the music at that party or whether he would even remember if it had.

He’s not sure he’s ever been in a room like that. Not really. For Rozanov it’s just second eighteen, a glance, then everything after. Nothing Shane does looks like that. He starts the clip over.

Shane’s third OHL season opened in September and the World Juniors roster would be announced in December. Everyone already knew the roster before it was announced.

Rozanov was already there before anything was official.

Shane added one line to the bottom of the untitled document and then sat there looking at it. He deleted the line. He closed the laptop and went to practice.

The Hockey Canada camp in November was the first time Shane was in a room that was actually trying to be the national team, not just preparation for it. The best players from every major junior program in the country in the same building for a week, all of them performing for the same small audience of scouts and staff, all of them careful in ways they wouldn't be on their regular teams.

Shane was good at this. He’d been practicing it for years: playing like he wasn’t being watched while everyone was. He ran his inventory. He did the work. He came out of camp with his name where he expected it.

Canada. World Juniors. First line center.

He called his father from the rink parking lot and listened to his father’s voice settling into too-big pride. He called his mother and she said I knew before he got the words out, and then: your positioning in the neutral zone drill on Wednesday was sloppy. I watched the stream. Fix it.

I know, Shane said. I already fixed it.

Good, she said. Then we have nothing to worry about.

PART SIX: WORLDS

Saskatchewan in December was not like Kingston or Ottawa. It was dry and absolute, cold that didn’t soften anywhere.

Shane stepped off the plane and breathed it and felt sharpening that only came with games that actually mattered. The noise in his head dropped out. This was the point.

Three years of billet houses. Of carrying the bags. Of the sex interview and the bus bathroom and Desjardins and Theatre and the locker room language and the roster politics and Amélie and the fake Jess. Three years of the inventory—voice, hands, posture, eyes—still running. Three years of the Rozanov file, now at eleven pages plus the untitled list.

He had not seen Rozanov in person, only on screens.

An hour before the semifinals against Sweden, Shane was crossing the pavement outside the arena when he saw Rozanov. He was half-turned away from the doors, smoking in a section clearly not meant for it. The cigarette looked entirely correct in his hand, like it belonged there more than the signage did.

Rozanov was taller in person. The curls were longer than in any clip, messier.

Shane stopped. “I don’t think you’re supposed to smoke here,” he said.

Rozanov looked at him. One slow blink, as if it wasn’t urgent enough to process.

“Okay,” he said. His eyebrows came together, not confused so much as waiting.

Shane nodded once, as if this had resolved something. “Um. I’m Hollander. Shane Hollander.”

He extended his hand.

Rozanov looked at it for a second longer than etiquette required, then took it. His grip was firm, no adjustment in it. Shane felt the calluses against his own, the warmth bleeding into his palm.

“I just wanted to introduce myself,” Shane said. “You’re an awesome player to watch.”

“…yes,” Rozanov said. His mouth was pinched.

His English was functional, improving in real time, but still slightly delayed. His eyes didn’t leave Shane’s face—not quite focused on words, more on him.

Shane didn’t register it. People looked at him sometimes.

A silence opened up between them that neither of them moved to close. The cigarette burned down a little between Rozanov’s fingers.

Shane shifted his weight. “I should probably go. They’re waiting for me.” He hesitated—a beat too long, visible—then reached out his hand again. Second handshake in under five minutes.

Rozanov took his hand again, cigarette still between his fingers, and when he moved it to his mouth to free his grip, the corner of his mouth lifted—barely there, almost not a smile, but shaped exactly like the one from the twelve seconds at the end of the interview clip.

“You will not be so nice,” Rozanov said, “when we beat you.”

“That’s—that’s not going to happen,” Shane said.

Rozanov tilted his head: we will see. Then he was already turning away, mid-exhale.

Shane stood there for a moment longer than he needed to. He had watched him for three years. One file named, one not. None of it had accounted for how Rozanov looked at him.

He went inside.

Canada vs. Russia. Finals. Shane had eleven pages. He had three years. He had every version of Rozanov on ice that he could find and he'd built a comprehensive model of how Rozanov played and how Rozanov thought and how Rozanov set up plays that looked spontaneous because they were, in a weird sense, spontaneous. Wildly intelligent in a way that was too fast to plan.

The puck dropped.

Rozanov won the faceoff. Of course. Shane had modeled this and was already applying the response—getting the puck back within five seconds, resetting the zone. He tracked Rozanov through the neutral zone: hip position telegraphing the backhand, right-side dominant, slight forward lean on the leading edge.

I know you, Shane thought. I know exactly what you're going to do.

Forty-three seconds later Rozanov did something that was not in any version Shane had modeled. It came from a left-wing wall retrieval that should have been nothing—routine chip-and-chase, dead end, defensive reset. Instead it became a sequence. Shane's brain was still processing what Rozanov had done when the puck was already in the Canadian net. A two-on-one that had materialized from the read Rozanov had apparently established eight seconds earlier, with a positional choice that had looked like a neutral recovery but had actually been a setup, three exchanges ahead, for something that now looked inevitable.

1-0. Russia. Forty-three seconds.

Shane won the next faceoff. Skated into position. His brain was running very fast. His heart, too. He looked across the ice.

Rozanov was looking at him. There was a play he was ignoring and a puck somewhere still, and he was looking at Shane. With the expression from the pavement outside—recognition, nothing to file it under. Now you've seen it. Now we can start.

The idea settled somewhere, warm and unwanted.

Canada played hard. Shane played excellent hockey. Two goals, including one that came off a broken play he turned into something clean that wasn't, including one backhand that would be in clip compilations for years. It wasn't enough. Russia won by one in a game that the evaluation circuit would discuss for two full seasons.

At the handshake line Shane moved through the Russian players with the correct face, the loss already processed and filed, and got to Rozanov.

Rozanov shook his hand. Held it a half-second longer than required.

"Good game." Shane meant it. He hated that he meant it.

Rozanov’s mouth didn't quite grin—the precursor to it, maybe, or a different version. He looked at Shane the way he’d looked at him across the ice after forty-three seconds, something resolved in it.

He let go of Shane’s hand. He moved down the line.

Shane stood there for a moment in the noise. He wasn’t sure he’d ever felt this alive, which was particularly stupid after a loss. But his nervous system didn’t care. He was practically vibrating with it.

He thought: I’m going to beat you for the rest of our lives. He thought: I need to understand what you see that I don’t see yet. He thought of a third thing that lived in the untitled document, in lines written and deleted over and over again and that he still didn’t have a name for.

In the dressing room Shane sat in his stall for a while without taking his gear off and thought about the forty-three-second sequence. Thought about what had been established in the first eight seconds of it that he'd missed entirely. Thought about eleven pages of notes that had somehow not been enough.

He opened a new document that night. He titled it: the 43-second sequence—analysis. He worked until two in the morning. He added six pages.

Home for New Year’s.

Shane helped his father shovel the driveway, the two of them working in the comfortable silence that was always how they were together in physical tasks. His breath coming out in visible clouds. His father's back making that new sound when he twisted.

"I watched every game on the stream," his father said. "The Russia game."

Shane shoveled.

"That thing he did in the first minute. I must have replayed it fifteen times."

"I've watched it more than that," Shane said.

"Can you figure it out?"

"Getting there."

His father nodded. "You'll figure it out," he said.

Shane looked at the snow. "Thanks, Dad."

“Of course, bud.”

“I mean…for everything.”

David looked at him. Really looked at him. A boy, or a man, or something strange in between—Yuna's artwork, mostly, but with David's hands in it somewhere, in the quiet places she hadn't gotten to.

“Of course.”

His mother, when he walked her through the forty-three-second sequence later that night with his laptop, listened with the same focused attention she brought to everything. Watched the clip twice.

"So what does he know that you don't know yet," she said in the same voice that had faced down her in-laws, and her job, and every narrow-minded man on the Manotick minor hockey board.

"I'm not sure," Shane said, in the same voice. "Something about how the setup begins before the play begins."

"Then stop trying to catch him after it starts," she said.

The 2009 draft was in Ottawa.

In Ottawa. Which meant Shane's parents were there, which meant extended family was there, which meant people from Manotick hockey he'd been proving wrong since he was six were there, which meant the Delaney couple from board who'd assigned their sons to call penalties on him for three years would see it on the local news.

Rozanov went first overall.

First name called, first jersey held up, first walk across the stage that made the room settle into a single direction of attention. Nothing about it was dramatic, but it was decisive, and for some reason that made Shane feel stupid.

They put the Boston jersey on him and it fit like it had been waiting for him all this time. Shane told himself he only noticed that because of the shoulders.

He went second. When his name was called the noise changed, not louder or quieter but more divided. He walked out, shook hands, looked into cameras that kept firing in uneven bursts of white light, and tried to keep his face in the same neutral position he’d practiced in mirrors without ever calling it practice. Present. Controlled. I said I would and I did.

His mother was crying in the stands, which he had never seen before and would not see again for years till his first Stanley Cup. His father was next to her with his arm around her and Shane looked at them for a long moment.

Then they brought him and Rozanov back together. Side by side again for photos. Flashes came in clusters. Too bright, too fast. Shane kept resetting his expression so that it would not interfere with the image later. Rozanov didn’t reset his at all.

At one point someone asked them to stand closer. Shane moved in. Rozanov didn’t, which meant Shane adjusted twice without deciding to.

A reporter asked Rozanov something in Russian. He answered slowly, and laughed once—small, controlled, like the sound had been permitted rather than given away—and Shane found himself tracking the rhythm of it instead of the meaning. The same way he’d been tracking it for three years. The same thing he still couldn’t find the bottom of. He was aware that this was the part people would look at the most after. First and second as if they belonged in the same sentence for reasons beyond order.

Afterward, when they were separated again, Rozanov was pulled into another cluster of cameras. First overall meant repetition until the image stopped belonging to the moment and started belonging to everyone else.

Shane stood a few steps off and watched it happen, not close enough to be part of it, not far enough to be removed from it. There was no clean position for second. Then a handler touched his elbow and turned him toward the next camera, and he let himself be moved.

He called Karim from the parking lot afterward. Karim picked up and said holy shit before Shane could say anything. Yeah, Shane said. There was a brief silence and then Karim said you deserved it and Shane said thanks and Karim said no, man. I mean you really deserved it. More than any of those other assholes.

They didn't say anything else for a while, just the ambient noise of two parking lots in different cities.

Shane broke it first: See you Monday.

A pause, and then: See you Monday.

CODA: OCTOBER

Shane slept in his childhood bed for the first time in months. Glow-in-the-dark stars still stuck to the ceiling from when he was nine. His mother’s coffee maker starting at six-fifteen. His father laughing at something on TV, the surprised kind, like it had caught him off guard.

Shane lay in the dark and looked at the stars. Winning the second Worlds felt clean. Expected. Like something had completed correctly. He'd found his teammates after, celebrated correctly, been exactly who he was supposed to be.

But underneath that, threaded through everything else, was Rozanov.

Sweat beading down the back of his neck after the gold medal game. His hand brushing Shane’s passing over the water bottle the night of the draft. The half-second too long in the handshake line afterward—see you in October. The cigarette between his fingers outside the arena in Saskatchewan. His voice around a question about Boston, and did Shane think people liked it there. The look he kept giving Shane that didn’t fit anywhere cleanly.

The tactical document was at seventeen pages now. The untitled one existed separately. He still hadn’t named it. Naming it changed what it was. The folder was almost full.

In September Shane would go to Montreal. Rozanov would go to Boston. Their names would start appearing beside each other permanently now. Standings to worry about. Broadcast graphics. Calder conversations. Canada and Russia for the next decade if things unfolded the way everyone expected.

But he just kept seeing Rozanov at seventeen, the first time: leaning against the concrete outside the arena, smoke curling through cold air, looking at Shane with open amusement and sharp appetite like he knew exactly how closely Shane had been watching him.

The galvanic feeling of being seen back.

His father's laugh came up through the floor again. Shane lay there and listened to it, and smiled without deciding to, and thought: October.

He closed his eyes and let himself want it.