19
The First Hockey Practice
MASTERMIND: Liam Hooper.
PROVEN SKILLS AS POTENTIAL CAPTAIN: Rich parents, self-starter-ish-ness.
RECRUITMENT TACTICS: Definitely: flyers. Maybe: word of mouth, online message boards, bathroom stall graffiti, who knows? Liam is persistent.
POOL OF PLAYERS: The greater Austin area.
EXPECTED PROFICIENCY LEVEL: “Ice is slippery.”
LIKELIHOOD OF PAIN: High.
In hindsight, Norris really didn’t know Liam at all.
He’d once decided to scribble everything he knew about the guy in his notebook as he did with most people who crossed his path often enough in Austin, Texas. Liam was white. Liam was rich—not just in comparison to him and Judith, but in the official summering-is-a-verb sense of the word. Liam had a powerful, intense stare and a low, soothing voice that might one day make him a spiritual guru or a very intimidating drug dealer’s henchman.
But mostly, Liam had an innate, natural ability to convince people to join his cause. (Which again boded well for either drug dealing or spiritual leadership conferencing.) That was probably why the guy had somehow managed to convince eighteen people to show up at their first official hockey practice.
“How?!” Norris had asked, walking into the warehouse with his skates around his neck and a stack of traffic cones for their usual session, only to find a few clusters of guys and four girls, in mismatched attire, all waving to Liam. Some were already circling the ice while others stood on the edges, awaiting instructions, looking excited but uncomfortable.
“You’re never alone in your interests,” Liam had said. “You just got to dig a little further.”
“That sounds like the rallying cry of perverts across the internet.”
“Or hockey fans in the greater Austin area.” Liam smirked proudly. Norris was on the verge of congratulating Liam when a voice bellowed at them from across the ice.
“Yo, finally! Where have you guys been?”
Patrick “Hairy Armpits” Lamarra barreled toward them, skates already improperly laced.
“No!” Norris said, stopping dead short and turning to Liam.
“He was by far one of the most enthused people,” Liam said. “He might surprise you.”
Patrick stopped himself by using Norris as a speed bump. “Are you ready to do this, my dudes?” he exclaimed, bumping his gloved hand against Norris’s head.
“Give him a chance,” Liam preemptively mouthed to Norris before turning to give Patrick a knowing nod.
“Right,” Patrick said, catching on to Liam’s look and turning to Norris, chin slightly raised. “Listen, Norris, we’re good, right? I probably shouldn’t have gotten physical that time. . . . Y’know, at school.”
“You mean that time you shoved me down a flight of stairs?” Norris really had no incentive to make this easy for him.
“Right, that,” Patrick said, his tone more whiny than uncomfortable. “Bygones or whatever? I’d really like to play with you guys. If you’ll let me.”
Liam was quietly observing the exchange. He seemed invested, so Norris thought it best to simply go along with it.
“Bygones or whatever.” Norris sighed. “Let’s just do this.”
Liam grinned and pulled a whistle out from under his jersey, giving it three sharp blows.
“All right, folks, let’s gather around! Welcome to our first official hockey practice!” He seemed to have the whole leadership thing down; if he had been serious about Norris captaining the team, Norris hoped it had been forgotten.
The scrimmage—their first real attempt at an actual seven-on-seven hockey game—was fast, messy, and would have had half the players benched halfway through the first period had it been any legitimate hockey league. There were only two periods, clocking twenty minutes each. Collectively, the sixteen players involved broke about thirty-six rules. Despite their teams’ ill-defined positions, Norris mostly played defense and made sure to go easy on the rougher skaters, still looking a bit wobbly on their feet. A handful of them were surprisingly agile. Norris had to admit that even Patrick had a certain flair to his skating, tracing loose loops around the thin ice.
Norris only had a passing knowledge of some of the other players. He learned from the half-time chitchat that Brett, a nineteen-year-old, was from Boston, as was his cousin, who was also his roommate now that the two were in college. A few more were college aged. Apparently, Liam had placed an online ad for interested players under the Activities Partner section of a popular local classified website. Norris was starting to think that a friendship with Liam would end with the two of them in some serial killer’s basement somewhere because Liam wanted to take a chain-welding class with an expert.
Keeping count of the goals quickly became meaningless for the purpose of their scrimmage, and Norris stopped keeping track at five to three. There were no dressing rooms to speak of, so practice ended with the sweaty, smelly players dousing themselves in deodorant in the corner.
Norris and Liam took care of the nets and traffic cones and stray pucks, watching from afar as the team—jeez, their team—came together.
“Thanks to our boys for bringing us all together today!” Patrick cheered as they all headed out of the warehouse.
Afterward, everyone grabbed a bite to eat at a nearby traveling taco stand and gobbled up the food in the skating rink’s air-conditioned lobby. Norris would have normally excused himself from all extraneous socialization, but Liam was his ride home. Plus, he had seen that particular taco truck around Austin, and it was also highlighted in one of Judith’s pamphlets—and he really was starving.
“My ankles are kind of killing me,” Pat-reek admitted with a mouthful of cheese, shrimp, and jalapeños, reaching down to rub his ankles as they ate.
“You need better skates,” Norris begrudgingly counseled. “These are too big for you.”
“These are my cousin’s. Skates are so fucking expensive.”
Norris sighed. “I know a couple of websites that have good deals on skates,” he said, pointing to Liam’s blades. “They won’t be as good as Liam’s, but you can find some decent blades. I could send you some links or whatever.”
“Nice, dude! Thanks,” Patrick said, elbowing him in the side.
“We were just wondering . . .” one of the players whose name Norris could not remember asked. “Do we have a name yet?”
“Not yet,” Liam said. “It shouldn’t be a unilateral decision.”
“Not the Bats,” Norris said quickly.
“Agreed,” one of the guys said. “Everything in this town is Bats or Longhorns. We need a third animal on the field.”
By the end of the meal, Norris somehow had a dozen new names on his phone and their animal avatar was still undecided, locked somewhere between the Austin Rolling Dices and the Austin Winterbringers.
The buzz from practice was starting to fade, and Norris’s muscles were falling asleep. It would be the best soreness to wake up to the next day, but he was getting ready to pass out after a good shower. Liam was driving Norris home, for which Norris was grateful. His forehead was already glistening in Austin’s late evening heat—no pummeling sun but still eighty degrees in freaking March.
Norris opened his mouth to complain—about his sore muscles, about the heat, about the fact that he was now committed to spend actual time with Patrick “Hairy Armpits” Lamarra at least once a week—but as he looked around at the group, joking around and laughing as they recalled the best moments of their first team practice, he closed it again and smiled.