Taking a Shot (4 page)

“You could give her that good memory,” he said. Okay, so maybe he really
was
weird.

I had always known everyone could see straight through me, and Zee and Soupy had been giving me shit about my crush on Katie for over a year, but Kally hadn’t been around very long. How was it that he could already tell?

“Take her to her prom?” I shook my head. “Webs would kill me.”

“This isn’t about Webs. It’s about Katie.” Kally shifted even more in his seat, so much that he was practically in the back with me and had to be breaking the law sitting that way. “Hopefully she’ll be fine in a few months or a year, and she can make a lot more good memories—but she might not be fine. She deserves to have this one, and her dad will see that eventually. He’ll come around. But he can’t give it to her—that kind of memory. You can.”

“He’s right,” Soupy said, his eyes flicking up to the rearview mirror to meet mine. “And she needs a reason to fight. She looks like she’s giving up.”

I knew Kally was right, at least some part of me did, and what Soupy said about her giving up made me feel physically ill. But still… “How the hell am I supposed to get Webs to let me take her to her prom?”

Soupy turned into our parking garage. “You listen to what Zee said. You do what you know is right even though you’re scared.”

“You never know how long you’ll have with her,” Kally said. He turned around in his seat, facing forward again. “Don’t put things off, because you might regret it someday.”

AARON LUDWICZAK DIDN’T
see the Colorado player cutting across the middle of the ice toward him, not even in the half-second before he got hit.

I didn’t notice who ran him over. All I could focus on was how hard Luddy’s head hit the ice when he dropped. The impact snapped his helmet off, and it went skidding across the ice in the opposite direction of his suddenly prone body.

“Fuck!” Scotty Thomas, our head coach, paced behind me on the bench while the trainers and medical staff headed out to check on Luddy.

The boys and I were all on our feet, trying to get a better look. After a minute, they had Luddy up on his knees and were helping him stand. That was a good sign—Luddy getting up—even if it wasn’t completely on his own. That meant at least they weren’t going to take him off on a stretcher. They’d had to do that with our starting goalie, Nicklas Ericsson, a few months back. Nicky had only returned from his concussion a couple of games ago. Not that you could tell anything about a concussion based on whether a stretcher was needed or not. And Luddy could still have one.

Hard to imagine that wasn’t the case when you saw the way he hit the ice. The arena crew kept replaying the impact on the Jumbotron overhead, making sure we wouldn’t be able to erase it from our memories.

The trainers brought him past the bench on the way to the tunnel, and he nodded at us. “Give ’em hell, boys.”

Eddie Masters, the head trainer, stopped right in front of me. His eyes were focused on Scotty behind me. “We’re taking him out of the game for concussion protocol. We’ll know more later.”

“Yeah. Right,” Scotty said. “Fuck.” He looked up and down the bench, and the two assistant coaches came over to him. “I don’t want to screw with Zee’s line. They’ve been working together too well lately.”

Good. That was my line. Zee, Soupy, and I had made up the second line for big stretches of the last two seasons. I was pretty sure all three of us liked it that way, too.

“What about moving Kally up to take Luddy’s place on the top line?” Hammer suggested. They’d had Kally skating on the third line this game, but he’d been all over the place while they tried to find a good fit for him, to find someone he could have chemistry with and get him scoring again…pretty much everywhere but the top line.

Scotty dragged a hand over his face. “He hasn’t scored a fucking goal since he got here.” He grabbed the clipboard from Hammer, scouring it with his eyes. You could almost see the way he was trying to piece together line combinations in his head.

“What better options do we have?” Hammer said. “At least for the rest of the game, and then we’ll see what happens with Luddy. Besides, he and RJ are familiar with each other.” RJ had taken over as the top-line center when they’d made the trade sending Sergei Ivanov and Pavel Spanov to the Islanders.

I didn’t know if those two, Kally and RJ, had played together much when they were with the Islanders—at least not since Kally had stopped scoring—but they’d at least watched each other a lot for the last few years. That could help with knowing what the other guy would do.

“Yeah. Fine.” Scotty didn’t look too thrilled, but he didn’t have much time to debate it right now—the ref was heading over to the bench to speed things along. “Kally, you’ll be with RJ and Eller now. Jonny, you’re moving up to Hank’s line. Let’s put this one away for Luddy.”

He gave Zee a nod, and so he, Soupy, and I headed out for the next face-off. We were up two to one halfway through the third. Keeping this Colorado team limited to a single goal was a pretty rare feat. They tended to score early and often, which was a good thing for them since they had problems on the defensive side of things.

We really ought to have scored more against them to this point, though, considering how leaky their defense could be. The less time that remained on the clock, the more desperate they were getting to score. Our one-goal lead wasn’t likely to hold up, but we needed to get the full two points for a regulation win tonight since we were tied with them in the playoff standings with less than a month remaining in the regular season.

The officials were set to drop the puck in our offensive zone, but Colorado had sent Matt Duchene and his line out to take the face-off. Duchene had owned Zee on the dot all night.

Zee motioned all of us over to him before we lined up, including Andrew Jensen and Keith Burns, our top two defensemen. “I have no chance of pulling it back. Not tonight. I’m going forward with it, straight for the net.”

“Right,” Soupy said. “So be ready for rebounds.”

“Exactly.”

We got into position, with me on Zee’s right and Soupy on his left. If I could get past the Colorado
D
, I would be the first player to the crease. They should be expecting me to go to the middle and try to help Zee fish the puck out with all the difficulties he’d been having tonight.

Even though I knew Zee planned to shoot it on the net, he could have fooled me. The way he was holding his stick, it looked like he had every intention of winning possession the traditional way and letting our
D
set up our attack. I tried not to grin and give anything away, but everyone knew I didn’t have a poker face.

I got lucky that the linesman didn’t mess around with dropping the puck—I didn’t have to try to keep a straight face for very long. Zee shot it forward just like he’d planned and confused the Colorado
D
. Soupy and I both got past our guys. I got to the side of the net just after their goaltender made a kick save. Too bad for him he kicked it out right onto the tape of my stick.

He was still sprawled on the ice from the save, so I roofed the puck. It went in just over the goalie’s glove and under the crossbar.

“That was a fucking beauty,” Soupy shouted at me over the dual roars of the crowd and the goal horn.

We all skated over to the bench and got fist bumps from the guys. Scotty gave us a nod so we stayed out for the next face-off.

Now Colorado was really pushing back. Their forwards were skilled, speedy, and determined even during their worst games, and tonight wasn’t anything close to that. For the next several minutes, we were barely keeping our heads above water. If not for Nicky making one ridiculous save after another, they would have easily tied the game and moved ahead of us.

They hadn’t, though, despite the fact that we were spending a hell of a lot more time in our own end than was good for us.

With only a couple of minutes left, RJ’s line managed to clear the puck out of the zone so they could get off for a line change. Scotty shouted for my line to replace them. I was halfway on the ice when Colorado sent the puck careening back in. It hit Kally’s skate. I had to hold myself dangling over the boards so we didn’t get called for having too many men on the ice.

He shot it back to the other end and got onto the bench, and I was able to drop down to my skates finally.

They didn’t waste any time retrieving the puck again and driving into our zone. As soon as they got set up, their goaltender headed for the bench so they could bring on an extra attacker. The way Colorado cycled the puck, it was like they were putting on a passing clinic. We couldn’t quite catch up to them. Every time we’d prevent a pass one direction, they’d find a seam going the other way.

A hard pass to the point. I dropped to block the shot, and it hit off my shin and bounced right back to their
D
. The point-man sent it to the half-wall, then to the other defenseman streaking in for a back door opportunity. Nicky made the stop, but he couldn’t control the rebound. Colorado retrieved it again and kept the pressure on.

We needed a whistle. Colorado kept cycling the puck, kept us chasing them for so long we were just trying to suck in air and not blow the game.

They sent the puck back to the other point. He passed it straight to the guy I was covering, who had his stick cocked for a one-timer. I squared up to block it, and this time it hit my skate. The puck sailed between both defenders and out of the zone.

They spun around to chase it, but I somehow found another gear despite my exhaustion. I beat them to it at center ice.

I took a swing.

The puck went in the net.

The Moda Center went berserk.

After that, with a three-goal lead, it was pretty much just a matter of running down the clock without giving them anything. My line headed back to the bench, and Hammer gave me a solid whack on the back of my helmet. “Nice work, Babs,” he said. “Fucking right.”

I was watching the action on the ice when Soupy elbowed me and pointed to a group of girls in the front row behind the penalty boxes. They were all wearing skimpy tops and looked so young I wondered why they didn’t have dads like Webs running guys off. Each of them held a sign up to the glass.

Be my prom date, Jamie
.

Tiegan + Jamie = 4Eva
.

My Goal: Make a Storm with Jamie Babcock
.

There were probably half a dozen more than that, too. I’d started ignoring the signs about a week into my rookie season; they were only a distraction. The boys never let me off the hook about it, though. Soupy and Zee kept trying to get me to auction myself off as a prom date for charity or some shit like that.

“Fuck off,” I said to Soupy.

He laughed. “You could have your pick of them. I’m sure they’d all be thrilled to go to prom with you if you’d rather take one of them than Katie.”

There wasn’t a girl in the world I’d rather do anything with than Katie Weber, and he fucking knew it. Hell, apparently everyone knew it, judging by my earlier conversation with Kally. If they hadn’t known it before this morning when she’d had her dad shave her hair off and I could barely hold it together, they all knew it now. I hadn’t been able to look away, hadn’t been able to hide anything I’d felt while watching it.

No poker face.

The horn sounded, marking the end of the game.

I couldn’t get down the tunnel fast enough.