The Understatement of the Year Read online

  — Rikker

  I ate a late dinner of crab cakes and lobster roll at some fish place that Coach herded us to. And then everyone walked back toward the hotel in plenty of time for our ten o’clock curfew. But I dawdled, walking down the side streets, buying myself an ice cream cone in a drowsy little cafe. I liked cities. I liked their busy sidewalks and their anonymity.

  Where I grew up in western Michigan, there was only a taste of the city life. Most everyone favored the dull suburbs. When I moved to Vermont for tenth grade, I thought I’d hate the rural atmosphere. But it actually grew on me, because it was more honest than the aggressively tended lawns of my youth. There were ragged meadows, with cows munching them. There were miles of pine forest, and the outline of the Green Mountains everywhere you looked.

  Still, I preferred the city. Especially a good, old one. My ex-boyfriend and I used to drive ninety minutes from Burlington into Montreal, where the drinking age (and therefore the clubbing age) was only eighteen. We had a blast finding all the gay bars and trying them out.

  A group of college kids passed me on the sidewalk, laughing together. There was no denying that I was lonely, and letting it get to me tonight.

  At ten o’clock on the dot, I walked into the hotel carrying my duffel bag and a heavy helping of dread. When Bella had given me my key card, she’d done it with a frown. “If you see anybody drinking before the game tomorrow, will you tell me?”

  “Um, sure?” You’d have to be a pretty big idiot to want to drink before getting onto the ice with a bunch of guys who were trying to squish you like a bug.

  She didn’t say anything about my rooming situation, so I was pretty sure who I’d find. Unless he’d fled, somehow.

  Upstairs, the door to room 312 opened with a mechanical click, and I pushed inside. It was so dark in there that I assumed I was alone. In fact, when my eyes adjusted to the dimness it startled the crap out of me to see Graham sitting at the little table near the window, his chin parked on his folded hands.

  I dropped my bag on the floor and fumbled for one of the bedside lamps. Even when I clicked it on, making a circle of yellow light on the rug, he didn’t move.

  “Hola, Miguel,” I said, my voice low.

  There was no response.

  Seriously? Even if I could understand his reluctance to speak to me in a room full of people, ignoring me right now was asinine. He made me feel like I was starring in that movie where Bruce Willis is dead, but doesn’t know it.

  I should have just headed into the bathroom to brush my teeth and pretend like it didn’t matter. But it did matter. And during the next ten seconds, my anger swelled. I was suddenly livid, with the sound of blood pounding in my ears. Because no matter how much you might want to pretend a person doesn’t exist, you can’t do that. Especially if that person is your teammate.

  Especially if that person used to be your best friend.

  Crossing the room, I stood over him. He didn’t move. Not a muscle. So I raised a hand, hovering my palm over his forehead, where all that soft blond hair framed his face. I used to run my fingers through it. But I didn’t do that now. Instead, I used the heel of my hand to give his head a violent backward shove.

  He moved then, because I really didn’t give him a choice. His neck snapped back until it collided with the wall, and his wild eyes met mine. But he didn’t say a word. And it made me so fucking crazy that I was close to losing it. I didn’t even plan to, but I made a fist.

  “Hit me,” he whispered then. And the expression on his face held so much pain that you might think I’d already socked him.

  “FUCK you,” I spat. I wanted to hit him — I really did. But the small flicker of sanity that I still possessed decided to surface, reminding me that I would only get in trouble for it. He probably wanted me to deck him so I’d get kicked off the team.

  Not worth it.

  Not worth it.

  Just breathe.

  I didn’t punch him. Instead, I reached up like a punk-ass kid and flicked him on the forehead. That’s proof right there that I was, at that moment, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Hell, just then, I wished he’d hit me. Because then I’d have a good reason to feel this insane.

  But that didn’t happen either. Instead, Graham reached up and caught my retreating hand by the wrist. Awkwardly, he pulled the back of my hand tight against his forehead, trapping it there. He closed his eyes, and heaved out a breath that had the weight of the world in it.

  Stunned, I was frozen in place for a split second. My brain went temporarily offline at the feeling of Graham’s hand closing around mine. For a long second, I could only manage to take in the warmth of his palm and the trembling fingers.

  Freaked out now, I jerked my hand out of his grip. Taking two steps backward, my knees hit the back of one of the beds, bringing me down to a seated position. Time out, my consciousness pleaded, trying to catch up. And all the while my heart slammed into my ribs.

  “I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely.

  I cleared my throat. “For what?”

  He gave his head a single, violent shake. “For everything. The whole frickin’ thing. It’s way too late to say it. But I am. Sorry, I mean.”

  Whoa. More silence from me, while I waited for the world to stop tilting. “Okay,” I said, taking in some extra oxygen.

  “I’m sorry I ran.” He put his head down in his hands, and I could see his chest rise and fall with each breath that sawed in and out.

  Well, fuck. A part of me had been waiting five years to hear this. But now that he’d actually apologized, I found that it hurt too much to talk about it. “Um, thanks for the sentiment. But I ran too, dude. It’s just that you ran faster.”

  See, running away wasn’t Graham’s crime. Running from thugs who are yelling “sick little faggots!” is not a bad call. The real damage was that Graham never spoke to me again. And as far as I knew, he never told a soul that he was there the day I was attacked.

  Although, if I’d been thinking straight in that E.R., I probably wouldn’t have told anyone either. But they gave me painkillers at the hospital. So my parents were treated to a sloppy version of events. It was enough to freak them out for good.

  By the time the police arrived to ask me why the thugs had beat me up, I said what my parents told me to say. “They wanted my wallet.” The cops didn’t even bother to ask why I still had it. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t fooling anyone.

  My parents’ solution was to get me the hell out of Dodge. They thought that if they sent me away from Graham, I wouldn’t stay gay. “Vermont will be good for you,” they’d said when they brought up my grandmother. “You’ll go there to heal.”

  Permanently, though.

  Yeah. Thinking about this was really not my favorite activity.

  Graham was still slumped into his hands at the table. He looked like a man who was waiting to be executed for his crimes. And even though I’d been mad at him for five years, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Okay, Graham. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  I waited until he picked his head up to look at me. It was the first time he’d made eye contact on purpose since I’d come to Harkness.

  “I’m going to stop torturing you,” I said. “No more…” I didn’t even know what to call the taunting I’d done to him. “I won’t bring it up again.”

  “I deserved it,” he said.

  Hearing say that really took me back, because that was a classic Graham response. He had that still-waters-run-deep thing going on. Whenever we fought about XBox, or whether one of us had slighted the other one — whatever fifteen-year-olds argued about — he felt it deeply.

  “Fine,” I said. “So this is how you’re going to make it better. You’re going to stop looking like you want to puke every time I walk through a door. I didn’t come to Harkness to wreck your life. I came to play hockey. There’s a lot of guys in that room who’d like to toss me out on my ass, so you can try to stop being one of them.”

  His face was as somber
as I’d ever seen it. “Okay,” he said finally.

  “I mean it. Let’s forget every fucked up thing that happened. We won’t talk about that shit ever again. But in the locker room, we have a truce.”

  “All right,” he said slowly.

  “I’m not expecting you to stick up for me,” I added quickly. “Just chill the fuck out. Can you do that?”

  His nod was slow. But it was serious.

  There was a knock on the door. “Rikker? Graham?” Bella’s voice called.

  “Yeah?” we both replied at once.

  She twisted the lever. “It’s locked, morons.”

  Graham got up quickly, his long legs eating up the distance to the door in just a few strides. When he opened the door, Bella came in, her glance traveling the quiet room, as if taking our temperature. “Whatcha doing?” she asked.

  “Heroin,” Graham said. “With a side of meth, and a vodka chaser.”

  For the first time in over five years, I laughed at one of Graham’s dry jokes.

  Bella looked from him to me and back again. “Okay then. I was just checking to make sure that everyone is in for the night.”

  “You can check us off,” I said. I got up off the bed and picked up my duffel, rummaging inside for flannel pants and my toothbrush.

  As I passed Bella on the way into the bathroom, she said, “Hey, Graham, did Rikker tell you that you were on the same team for part of high school?”

  “We, uh, covered that,” he said.

  Standing at the sink, I brushed my teeth. Thanks to the mirror, I could see Bella reach up to cup Graham’s face in two hands. She rose up on her tiptoes and brought her mouth over his.

  With my toe, I kicked the door shut behind me. But because the doors in cheap hotel rooms are made with all the sturdiness of a rice cracker, I heard Graham’s comment a long minute later, while I was pulling up my sleep pants. “That was nice and everything, Bella. But did I pass your Breathalyzer test?”

  “Maybe that’s not why I kissed you,” she snapped.

  “The hell it isn’t.”

  Her voice got tight. “You’re right. I don’t like you at all.”

  “Night, Bella.”

  “Night, moron.”

  I waited until I heard the hotel room door close before I came out again. Both beds were untouched, so I chose the nearest one without asking whether Graham had a preference. He and I did not need to have any conversations with the word “bed” in them. Pulling back the bedspread, I climbed in, rolling to put my back to him. It was body language that tried to say, Nope! No awkwardness here.

  Graham spent a few minutes in the bathroom, too. “You want this shut off, right?” he asked. I turned to find him standing by the lamp, fully dressed, including his hockey jacket and shoes.

  “Yeah,” I answered.

  He clicked off the light. “I’m going for a walk,” he said, his voice low.

  “Okay?” That was against curfew, but I wasn’t going to argue with him.

  “I just need, you know, head space.”

  Pushing up on one elbow, I asked, “Do you still sleep like shit?” Since I’d known him, he was a terrible sleeper. The only middle school insomniac I’d ever met.

  “Yup.” Absently, he reached a hand up to probe the back of his head, where it had hit the wall before.

  “Shit. I’m sorry about your head.”

  He gave his chin a shake, as if warding off my apology. “All our previous shit is covered under the treaty, no?”

  That made me smile, and for a second his expression softened. But then he shut it down, turning away from me. He flicked off the bathroom light. Then, without another word, he opened the door and left.

  I lay there in the dark for a long time, wondering what to think. How odd to find myself, after five years, lying sleeplessly in another strange bed, wondering where Graham was.

  Part of me would always be hurt. When I was beaten and scared, I’d waited for him to call me. I’d slept with my phone in my hand in that hospital bed. So that nobody would try to keep him from me when he finally called.

  But he never did. Not once.

  I wasn’t sixteen anymore, though. And the years had provided some much-needed distance from that awful time. What I hadn’t wanted to face at sixteen was the fact that my phone made outgoing calls, too. I was looped up on pain meds for a few days — not a few years. Even after they shipped me off to Vermont, I could have sat myself in one of the wicker chairs on my grandmother’s porch and called him.

  I didn’t, though. Because I was scared to hear that he didn’t want me anymore.

  Fuck, we were sixteen. We’d confided in nobody. And we were too afraid to ask for help. So I could either carry around this childhood grudge for the rest of my life, or try to set it down. Seems like a no brainer, right?

  When I finally fell asleep, I was still alone in the room.

  — Graham

  The following weekend we had practices only — no games. It was our lull before the storm. Regular season games were about to kick in at full force. So Bella and Hartley and I sat a long time over Saturday brunch in the Beaumont dining hall, drinking coffee and shooting the shit. Hartley’s girlfriend Corey told us a funny story about holding tryouts for an empty goalie position on the women’s team. But I was feeling almost too lazy to listen. Outside of the old arched windows, the fall leaves made a yellow carpet in the courtyard. Sometimes this place was like a freaking postcard for Ye Olde College Experience.

  Like a total sap, I loved everything about it.

  Eventually I got my lazy butt up to go, and Bella stood up too. “I’ll walk you out,” she said. Together, we started down the granite steps and out into the autumn day. The air had that Harkness smell — a mixture of decaying leaves and coffee beans.

  Bella had a giant duffel on one shoulder and a box under her arm, so I scooped the duffel off her shoulder as we walked along.

  She gave me a smile. “Aren’t you the gentleman?”

  “Once in awhile. When it suits me.”

  “What are you up to today?”

  “I have to hit the library for a couple of hours. You?”

  “Team errands. Can I pawn one off on you? It’s on your way.”

  “Sure?”

  She stopped and beckoned for the duffel I was carrying. Unzipping it, Bella pulled out a new Harkness Hockey jacket in its plastic wrapper. “Can you drop this off? It’s Rikker’s. He lives in McHerrin.”

  Aw, Christ. “We don’t know if he’s home, though,” I said. “Why don’t you give me a different errand. I don’t want to carry that around all day if he’s out.”

  She pressed the jacket into my chest. “I just texted him from the dining hall, and he’s there. He even propped the outside open for me. It will take you two minutes. He’s in the first entryway on the left, third floor.”

  Damn. It. I couldn’t think of a decent reason to turn her down. “Okay.”

  “You’re the best. See you at practice tonight.” She hefted her duffel again, which was now not quite so large.

  She walked away without a backward glance, having no idea what she’d just asked me to do.

  Even though Rikker and I had cleared the air in Boston, we weren’t pals. When I’d walked out of that hotel room after our crazy-ass conversation, I was shaking like a leaf. A few laps on foot around Boston had helped.

  But I knew I couldn’t stay in that hotel room with Rikker. Talking to him had stirred up a lot of raw memories for me. I couldn’t lay there in the dark, listening to him breathe, and re-live the sound of pounding feet in that alley where we’d been attacked. “Cocksuckers!” they’d yelled. “Faggots!”

  It used to be that when I closed my eyes, the voices were always right there, waiting for me. Along with the sound of their laughter. And the heavy thud of Rikker’s body hitting the ground when he’d tripped.

  Once in a while I still heard that sound in my dreams.

  “Get the other one!” someone had shouted. I’d switched
into survival mode, and I just ran. Even after I’d gotten away, I kept running. I ran a mile in the wrong direction. When I’d stopped, the streets were unfamiliar. On shaking legs, I’d found a city bus stop. But I wasn’t that familiar with the bus system. It took me a couple of hours to get home. I was so freaked out when I finally got home that I might have broken down, telling my parents everything. But the house was empty. There was a note from my Mom on the perfectly clean kitchen counter telling me that she and my father had gone to walk around the sculpture garden.

  While I’d left Rikker all alone to be beaten.

  Panicked, pacing my kitchen, I’d had to run to our bathroom to throw up. I fell asleep on the bathroom floor after that. But somehow, when my parents came home, I’d gotten up and tried to act as normal as possible. Down in the basement, the game controllers sat next to each other on the sofa, right where Rikker and I had left them.

  So I’d knocked them off onto the floor, then curled up in a ball and commenced hating myself. And I’d never really stopped.

  Last weekend in Boston, I’d given those memories a couple more hours to churn. After pacing the streets, I walked back to the block where our team’s hotel was. But instead of going inside, I went into the hotel on the next corner. Sitting at the bar, I’d dampened those old memories with beer. (Only beer. Bella would be so proud.) Then I’d gone to the check-in desk and asked for a room. Two hundred dollars later, I walked into another hotel room. I didn’t even turn on the lights. I set my phone alarm, dropped my jeans and jacket, climbed into the bed and slept.

  The next morning, I’d snuck back into the team’s hotel, and into Rikker’s room to retrieve my things. He’d been eating breakfast with the rest of my teammates.

  Since then, we’d spoken only once. After the final game, we’d found ourselves standing next to each other at a fast food counter. “You okay?” he’d asked without removing his eyes from the lit menu board above our heads.

  “Yeah, we’re solid,” I’d said.

  That was it. Until now.