“Fine.” He didn’t snap it out, even though he wanted to. Instead, he spat water and the taste of bile, straightened his shoulders, and got in line for the vertical jump test. He didn’t recognize the guy in front of him. Olly kept his eyes down, sucking in air that smelled like old sweat and eighteen-year-old male determination. It felt out of reach at twenty-four.
Olly’s preparation for camp had always been impeccable. He wasn’t a superstar, so it had to be. But not this year, and he had no one to blame but himself. He’d been a mess: not working out or eating right, hiding up at his cabin so he didn’t run into his trainer in Duluth, or hear about his lack of gym time from his dad. Well, his dad left him voicemails, but he’d deleted them without calling back, for the first time in his life.
Whatever workouts Olly had or hadn’t done were irrelevant now. He had to get through the tests, get through camp, just get through it. He couldn’t think about the stretch of the season—eighty-two fucking games and probably the playoffs, if he was still hanging around by then—or his stomach would heave again.
Maybe he wouldn’t make the roster; maybe he’d get sent down to the Eagles’ farm team.
Maybe he’d walk out and be done with it.
But Olly wasn’t a quitter. His fuckups had gotten him into this mess. He was going to have to deal with the consequences.
So he filed out of the weight room and got dressed for his on-ice testing. The locker room was loud, pump-up jams and the Eagles’ captain, Mike Dewitt, making an encouraging circuit of the room.
“Looking good, Järvinen.” That had to be a lie.
Olly nodded and kept his eyes on his skate laces. Dewitt stood there for a second, like he was waiting for a response. When he didn’t get one, he moved along.
Olly had been excited for camp last year. He could remember that. Signing with his hometown team in Minnesota: two hours’ drive away from his mom and his boat and two of his brothers, with his third brother, Sami, twenty minutes away in Minneapolis.
Look how that had turned out.
The on-ice testing that followed was a blur. Olly puked again, halfway through. He couldn’t have said whether it was because of his level of fitness, or something else. Maybe they’d cut him; and he didn’t want to want that, he was a professional, he’d never fuck up on purpose. But maybe he wasn’t fucking up on purpose. Maybe he was just...fucking up.
He heaved over another trash can. A different trainer handed him a different towel and water bottle. He spat a different mouthful of backwash Gatorade.
Olly put his helmet back on, and somehow—some fucking how, his brain went offline and his body went, the slick of the ice and the cross of his skates, burning in his hamstrings and quads and lungs, leaning into the pain like it was going to fucking fix something—he made it through the endurance test with one of the top times.
Olly staggered through the gate, managing not to flinch away from the backslaps and the atta boys. Kept his head down while the rest of the guys finished up; didn’t laugh along with everybody else when one of the rookie D-men tripped on a cone and went sprawling across the ice.
Once the refrigerator-sized rookie had managed to stop laughing and get through his test without losing an edge, Dewitt—Dewey, everybody called him—cornered Olly in the locker room for more captainly outreach. “Good day,” he said, punching him in the shoulder.
It hadn’t been. Olly knew that. He pulled an Eagles-branded T-shirt over his head, temporarily blocking out Dewey’s square jaw and salt-and-pepper stubble. “Thanks.”
“I wanted to welcome you to DC. Check in. Make sure you’re settling in okay.”
There was no point to settling in until Olly saw his name on the final roster. Instead of saying that, he said, “Yeah.”
“We’ve got an apartment for you,” he continued, “with one of the rookies from the D-League. We like to make sure our new guys have a support system. And Benji’s a good guy, even if his edgework leaves a lot to be desired.”
Olly swallowed convulsively. He couldn’t stand to wonder what Dewitt might have heard about Olly’s last roommate; what he might be thinking behind the professional Canadian politeness.
“I’ll text you his number. Go tonight.”
“Okay,” Olly said, a little too late. He didn’t understand why they were pushing him to get into an apartment now, before the final roster had been announced. NAHA players didn’t get housing until they were a sure thing. Olly was anything but that.
Instead, he felt...tenuous. Exhausted. More than he should be, even after camp and the drive down from Minnesota. He’d done the whole thing in one stretch, since he wouldn’t have slept if he’d stopped halfway. He hadn’t slept last night either, listening to the hum of the A/C unit in the Arlington hotel where they put all the new guys. Except his future roommate, anyway.
He’d hoped that camp would tire him out enough that maybe, maybe, maybe he could sleep, like he hadn’t all summer.
Feeling the tension radiating out from his stomach, Olly doubted it.
* * *
Benji Bryzinski was just a dumbass from Duncannon, Pennsylvania, but he had arrived.
That was what he told himself after the first day of training camp, leaning on the railing of his Washington condo’s balcony and looking out at where the river was bracketed by the blue glass towers of office buildings.
Well, he wasn’t quite in DC. But Rosslyn, Virginia, was more convenient to the practice rink, where he would be spending a lot of fucking time over the next three years of his contract. Jesus Christ. The goddamned NAHA: everything he’d been working for since he was seven years old. He grinned, the excitement bottle-popping through his body.
Camp was hard, of course it was, but he was honoring all those years of work, all those hours in the gym; that little kid he’d been, suiting up in secondhand gear and taking his first wobbling strides across the ice.
And he was making the roster, after two years with the Eagles’ Major Developmental League team in Hershey. His housing letter, and his signature on the lease of this nice fucking apartment, said so. It was unusual to get housing before camp, even if the head coach had told him “you’ll be back for good next October,” after his most recent stint covering for a defenseman out on injured reserve.
His phone buzzed in the pocket of his basketball shorts. He fumbled it out, managed to drop it on the cement with an ominous crack.
“Fuck.” Even if breaking his phone wouldn’t be so bad now. He had enough money to buy a new one, without even thinking about the balance in his bank account.
His older sister Krista’s face lit up his (unbroken) lock screen. “Crate & Barrel has three couches that I think will work. Do you want to try them out or should I just show them to you on FaceTime?”