Puck Shots, page 6
“We’re done,” Gareth replies, and I follow Cosmo up the stairs to the attic, where he shares a room with Luka, his best friend. I managed to figure that out from just observing them on the first day. They’re always together, well, almost always. They’ll rush to sit beside each other at dinner, are always finding each other in the house at events, and take almost all the same classes, not to mention they’re both on the hockey team, too. I’d kill to have someone I could connect with like that.
We get to his room, and he goes straight for a small bookcase on Luka’s side.
“He won’t mind if we borrow this,” he says, pulling out a photo where it sat on the bottom shelf.
“Okay, not everyone is in this pic, but we’ll start here and then move on to the rest.”
I take the photo and smile at the sight. It’s got about fifteen of the guys standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders, bunched together in a group in front of a giant inflatable bounce house. They’re covered in something shiny, and bubbles cling to them in places.
“That was last year’s summer fundraiser. Each house had a different challenge, and we spent the day moving between them trying to win ribbons like those,” he says, pointing to the red, blue, and green ones around his neck in the photo.
“Looks like you had fun.”
“It was amazing. Once you’re one of the brothers, they stop bossing you around, and you get to join the fun.”
“So I won’t be making your bed all year then?”
“I mean, you can, if you want to,” he replies, sitting on the edge of his still perfectly made bed. I did it early this morning after he left for training. It’s way more fun when he helps, though.
“Okay, let’s go through what you know already,” he says, patting the bed cover beside him, encouraging me to sit.
“I know Sam,” I say, sitting and pointing to where he stands in the photo. “And Kirt and Logan are on either side of him, brothers in the house and in real life. Logan is two years older, and during Kirt’s rush, Logan nearly got expelled because he tied Kirt to a lamppost in only his boxers and wrote Free Kissing Booth on his chest in red lipstick. He’d been kissed by about forty people, guys, and girls, when the Dean walked by and freed him.”
“Oh my god, I nearly forgot about that. It was forty-two people exactly. Kirt still brings that up whenever they have an argument. It’s his forever win card, I think, like a get out of jail free card. Whenever he just says “forty-two” Logan backs down and gives in to whatever he wants.”
“Forty-two, got it. Umm, Logan is another lacrosse player, and there are twelve lacrosse players in the house total this year, more than last year, but they graduated. And Boston won the lacrosse finals last year, right?”
“Yep, but that’s not important. How many ice hockey players?”
“Umm,” I murmur as I try to count them in my head. “Seven?”
“Yep, and who is the fastest player in the team?” he asks, his smile growing wider.
“You,” I say, nudging his side.
“You bet your ass. Okay, now we’ve settled that, let’s go over the others.”
***
I finish third, purposely getting a couple of questions wrong to help with my standing with the other pledges. Another one of Cosmo’s ideas.
“You want them to see how amazing you are, but you want a couple of them to feel like they’re better than you. But we’ll know you could have smashed them all,” he’d said, and as Sam lifts the lacrosse stick to give his speech and the small butterflies fall out, along with one extra, made out of a folded water bottle label. Cosmo locks his gaze on that one, and then he glances my way, brilliant blue-gray eyes locking with mine for just a moment before he turns away, shaking his head with a chuckle. I couldn’t help but add it to the bunch when I saw what he’d planned. Everyone laughs. Except Sam, who looks right at Cosmo.
“Wasn’t me. I was on beer duty,” Cosmo says with a cheeky grin. He looks guilty as sin, or maybe that’s just how he looks to me. Like some forbidden desire I want but can’t have. And fuck, I want it bad. The more time we spend together, the more I feel like he might want it, too, like the way his eyes will linger on my mouth just a little longer than is just a casual glance. It’s probably all in my head, though.
“Who was it?” Sam asks, and the chuckles die down.
“Pledge Elli was on set up,” Gareth says, folding his arms over his chest, and my cheeks burn.
“Pledge Eli, you got anything to say about this?” Sam asks, plucking the last of the fake butterflies from his net and tossing it to the ground. Shit, what do I do here?
“Umm, it was…” I won’t say it was Cosmo. Fuck, what do I do here? “It was too hard to find real ones, so I had to manage with fakes. They’re pretty, don’t you think?”
The room goes dead silent. Fuck, maybe owning it was a bad idea. Is this the end? Do they kick me out now, or wait until pledge-a-palooza is over and then kick me out? Could I even get a dorm room this far into the semester?
Sam reaches down and picks up one of the butterflies, inspecting it closely.
“Real would have been better, imagine if they all just started flying around the house when I grabbed it,” he says, and then he does something I never would have guessed. He laughs. Scooping up a handful of them from the floor and tossing them over the pledges in the front row, the rest of the guys start laughing, too, and it’s almost loud enough to drown out my thumbing pulse in my ears.
I look over at Cosmo, and he winks my way. Was this part of some grand plan of his, too. Did he know I wouldn’t rat him out? Did he know Sam would be cool with the joke and not banish me from the house?
Two of the pledges, Dos and Finn I’ve had zero conversations with, come up and shake my hand.
“Never knew you were a prankster, Eli,” Dos says.
“Yeah, Eli, you killed that quiz, too. Tell us when you’re planning something else, we’d be up for it,” Finn adds.
“Sure. Umm, thanks, I will.”
***
I lie in bed listening to the breathing and snoring of the other pledges that night, almost too wired to sleep, so I grab my phone and message my brother, John.
ME:
You up?
A few seconds later, my phone vibrates, and his message comes through.
JOHN:
Yep, what’s up. Everything going okay at the house?
ME:
Yeah, your friend’s brother is looking out for me. He’s cool. Loud, but cool.
JOHN:
That’s good. See, I told you that you’d fit in there.
ME:
I don’t know that I would say I fit in just yet.
JOHN:
You killed the quiz, right?
ME:
Third.
JOHN:
Seriously?
ME:
I may have thrown a few questions. You know, to win over some of the pledges.
JOHN:
Did it work?
ME:
I think so, the prank on the Pres did more, though.
JOHN:
You pranked the Pres? Who are you, and what have you done with my brother? I don’t have much money, but I could pay you at least a twenty for his safe return.
Fucking smart ass.
ME:
Is that all I am worth to you?
JOHN:
I’d sell my soul for you, brother. But seriously, you pranked the KOK president?
ME:
I participated in it, but took the blame for the whole thing, so might as well have been all me.
JOHN:
That sounds more like it. So what punishment did you get?
ME:
No punishment. They actually thought it was pretty funny. When they knew it wasn’t Cosmo, anyway.
JOHN:
Glad to hear it’s going well. I made lifelong friends in that house and had the most fun in my life. Well, until I started playing B-Ball. Be sure to have some fun, too, okay?
ME:
I will.
I pop my phone on the book stack bedside. This last week has actually been lots of fun, for the most part, and when I think of all the things that made it that way, Cosmo is right there, in every memory, smiling at me with those bright eyes and smelling of iced coffee, vanilla, and peppermint.
7
Cosmo
“Who gives a quiz in week three?” I ask, stomping through the house, staring down at my phone still loaded on the blackboard app. The marks for a pop quiz Mr. Ericsson held yesterday in basic statistics stare back at me. I didn’t do well. I did really fucking terribly if I am being honest. Dead last in the whole class and it’s right there on a fucking shared backboard. Why is it that part, makes it so much worse?
“Relax, man. It doesn’t count toward your final grade. They just wanted to get a baseline for where everyone is up to,” Luka says, trying his best to reassure me.
“Then why post the grades on the blackboard for everyone to see?”
“It’s only our class and the faculty that can see it. You’re fine. Like you said, it’s week three, no one expects you to be across it already, that’s why we’re in the class, to learn this shit.”
“Thanks, man,” I say, hoping to end the conversation. Luka is my best friend, and I know he means well, but like he said, the faculty can see this and I know for sure the coaches will be checking up on us to make sure we’re keeping up with our studies or they’ll sit us on the bench, and no way I get drafted to the NHL from the bench. I need to study. But fuck, I hate studying. I try to focus on the words on the page, and it’s like five minutes and my brain is all nope, time to replay in detail the last twenty minutes of The Real Housewives of the NHL. Fuck, that show’s good. The sex, the drama, the sneak peeks into the lives of the guys who are living the life I want. A life I have zero hope of getting if I don’t play.
I was sure I would have been drafted already given my speed, but speed isn’t enough. I’ve been focused on every other aspect of my game all summer. My stick handling has improved heaps, but my passing accuracy still needs work, and my shot variety is meh. I’ve been working on a super-speed slap shot, but when I’m going that fast, I struggle to maintain control of the puck and usually miss it when I go for the shot. I also was a little more into partying last year than I should have been. Almost got me kicked out of the team on a couple of occasions when I’d miss a practice or two or three. I like to think that if I stand out in every game this year, then I can undo any prior bad opinions of me and start setting new good ones. Great ones, even. I need them to see that the party-hard playboy of last year is gone and I am fully committed to making my dream come true.
“You ready?” Eli asks, standing from my bed the second I walk through the door, a chessboard laid out on the covers.
How do I expect to learn how to play chess when I can’t even get a passing grade on a basic pop quiz?
“Are you sure this is easy?”
“It is easy to learn the basics, winning the game can be hard, or impossible depending on who you are playing. You look stressed. What’s up?”
Luka walks past me to the bathroom.
“He thinks he’s stupid. Maybe you can convince him otherwise. My words seem to be doing nothing to change his mind,” Luka says before closing the bathroom door. The shower sounds a few seconds later.
“He’s not right, is he?” Eli asks, and I pass him my phone and plonk onto the end of the bed. It jostles the board, and more than a few pieces topple onto their sides.
“Oh, shit, sorry. Umm, I think this is… wait, what are these?” I ask, holding up something tall that sort of looks like a part of a castle. Like a tower of a castle, but its base is a light ash grey wood, and the main castle tower piece was cut from a section of a soda can, thin black rubber lining the sharp edges.
“That would be a rook. It can move both vertically and horizontally on the board and as many spaces as it wants on a turn as long as your fingers are still holding it. As soon as you let go, the turn is over.”
He passes me back my phone, the screen dark. He gently sits on the bed on the other side of the board and helps me return the pieces to their positions. I notice now all the ones on my side have the same light wooden bases, carved to make up part of each piece, but topped with various objects like shells, colored glass, and bent copper wire to name a few.
“You know there are lots of statistics in chess,” he says.
“So you saw the grade then.”
“I try not to look at grades as a sign of intelligence, it’s more a sign someone is good at taking tests. There are lots of ways to be smart, and I’ll prove it to you.”
“Go on then,” I say, and he nods to the board.
“You’re sitting on the side of the white pieces, and mine are the black, right?”
“Yeah,” I reply, spotting the deep charred wood that makes up the bottoms of his pieces, it’s shiny like it’s covered in some kind of gloss, too, whereas my pieces are dull, like the wood came straight from a seaside shoreline.
“Well, white moves first, and in chess, that gains it a first-move advantage.”
“Okay, but like how does that relate to statistics?”
“Several studies have been done,” he says, lining up the last of his pieces. “White scores better than Black for the four main opening moves, 1d4, 1c4, 1e4 and—”
“1f4?”
“1Nf3 actually.”
My cheeks burn, but he continues like I didn’t just mess it up.
“White’s winning percentage is then calculated by taking the percentage of games won in addition to half the number of games drawn. So, if out of one thousand games, white won four hundred of them and draws three hundred and twenty and loses two hundred and eighty, white’s total winning percentage is four hundred, plus half the draws, so five hundred and sixty.”
I nod, surprised that my brain is keeping up with the math so far.
“Divide that by one hundred and you get the percentage, fifty-eight.”
“So I have a fifty-eight percent chance of beating you just by being given the white pieces?”
“Oh, no, your percentage is zero because you’re a beginner and I’m experienced, but you get the drift. Interestingly enough, the outcome was the same for games against computers, too, when those first moves were made.”
“Doesn’t really seem fair. Like maybe you should play an equal number of games as black and as white to get the best of them to decide the overall winner.”
“Some people do that; others love the finality of checkmate. It’s when your king has nowhere to go without being captured.”
“That’s when your piece takes another piece like the little guys do but only diagonally?” I ask, and he smiles so wide I blush.
“Yeah, that’s right. See, you’re getting it already.”
“I read up a few things on my phone this morning before class. Maybe I should have been reading up on statistics instead.”
“We’ll get you there on both.”
“You really think I can learn this?”
“I know you can, and you’ll smash that next quiz. Just like how you helped me with the pledge one, I’ve got your back.”
“KOKs forever,” I say, and he chuckles.
“Yeah, I’m not saying that.”
“You have to, it’s the code.”
“Is not.”
“It is, you can’t leave me hanging with my KOK just out there.”
He holds his waist and laughs harder.
“Stop, it’s too much,” he gasps.
“Look, you’ll have to get used to saying it without laughing sometime. Go on, try it.”
“Kappa Omicron Kappa’s forever,” he practically wheezes.
“Fine, I’ll take that for now, but seriously, the more you say it the easier it will get. How about every time you steal a piece in chess, you have to say, KOK’s rule?”
“I am the one teaching you, so we play by my rules.”
“Fine, teach me how to play this game already.”
***
“KOKs rule!” I yell, taking one of his pawns and lining it up neatly beside the one other that I have managed to nab.
He chuckles and then takes one of mine in a swift move, laying it down beside the many, many others, like a row of tiny dead bodies from the battlefield of chess.
“How did you do that?” I ask, and he chuckles.
“These move in an L shape, remember?”
“Ohhh, right. Knight moves like up and over or over and up.”
“And that is checkmate,” he then says, pointing to his horse, two pawns and his queen. I learned quickly the queen is the most powerful piece on the board, even though you are after the king to win. She can go any which way she wants and as many squares, too. The only thing is, when a newbie like me found that out, I thought I was being all clever using her to capture one of his horses early on, only he took her with a bloody basic pawn a second later.
“See, if you move here, I can take you with this one, and if you move there, I can take you with that, and then there and there, and there,” he goes on to say as he shows me with the handmade pieces of the board. He crafted them all himself from bits and pieces he found on his walks. He does that often. Takes walks, that is. He says it helps him to clear his head, but I have a feeling he’s more used to being alone than even he’d like to admit. In this house, he’ll never need to be alone again, unless he wants to, that is. Actually, even then he might not be.
“Nice to know you were playing to win. Shit, we’ve been going for over an hour.”
When did Luca even come out of the bathroom?
