Lakey’s white truck takes 616 at the speed limit with a line of cars behind. Too many people coming in the opposite direction for anyone to go around him. I track his progress through the crosshatched windows of the detox facility, barred for my own safety, and gesture to the glass door, so Michelle knows he’s here, he’s my ride, thanks for everything. My shirt’s still stained, my cheek’s still bleeding, my hip still hurts, thanks for the two Tylenol you were generous enough to give me. They won’t cover it. My doctor prescribed the Oxy.

“You sure you don’t want to change?” Michelle asks. “We could find you something in the lost and found.” Her hair hangs in the same limp ponytail as it did yesterday afternoon. Already, she’s backing through the intake door.

“No,” I say. I’m embarrassed enough. The stain on my shirt extends from my collarbone to my shoulder, rusty brown despite two complete cycles, hydrogen peroxide, elbow grease, and a toothbrush. What happened was, I slept for too long on my bedroom floor, and when I woke up, this was there.

“Alright. Good luck, girl. I hope I don’t see you again.”

It snowed last night, thick, wet flakes topped with a layer of ice. I dreamed about it, too—wearing my skates again, whirling around a frozen lake, tracking the puck and my teammates’ erratic skating. Number 15 down by the makeshift goal. Number 25 practicing her power pulls to the left. The rest of us tangled in the neutral zone, an amalgamation of high sticks and fruitless swipes. Someone fired off a slap shot, and the lake became my university’s rink instead, where the referee pointed me and Blondie to the penalty box. I had her thigh pressed to mine until the plows came through for the main road. No way to sleep through it. My hip still hurt.

The facility’s sidewalk is one solid, slippery sheet from the edge of the awning to the curb, damn the salt they’ve poured on top. I take the distance at a humiliating shuffle.

Lakey inches into the pick-up/drop-off lane, careful to avoid the plow-churned mounds that crowd its edges. “Do you have your stuff?” he asks.

No stuff to have, really. Just me and the stained shirt. No jacket—there’s heat in the truck, right? Nothing in my sweatpants pockets but my ID and the business card for New Creation Center’s rehab. When a bed opens, sometime in the next hundred years, they’re supposed to call my dad, and I’ll head there. Michelle’s place only handles the immediate emergency. I left my phone and wallet on the kitchen island in my apartment, specifically so I wouldn’t worry about them now.

What happened was, it was late at night, and I didn’t feel like packing my shit to go. I just felt like going.

“Alright, sorry about the mess,” says Lakey. He throws a few fast-food wrappers into the backseat, reaches across, unlocks the passenger door for me to climb in. His hair is longer, the copper ends curling at the nape of his neck. A black fabric headband holds the front sections out of his blue eyes. Last Christmas, he’d grown a head taller than me, lean and muscular in the way hockey players can be, and every time someone called his name, I was surprised to see him turn. Him, my chubby little brother, always hidden under goalie pads. Older every time I see him.

Today, he sits further from the wheel than I remember, adjusts the mirrors higher. His biceps bulge underneath the hockey team’s sweatshirt. We ease out of the parking lot and back onto 616 in the opposite direction.

“How’re you feeling?” Lakey risks a glance in my direction.

I want to take the ride in silence. I called my dad, first, on the ancient landline the rehab facility allowed us all to use. He knew where I was. He got the alert from the hospital when they referred me to Michelle’s detoxing center. But he said he had meetings today, nine AM to five PM. He could send Lakey. Did I want to see Lakey? Lakey has a snow day, nowhere to be until his hockey practice in the afternoon, and the truck has four-wheel drive.

Lakey falls square in the middle of a list of people I don’t want to see. It’s enough to be wearing a shirt I bled on, needing someone to babysit me.

Route 616 winds away from the packed houses of Jefferson and into the unsalted stretch of Glenville’s woods. Tire tracks make long gray paths in both directions. Lakey takes his time on his turns, hands glued to the wheel. We hit Shaffer’s Church Road, punctuated with gravel driveways, each its own ski slope. Snowcapped trees on either side of the street drip onto Lakey’s windshield.

The taut vinyl of the passenger seat doesn’t give enough to support my bad side. No matter how I shift, I can’t find a comfortable position.

“San Jose’s playing tonight,” Lakey offers. “They’re starting the Graf, Celebrini, Smith line. Toffoli’s back on the second.”

It isn’t Lakey’s fault that I’m in pain again. It’s not Michelle’s either, or the creator of Tylenol’s. Lakey didn’t force-feed me OxyContin until I passed out on my bedroom floor. I start chewing the inside of my cheek.

“I don’t know what these line changes have been about. If we’re gonna commit to sucking, we might as well take Will Smith off Celebrini’s line. He needs to learn how to finish a check. You saw, right, the Oilers game—?”

“Lakey, I can’t,” I say. “Not right now.”

He persists. “Smith is a good player, probably could be great, but he always ends up in a line that’s gonna take hits so he doesn’t have to. Celebrini’s just another way to coddle him out of his potential.”

I don’t want to hear about star players. An ache radiates from the hollow below my hipbone around my lower back. My team’s PT used to chirp me for sitting crisscross applesauce on the benches in the locker room—tightening my hip flexors, destabilizing my pelvis. It’s a horrible position for a woman already having problems with her IT band. Well, fuck that. Fuck PT. Fuck the one-year timeline that became never again. I pull my legs up onto Lakey’s seats, taste blood against my back teeth.

Lakey’s hockey bag takes up the bench row behind us, halfway unzipped. The team’s mascot, a Firebird, spreads its wings beside his embroidered number 30.

My stomach sours. The pain spreads.

“Pull over,” I demand.

“What?”

“Pull over. Now.”

Lakey does as told. The truck rolls to a stop on the shoulder, the right side tires several inches in a snowdrift. He flicks on the four-way flashers. I launch myself from my seat and out into the winter sun. This morning, Michelle brought me a plain, buttered bagel with a cup of stale coffee, and now I heave it up again, a steaming puddle below my pathetic face. The knees of my sweatpants soak up slush.

When it’s over, my stomach settles, and I struggle to catch my breath. The cold air on my bare arms, the other cars seizing this opportunity to pass Lakey, my numb fingers buried on either side of my breakfast. I clench and unclench my fists. In my dream this morning, Blondie and I sat side by side in the penalty box, screaming and beating our gloves against the Plexiglass.

Lakey watches me, horrified, as I drag myself back into the passenger seat of the truck. My cheek still hurts. My hip still hurts. I just threw up my Tylenol.

***

My parents’ house is a split-level on the edge of the woods. Stairs to the front door, stairs from the foyer to the hallway with bedrooms, stairs from the foyer to our basement. Everything stairs. Lakey has cleared a path the width of his shovel from the driveway to the garage. Inside, he waits by the first set of steps and provides his shoulder for stability as I climb them.

“You and Dad watched the Sharks, right?” he asks. It’s his Hail Mary pass—hoping I’m being short with him because he mentioned the wrong team. We live in the Pennsyltucky sliver between Penguins and Flyers territory, and it’s as good a guess as any. I tackle the last of the stairs without leaning on him.

When I’m in front of the correct door, Lakey heads back down to the foyer to prepare for hockey practice. Since I moved out last year, my trophies are the only indication I ever lived in this bedroom, crowding the upper half of my bookshelf in staggered lines, gathering dust on the dresser. Medals hang between folds of fabric on the curtain rod over my window, 19U State Championship Gold in the center. I push it aside for a clear view of Lakey in the driveway.

He brings his bag from the backseat. His footsteps sound on the stairs, in the hall, on the stairs again, and he reappears by the truck with his goalie pads and knee guards. He wears the Firebirds practice jersey, number 30. When he walks, he leans slightly to the right, a relic of a torn labrum surgically repaired and rehabbed.

The inside of my cheek stings when I run my tongue over it.

I used to be number 2. I played right wing to Blondie’s center. Two-time champs in high school, three years of college and a good shot at the Natty. Our last playoff push, she sat out with a shoulder injury, but I soldiered on, I played, I helped 15 find the back of the net until some asshole took me down in the semis. Surgery wasn’t enough to salvage my hip. This is it. This is what there is of me.

I mean to catch Lakey in the foyer and apologize for being such a bitch. I’m sorry. My hip hurts. They gave me two Tylenol and those are melting the snow on Shaffer’s Church Road. And Michelle’s hydrogen peroxide toothbrush trick didn’t work on my collar.

Yes, Dad and I watched the Sharks together.

But making it as far as the banister has me digging my nails into my palms. Lakey tore his labrum to play backup goalie and lose.

Instead, I watch him grab his stick from where it’s propped beside the shoe rack. He taps the blade twice against the top of the doorframe for good luck. His hair now falls in two French braids, barely reaching his chin, with shorter tufts poking from each crossed section. He senses me above him, looks up. I remember going to his peewee games when he was five or six, his baby-fat face concealed behind a helmet, visor, neck guard. My dad and I cheered for him from our seats by the goal.

“Did I do something?” Lakey asks.

I’ve embarrassed myself enough by coming back to this house in between rehabs. I’m not jealous of the Firebirds. What happened was, I woke up a few nights ago, not dead, and the handful of Oxy didn’t stop by hip from throbbing, and I’d chewed my cheek to blood inside. The new hurt was better than the old. At least it had a fixable origin, an origin with blame I could pinpoint.

Blondie’s shoulder got better. She’s not the only blonde woman on her pro team, so when the fans make signs for her, they write Brookes in big bubble letters.

I grit out, “When does the Sharks game come on?”

“I’ll be at practice,” he says. “But we can compare notes later, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, okay.” He glances between me and the door, twisting his toe in the doormat. “I’m really sorry, Bridge. For whatever. I don’t know.”

I move back to my bedroom, to the window, to watch him leave. For my games, my dad always sat behind the penalty box.

***

When Lakey’s car folds into the surrounding trees, I feel like I’m going to be sick again. Michelle warned me that the sweats would continue for a week or two, and fine, I got that. I recovered from hip surgery back at my apartment with Blondie, who controlled the pill bottles and dished out one precious narcotic every four hours. She flushed the leftovers. She didn’t understand. Headaches, nausea, brain fog, muscle pain, I was prepared for post-detox to suck. The anger is different.

I don’t know, imagine you’re in a tunnel. There’s a light at the end.

Lakey left his bedroom door wide open in invitation. His room mirrors my own, trophies and medals as the signs of his ownership. Participation ribbons, Most Improved. The Firebirds haven’t reached a playoff final in decades, and they show no signs of nearing, but yeah, of course, his labrum healed. Dad used to call me with updates while I waited in the locker room for Blondie, damp from the shower, smelling like vanilla. My hip is killing me. I peel back the navy-blue bedspread and lift the mattress. The most obvious place. Nothing here.

Imagine that you have to keep moving. You’re making good progress through the tunnel, you’re getting closer to the light, and it’s drawing you in like a magnet.

In the dresser, tucked beneath his underwear, nothing, rolled into pairs of socks, nothing. I throw open the lower drawers, Lakey’s clothes neatly folded in rows of three across. T-shirts and jeans and sweatpants stacked one on the other, and nothing against the wooden bottom of the drawer. He’s supposed to hide things here. Each drawer comes off its tracks so I can feel around the recess it occupies.

Blondie hated that I kept refilling the prescription, taking the pills when my incision had closed. I couldn’t describe what it was like. Imagine you’re in a tunnel with a little light at the end and everything hurts, always, all the time, and you’re not allowed to stop walking. Lakey used to store his allowance in a box on top of his wardrobe. I grab his desk chair and push it over, except, climbing it would require bending my knee, and putting weight on one leg by itself. My balance has gone to shit. I couldn’t cross an ice-covered sidewalk this morning.

Now imagine. Everyone knows you’re in pain. That’s what the tunnel does to you. But it’s a tunnel, so you’re going to keep moving toward the light. Let’s take away the little light at the end. With nothing to move toward, no point of comparison, the tunnel will stop being a tunnel, and that’s good, right? That’s what you need?

I ditch the chair and go for the basket on his nightstand. Then the closet. Under the bed, pawing through everything. Lakey must have something. Hockey is about having something, because it’s about muscling through, and I did that so well for seven years—seven years behind Blondie, because I knew how to handle it. Fucking Ibuprofen. Naproxen. Tylenol again, whatever. I can take handfuls of it. I took a handful of OxyContin a week ago. I lay out on the wood floor in my bedroom and drooled chewed-cheek blood on my t-shirt. I was dreaming about ice—standing in my skates again, steady on my own two feet, and Blondie on the same line.

Imagine you’re in a tunnel, but there’s no light at the end, and everything still hurts all the time, and any measurable progress you’d catalogued by distance to sunlight is rendered moot in the dark. I explained it to Blondie, my Blondie, hovering in the doorway with her suitcase packed. But no one was going to understand that. Not her, not Michelle at the detox center, not my dad. Not fucking Lakey, if he doesn’t have a single goddamn pill in this room.

I withdraw my arm from behind Lakey’s bookshelf. He’s clean. Sunlight pours through his window, catches the dripping points of icicles on the awning overhead.

***

I find the game Lakey was talking about on TV: San Jose Sharks versus New York Rangers. It’s one of the few East Coast games the Sharks will play this season. Some players still skate lazy warmup circles around the rink’s perimeter, one side clothed in white and teal, the other in dark, royal blue with red stripes. Scattered pairs rocket a puck between the white tape on their sticks.

“You see him right there,” says an announcer. The camera does the pointing, zooms to a brunette guy a few feet out of the crease. “Number 71, Macklin Celebrini, down by the goal. Look at that wrist shot. A thing of beauty.”

The wrist shot is pretty good. I can concede that. I found a cream soda lollipop in the bottom of Lakey’s old hockey bag, alongside printed visuals for PT exercises, only a little dust on the wrapper. Both cheeks ache with the effort of keeping it in my mouth. The New Creation Center is supposed to call me about a bed in the next couple days. My brother is playing totally sober.

The game begins. In the first period, each team scores a goal. Macklin Celebrini shoulder-checks one of the Rangers and wheels away with the puck. Reminds me of someone. I find the handheld landline in our kitchen, bring it back to the couch, dial Blondie’s number—I know it by heart. She lets it ring to voicemail.

“The Rangers are playing a shit game,” I say in my message. “They’re awful. And I don’t know what’s happening to the Sharks defense. This is not a playoffs team.” The end of the phrase is more of a yell, directed at the television.

I know Lakey’s number, too. I dial that next. He’s at practice, so it rings out, and I shout into the receiver, “Perreault was fucking brazen with that elbow. That was a purposeful hit. Two minutes in the box my ass. I would’ve gotten four.”  The words grate in my throat.

At the end of second period, I call my dad. He’s only a few rooms away. Undoubtedly, he can hear everything I’m saying already. He could’ve come to get me from the detox center, like he used to come to every single game, camped in his usual seat long before I’d committed an infraction to doom me there. But I’ve started screaming, and it feels wrong to scream without an audience. I scream, “These teams are both shit. They’re playing like shit. Two goals and one period left. I thought we wanted to play hockey.”

The couch cushions have too much give. They can’t support my hip. My PT would be pissed off to see me sitting like this, crisscross applesauce on the droopy couch, but who gives a fuck about PT? About Macklin Celebrini, about any of it? It’s no one’s fault that this happened to me. My hip hurts, my cheek hurts, my shirt’s still stained.

I call Michelle’s detox place number, from a notepad next to the phone, and yell at the poor receptionist, “Why would you send me home with two Tylenol? I’m still in fucking pain!”

On the face-off, to the left of the Sharks’ goal, Will Smith catches a pass from Celebrini and books it for the Rangers’ defensive zone. Blondie and I connected like that—the first fucking line. At the end of my two minutes, I’d burst from the penalty box, and then something like this, the part that hurt the best, pushing my skates to their absolute limit on a breakaway, only the goalie and the net ahead. A Rangers player comes careening from the other side of the ice and flattens Will Smith against the boards. Play continues, the remainder of San Jose’s first line seeking the perpetrator, before the whistle blows.

“Oh, you hate to see that happen!” the announcer says, “especially to these younger players. Look, here comes Celebrini from the other side, he’s dropping the gloves—” ESPN briefly cuts from swinging fists to conjure a replay of the hit in zoomed-in, beautiful, horrific detail. A royal blue shoulder digging into Smith’s back. The shake of Smith’s helmet when it connects with Plexiglass. The shudder of his body as it hits the ice.

“Get up,” I scream. “C’mon, get up!”

We return to live footage for the fight still unfolding, the referees swarming a flailing mess of blue and white in the neutral zone. Smith appears in background flashes, rolled to his stomach, now with his knees underneath him, now on his elbows with his head down, helmet against the ice. The closest camera catches his open mouth, huffing breath. I dial Blondie’s number again and wait for the beep.

***

Grace Shelton is a writer and translator completing her MFA at Hollins University. Her work has appeared previously in Rougarou, AUIS Literary Journal, and elsewhere, and her first chapbook was published by Treehouse Editions in 2022.