I'm a rare breed. A defensive forward. I'm six feet six inches tall, two-hundred and forty-two pounds with only eight percent body fat. I am not afraid of a body check. In fact, most opponents are afraid of body-checking me. On paper, I should be a defenseman, but I'm also obscenely fast on skates and have a sixty-four percent win rate on face-offs. And did I mention my slapshot's average speed is one hundred and one miles per hour? Average.
So it's not that I don't pay attention to the opposition when I'm playing. I do. But yeah, maybe not as hard as anyone else because no one fucks with me. This is why I'm totally blindsided when I charge into battle for the puck in the corner, and just as I get it, I feel the glass break against my helmet.
And the next thing I know, I'm flat on my back on the ice, and my new Captain, Jayden Diaz's face is looming over me. His eyes furrowed with concern. There's a medic next to me and a ref hovering over him. I hear yelling and swearing. A whole lot of swearing. I start to sit up.
“Don’t!” Jayden and the medic snap at the same time.
“I’m fine,” I insist. “What happened?”
Jayden frowns. “Wall, just relax. We’re getting you a stretcher.”
“No fucking way!” I bark and start to sit up again. I’m trying to use my arms to push me up off the ice, but only my right one will work. The left one won’t move. Uh-oh. I’ll figure that out later. “I’m fine.”
“You were checked from behind so hard you shattered the glass and blacked out. You need to go to be evaluated,” the doctor tells me firmly. “At the very least.”
“Don’t worry. If you pass concussion protocol, you’ll likely be back before we start playing again,” The ref mutters as a bunch of guys with a stretcher show up. “Gotta clean up the glass and finish handing out penalties.”
“Penalties?” I echo.
Jayden nods gruffly. “Half the team decided to fucking lose their shit. Guess they like you.”
He used ‘they’ not ‘we,’ which I definitely catch. I try to sit up again, and this time I succeed even though my left arm is still useless and now throbbing like a mo-fo. “Please just let me skate off. No stretcher. It’s not that bad.”
“Fine.” The doc says reluctantly.
But when he and Jayden reach down and help haul me to my skates the pain in the left arm goes supersonic. I curse a blue streak, but they get me up. And I don’t know if the urge to puke is from the pain in my arm or the fact that the ice in front of me is rippling like a waterbed. “Oh fuck.”
“Yeah. It’s serious, Wall,” Jayden’s tone is that of a mother saying ‘I told you so.’
“I think I broke my left shoulder,” I announce. “And I definitely have a concussion. Grade two at least.”
“Let the doctors do the assessing, okay, bud?” Jayden suggests.
He's right. But I know I'm right too being that I was one semester away from graduating Harvard with a degree in neuroscience and had already been accepted into the medical program at Yale. And was raised by two doctors. Of course, Jayden doesn't know that. No one on the team does. So I nod and let him and the doctor hold me up as I skate off to an arena of worried fans cheering me on.
The coach gives me a worried glance as do the guys on the bench while they tap their sticks against the boards in support. No one looks like they’ll see me again anytime soon. And I’m worried they’re right.