FORTY

The boy was scared. He’d been dreading this trip throughout most of the season and now it was here: Olympia, Washington, for the state regional tournament, twenty hockey players and three coaches and one bus driver, all of them crammed onto the second floor of an interstate motel, four players to a room, two to each bed.

He’d been afraid of this trip. A weekend alone, without family or even a place to escape to, imprisoned by the side of the highway with nineteen other boys, all of whom knew each other and had grown up together, all of whom seemed to hate him with a passion that sometimes stole his breath away.

There was no running away, not here, and the boy knew that this was where things would finally come to their head.

It was not about hockey. The team had won their first game in the tournament tonight, and he’d played well and hard, and afterward Coach Hughes had tapped him on the shoulder and told him, “Good game,” and, “Be ready for another tough one tomorrow.” And he’d felt good on the ice and somehow free and without worry, but the moment he’d stepped off the ice he remembered where he was and what was likely to happen, and he’d wished he’d pretended to be ill and not come on this trip, that he could be anywhere else in the world.

It wasn’t up to the coaches to save him, and they wouldn’t. Hughes and his staff believed in the old school, that rookies were hazed and it made the team stronger. The team had elected Bad Boyd as its captain, and even Hughes seemed to know that Boyd was the best goddamn hockey player the county would ever produce, and if Boyd wanted something, it was more or less done.

Boyd made the rules. The boy was a rookie and it was his lot to follow them.

But this wasn’t about hockey or team building anymore. This was about something else entirely, something deeper and darker and mean.

The team had returned to the motel after the game. They’d showered and dressed and dispersed in packs of three or four or more to scour the restaurants that lined the road from the interstate, searching for food and maybe someone to serve them liquor, and, if they got really lucky, for girls.

The boy’s roommates hadn’t invited him to go out and he hadn’t gone, ate dinner from the vending machines down the hall and sat and watched television and relished the silence, all the while listening for the sounds of his roommates’ return. His roommates weren’t bad guys and sometimes could even be friendly, one-on-one, but they, like the rest of the county, lived in thrall to Bad Boyd. If Boyd was around, they danced to his tune.

The boy knew he couldn’t rely on his roommates to save him, any more than the coaches who’d long ago left in search of a bar. He entertained the notion, briefly, of simply walking away, leaving the motel and the team and finding the bus station and buying a ticket, but the only place he could go was back to Makah, and if he did that and word got out that he’d abandoned Bad Boyd’s team, that he was a quitter, then the boy knew Makah was no place he’d want to be either.

Anyway, he wasn’t a quitter, and he tried not to be afraid. He tried to believe he could stand up to whatever was coming, take it without flinching or letting Boyd beat him, look Boyd in the eye afterward and tell him he wasn’t really as good as he thought.

The boy tried to believe this, but he couldn’t quite get there. And he lay on his bed and strained his ears for the noise of his roommates down the hall; he knew sooner or later they’d come.

When they did, he’d been dozing, half asleep, and it wasn’t until he heard the key in the door that the boy recognized what was happening. They piled into the room, more of them than the three who belonged here. Their breath stank of liquor, and they laughed and jeered at the boy, crowding the small space and dragging him from the bed, forcing him to stand and be held in their midst.

Bad Boyd was the last to enter the room, and he held something in his hands, hidden, so the boy couldn’t see what it was.