It had been clean. I knew it was clean before I made contact, and I made contact because that was my job. I was a defenseman. I defended. Cole Briggs had his head down in the neutral zone and I closed the gap and finished the check, and if he didn't like it, then he should keep his head up. This was hockey.
But the way he looked at me after.
I had been hit many times in my career. I had been in fights. I had taken sticks to the face and pucks to the shin and elbows to the throat. I knew what anger looked like on a man's face. That was not what I saw on Cole Briggs.
I saw something underneath the anger. Something that looked like recognition. Like he was seeing me for the first time and was furious about what he found.
I did not want Cole Briggs to see me.
I did not want anyone to see me, but especially not him. Not the golden boy from Minnesota with his easy smile and his open life and his casual, careless bravery. Two years ago he had done an interview with The Athletic where he talked about being bisexual, and the hockey world had mostly shrugged, and he'd gone on playing and smiling and being Cole Briggs as if nothing had changed.
I had read that interview nine times.
I read it the way a prisoner reads about the ocean. Not because he expects to swim in it. Because he wants to remember that it exists.
I was not brave like Cole Briggs. I was not open or easy or free. I was Mikhail Volkov from Chelyabinsk, and I had learned at sixteen years old what happened to boys like me in Russia when they were careless. My father had taught me that lesson with his fists, and the law had taught me the rest. In Russia, they called it "propaganda." They passed laws that made it illegal to tell a child that people like me existed, and the word they used for what I was carried the weight of criminality even when no crime had been committed. The lesson had been simple: be invisible, or be destroyed.
I chose invisible.
I had been invisible for eleven years and it had worked. I played hockey. I sent money home. I spoke to no one about the thing that lived in the locked room at the center of my chest.
And then Cole Briggs shoved me in the chest last night and called me out in front of twenty thousand people, and for one terrible, electric second, I felt the lock rattle.
I turned off the film. Went to the showers. Stood under water so hot it turned my skin pink and tried to think about defensive zone coverage and neutral zone transitions and anything other than blue eyes and a jaw that could cut glass and the specific way a Minnesota accent rounded certain vowels.
It did not work.
By the time the rest of the team started filtering in for morning skate, I was dressed and sitting in my stall, reading. Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov. A book about men who destroy themselves and each other through passion and pride. It felt appropriate.
The locker room filled with noise. American noise. Music and laughter and the constant, relentless talking that seemed to be a requirement of existing in this country. I did not mind it. Noise was easy to disappear inside.
Cole Briggs walked in at 9:15. I knew this because I was not looking at the door, and I was not watching for him, and I did not notice the exact moment the energy in the room shifted slightly when he entered. I knew none of these things. I was reading Dostoevsky.
He sat at his stall across the room. His stall was a disaster. Tape everywhere, sticks piled at angles, a pair of sneakers that looked like they had been through a war. The man lived in chaos. It was offensive.
Jonah Park, his constant companion, said something that made Cole laugh. The laugh was loud and sudden and real, and it cut through the locker room noise like a blade.
I turned a page of my book. I had not read a single word on it.
A younger player, a kid named Wes Chen who played with his fists more than his stick, dropped into the stall next to mine. He nodded at me. I nodded back. This was the extent of our relationship and I was comfortable with it.
"Hell of a hit last night," Wes said.
"It was clean."
"I know it was clean. I'm saying it was a hell of a hit. Briggs went flying."
I said nothing.
"He's going to come for you eventually, you know. He's not the type to let it go."
I looked at Wes. "Then he will come for me."
Wes almost smiled. Almost. He was not a man who smiled easily either. We had that in common.
Coach Callahan called us to the ice and I put my book away and pulled on my helmet. As I walked toward the tunnel, I passed Cole's stall. He was standing, adjusting his gloves, and he looked up as I went by.
Our eyes met for less than a second.