JAMIE
The locker room smells like every locker room I've ever been in and nothing like any of them.
The tape is the same. The sweat is the same. The industrial disinfectant that never quite covers the smell of thirty men working at the outer limit of their bodies is the same. But the scale is different. The ceiling is higher. The stalls are wider. The logo on the wall, the Atlanta Reapers' stylized R in navy and red, is twenty feet tall and illuminated by lights that make it glow like something holy, and I am standing in front of it with a duffel bag over my shoulder and a heart rate that would concern a cardiologist.
I'm Jamie Kowalski. I'm nineteen years old. I was drafted 4th overall in June, which is a sentence I've practiced saying out loud because it still doesn't sound real. In Duluth, where I'm from, the 4th overall pick was a thing that happened to other people. People on television. People whose names showed up on ESPN tickers while I ate cereal before school and my father, who coaches high school hockey, said things like "that kid's got hands" and "watch the way he loads his weight on the crossover" and never, not once, said "that could be you someday," because Tom Kowalski does not deal in someday. Tom Kowalski deals intoday, and today I am standing in an NHL locker room trying to remember how to breathe.
The security guard at the front desk was the first person I spoke to in this building. An older Black man with kind eyes and a calm that suggested he had been watching nervous young men walk through this lobby for a very long time.
"You the new kid?" he said.
"Yes sir."
"Don't call me sir. I work for a living. Name's Gerald."
"Jamie."
"I know who you are, Jamie. Saw your highlights. You're fast."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me either. Just don't be late. Coach Callahan hates late." He looked at me over the top of his glasses. "And welcome to Atlanta."
The locker room. My stall is the third from the left on the south wall, between two men who represent the opposite ends of the human communication spectrum. To my right: Wes Chen. Six-one, two hundred and ten pounds, covered in scars, currently reading a book about fermentation with the focused intensity of someone studying for an exam. He looked up when I sat down, nodded once, and returned to his book. The nod contained everything he planned to say to me today, possibly this week. I understood this instinctively because I grew up around hockey players and some hockey players communicate through nods the way whales communicate through sonar: infrequently, over great distances, with complete sufficiency.
To my left: Jonah Park. Who is talking. Not to me specifically. To three people simultaneously while tying his skates, which is a coordination feat that should be studied by neuroscientists. He's telling a story about a restaurant on the Beltline that serves, according to him, the best pad see ew inthe southeastern United States, and the story has branched into a sub-story about his partner Ren's opinion on peanut sauce, which has further branched into a tangent about a youth hockey program Ren is running, and I am sitting in my stall absorbing all of this and thinking: this man has never experienced silence and would not recognize it if he did.
There is a plate of biscotti in my stall.
The plate is paper, the kind you get at a deli counter, and the biscotti are golden brown and dusted with powdered sugar and arranged with a care that suggests they were placed here by someone who thinks about presentation. There's a sticky note, yellow, with handwriting that is round and slanted and so cheerful it practically vibrates:
Welcome to Atlanta. You're going to love it here. - L
I don't know who L is. I eat one of the biscotti because the cafeteria is across the facility and getting to it would require walking past thirty men and I can't do that yet. The biscotti is extraordinary. The almond flavor is subtle and the texture is the precise balance of crisp and tender that separates something made with love from something made with competence. I eat a second one. The sugar leaves white fingerprints on my practice jersey and I brush them off before anyone sees, which is a futile gesture because the evidence is on my face and my fingers and probably my soul.
I am eating a stranger's cookies in an NHL locker room. This is my life now.
Practice. I step onto the ice and the sound hits me first. Not the crowd sound, because there is no crowd. The blade sound. The specific, clean frequency of NHL-level steel on NHL-level ice, which is colder and harder and smoother than any ice I've skated on, and the difference is immediate. My edges grip faster. My crossovers feel sharper. The surface is responsive in a way that makes my junior ice feel like I was skating on a carpet.
I'm fast. I've always been fast. It's the one thing every scout agreed on, the one line that showed up in every draft report: "Kowalski's skating speed is elite. Possibly generational." I don't love the word generational because it implies expectations that I have not yet earned the right to carry, but the speed is real. Within two laps of the warm-up, I can feel the other players registering it. The slight adjustments in their stride when I pass. The head turns. The recalibration of assumptions that happens when a 19-year-old accelerates past a veteran at a speed that shouldn't be available to a body that weighs 180 pounds.
The speed is real. Everything else is a problem.
The first hit comes during a forechecking drill. A defenseman whose name I will learn later (Volkov, Mikhail, Russian, built like a glacier with a scar through his eyebrow) hip-checks me while I'm trying to retrieve a puck along the boards. The contact is efficient and devastating. My feet leave the ice. I travel approximately seven feet through the air and land in a heap against the boards and slide another eight feet across the surface like a shuffleboard puck.
The ice is cold against my face. This is the only observation my brain produces.
A hand appears above me. Large. Scarred at the knuckles. Attached to the arm of the man who just rearranged my skeletal structure. I look up. Volkov's face is completely neutral. Not apologetic. Not amused. Not cruel. Just present. The face of a man who has done this ten thousand times and who considers it part of the job the way an accountant considers spreadsheets part of the job.
I take his hand. He pulls me up. The strength in the pull is absurd. It's like being extracted from the ice by a construction crane. I'm on my feet before my equilibrium catches up, and for a moment I'm standing very close to him, his hand still gripping mine, and he says nothing.
The nothing is somehow kind.
This happens two more times during practice. Different players. Same result. I am fast enough to get to the puck and not strong enough to keep it. The strength coach, whose name I also don't know, watches from the bench with the evaluative gaze of someone calculating how many pounds of muscle he needs to add to my frame before it can absorb this level of contact without collapsing.
After practice, Coach Callahan finds me at my stall. Mike Callahan is built like a fire hydrant and has the temperament to match. He stands in front of me with his arms crossed and looks at me the way a mechanic looks at a car with a good engine and bad brakes.
"Kowalski."