"Yes, Coach."
"Weight room. Tomorrow. 5 AM. Don't be late."
"Yes, Coach."
He walks away. That was the conversation. The entire conversation. I have been in this building for six hours and I have had exactly one extended conversation (Gerald at the desk), received one plate of biscotti from an unknown benefactor, been hip-checked by a Russian glacier, and been assigned a 5 AM appointment with weights by a man who communicates with the verbal economy of a traffic signal.
I change out of my gear. There's a second biscotti on the shelf of my stall, placed there while I was on the ice. The sticky note reads:
The first day is the worst day. Tomorrow is better. - L
I don't know who L is. I take the biscotti.
The drive to my apartment takes fourteen minutes. The apartment is team-arranged housing in a complex near Buckhead. One bedroom, furnished, clean in the way that hotel rooms are clean, with no personality and no history and noevidence that a human being has ever lived here. There is a couch, a television, a bed, a kitchen with appliances I have not yet turned on. The refrigerator contains the groceries that a team nutritionist stocked before I arrived: chicken breasts, brown rice, broccoli, eggs, and a protein shake that looks like it was formulated by someone who has never prioritized flavor.
I sit on the couch. I call my sister.
Becca is sixteen and smarter than me and the only person in my life who has never required me to perform. When I say "it was big," she hears the real sentence underneath it, which is "I'm overwhelmed and I don't know if I belong here." When I say "someone left me cookies," she hears "someone was kind to me and kindness made me want to cry." Becca hears the frequency beneath the words the way a musician hears the note beneath the note.
"How was it?"
"Big."
"Were they nice?"
"Someone left me cookies."
"See? You're going to be fine."
I tell her about the speed and the hip check and the weight room appointment and Jonah Park's opinions on pad see ew. I do not tell her about the feeling. I do not tell her about the locker room, where four couples exist in overlapping orbits of casual intimacy (a hand on a neck, a glance across the room, a thermos passed through a bench door, a phone call in Portuguese with a warmth that shouldn't be possible from a man who talks to goalposts), and how watching those orbits made something in my chest tighten in a way that I am not prepared to examine.
"Get some sleep," Becca says. "And eat the cookies."
"I already ate them."
"That's my brother. Eating his feelings since 2007."
I laugh. The laugh is real but small. I hang up. The apartment is quiet. Atlanta is outside the window, a city I do not know, making sounds I do not recognize, offering a future I am not sure I am ready for.
I sit on the couch for a long time. Then I take out my phone. I open the browser. The search bar is empty. The cursor blinks, a small vertical line, patient and persistent, waiting for me to type something.
I don't know what I would type.
I close the browser. I turn off the phone. I go to bed.
The furnished apartment is dark and the sheets are clean and the pillow is the wrong firmness and the ceiling is not my ceiling and nothing about this place is mine. Not yet. Maybe not ever. The 4th overall pick is supposed to feel like an arrival. It feels like a departure. I have left Duluth and I have left my father's coaching and my mother's kitchen and Becca's running commentary and the lake in winter and the life I understood, and I have arrived in a city where men love each other openly and a stranger leaves biscotti in my stall and the search bar blinks and blinks and blinks and I do not type anything because I am not ready to see what the search would find.
The cursor blinks in my mind the way it blinked on the screen. Patient. Persistent. Waiting.
I close my eyes. I do not sleep for a long time.
DECLAN
The press box at the Atlanta Reapers' practice facility is a glass room suspended above the ice, and from up here the game looks like a language.
Not the game itself. The team. The way thirty men move around each other with the calibrated awareness of people who share a nervous system. I've covered hockey for three years as a freelancer, writing for The Athletic and ESPN Digital and SB Nation, building a portfolio of features and game recaps and analytical deep dives that eventually, after 847 bylines and a dozen unanswered job applications, earned me this: a full-time beat assignment at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution covering the most compelling team in professional sports.
My name is Declan Osei. I'm twenty-seven years old. I grew up in East Atlanta, moved here from Accra when I was seven, got my journalism degree from UGA, and have spent every day since graduation trying to get to exactly this chair in exactly this press box covering exactly this team. The Reapers are the story. Four openly queer couples on one roster. An expansion team that went from league joke to playoff contender in three seasons. A culture that the sports world can't stop writing about and can't quite explain. Every major outlet has done the Reaperspiece. ESPN. Sports Illustrated. The Players' Tribune. They all fly in, spend three days, write the same article about courage and visibility, and fly out.