I adjust my glasses and walk to my car.
The glasses are new. Well, not new. I've worn glasses since I was twelve. But the frames are new, a pair of matte black rectangles that my friend Priya helped me select because my old frames, according to Priya, "made you look like a librarian who had given up on joy." These frames are professional. Serious. The frames of a man who covers the most important hockey team in America and who is taken seriously in press boxes and media scrums and editorial meetings.
The frames are also, if I'm being honest about their function, a barrier. A thing I wear between myself and the world that says: I am working. I am here in a professional capacity. The things I see are material for stories, not material for feelings. The glasses are the on switch. When the glasses are on, the journalist is on. The person behind the journalist is not relevant.
I get in my car. I take off my glasses. I rub my eyes. I put the glasses back on.
The person behind the journalist is not relevant.
The person behind the journalist is thinking about blue eyes in a hallway, which is a thought the journalist will not be writing in any notebook.
I start the car. I drive home. I have a game recap to write and a feature outline to develop and a career that I have spent three years building, and the career is the thing that matters, and the career requires objectivity, and objectivity requires distance, and distance requires these glasses and this notebook and the practiced refusal to let an observation become anything more than what it is.
A data point.
I'm sure that's all it is.
JAMIE
Three weeks in, I've learned the unwritten rules.
Jonah picks the locker room music on Tuesdays. This is not negotiable. Jonah's taste in music is eclectic in the way that a tornado is eclectic: it touches down unpredictably and destroys whatever genre conventions were in its path. Last Tuesday was Korean hip-hop. The Tuesday before that was Dolly Parton. The Tuesday before that was a playlist labeled "Vibes (Jonah Version)" that contained seventy-three songs spanning nine decades and four continents. Nobody objects because objecting to Jonah is like objecting to weather. It exists. It's happening. You put on a jacket and you deal with it.
Nobody touches Mik Volkov's book. He keeps one in his stall at all times, placed spine-up on the shelf above his gear, and the book changes every three to four days but the position never does. Currently it's Dostoevsky. Previously it was a biography of a Russian chess grandmaster. The book is not decorative. Mik reads during breaks with the absorption of a man who has trained his brain to enter and exit a text the way he enters and exits a defensive zone: quickly, completely, without residual awareness of the space he just left. I've watched him close the book mid-paragraph, step onto the ice for a drill, execute thedrill flawlessly, return to his stall, open the book, and resume reading at the exact word where he stopped. The precision of it is terrifying.
Wes Chen bakes bread. This fact was presented to me by Jonah as casually as one might mention that a teammate collects stamps. "Wes bakes," Jonah said. "He's really good. If he brings you a loaf, eat it. Don't ask about it. Just eat it." I have not yet received a loaf, which I interpret as meaning I have not yet crossed whatever invisible threshold separates "new guy" from "person worthy of bread." I'm trying not to take this personally.
Mars Santos arrives first and leaves last. He parks in the same spot every day (third from the left in the second row, closest to the side entrance) and he walks the same route through the facility (lobby, left corridor, locker room, ice) and he speaks to approximately four people per day, two of whom are goalposts. I find Mars comforting. Not because he's warm (he isn't) but because his consistency suggests that the world is a place where routines can survive, and routines are the thing I rely on most when everything else is unfamiliar.
Luca Moretti is L. I figured this out on Day 4 when I saw him placing a fresh plate of biscotti in my stall with the stealth of a man who has been running a clandestine baked goods operation for years and has perfected the logistics. The sticky notes have progressed from encouraging to funny. Today's says: "Your shot release is disgusting (compliment). Callahan pretended not to be impressed, which means he's very impressed. - L."
The biscotti are a constant. Every day. Fresh. With a note. The consistency of it is doing something to me that I can't quite categorize. In Duluth, kindness was present but practical. My father's kindness was a hand on my shoulder after a bad game. My mother's kindness was a meal that appeared without being asked for. Luca's kindness is different. It's preemptive and excessive and served with powdered sugar and exclamationpoints, and it asks nothing in return, and the asking-nothing is the part I don't know how to process.
Road trip. Nashville. My third.
I'm roomed with Jonah, which the travel coordinator arranged because Jonah is the team's universal solvent. Everyone is comfortable around Jonah. He creates comfort the way the sun creates light: involuntarily, constantly, as a fundamental property of his existence.
The hotel room is standard. Two queen beds, a desk, a window overlooking a parking garage. Jonah treats it like a living room. Within ten minutes of check-in, he has ordered room service, turned on a nature documentary, distributed his belongings across every horizontal surface, and initiated three separate text conversations while narrating all of them to me.
"Ren says hi. He's at the rink with the kids today. Little Marcus scored his first goal. Well, it went off his shin and kind of dribbled in, but a goal's a goal. Ren sent a video. You want to see?"
I watch the video. A small boy in a Reapers jersey (number 31, Mars Santos, the goalie who talks to his posts) falls over, accidentally kicks the puck with his skate, and the puck slides across the line at the approximate speed of a tired caterpillar. The boy's celebration, however, is vigorous and joyful and involves a full lap of the offensive zone with his arms raised.
"That's amazing," I say, and I mean it, because there's something about the purity of a child's celebration that makes the complicated feelings in my chest temporarily simple.
Jonah talks for another hour. About Ren. About the youth program. About his parents in Minnesota (his mother, Eunhee, has opinions about sesame oil that Jonah describes as "architecturally significant"). About the team, the playoff push, the culture. He talks the way some people breathe: withoutthinking about it, without stopping, without any awareness that the air he's producing is keeping other people alive.
I laugh at his jokes. I eat the room service fries he ordered "for the table" (the table being the two of us). I contribute approximately twelve percent of the words in the conversation, which is significantly above my average and which I credit to Jonah's supernatural ability to make silence feel collaborative rather than awkward.
He falls asleep at eleven. Mid-sentence. One moment he's explaining why the Beltline is the best running path in the Southeast and the next moment he's asleep, fully clothed, phone on his chest, mouth open. The transition is instantaneous. Jonah Park enters unconsciousness the way he enters everything: without hesitation.
I lie awake.
The hotel ceiling is white and textured and anonymous. The sounds of Nashville are muffled through the window. Jonah's breathing is steady and unselfconscious. The room is dark except for the glow of the city through the curtains.
I think about the couples. I think about the bar after tonight's win, where I sat with my Sprite and watched Wes text Luca with an expression I've never seen on his face (soft, unhurried, the murder face replaced by something almost gentle). Where Mars was on the phone in the corner, speaking Portuguese to someone in a voice that was warm in a way I didn't know Mars could be warm. Where Cole and Mik left together, Cole's hand on the back of Mik's neck, casual and owned, the gesture of a man touching something that belongs to him.
I think about the journalist. The one with the glasses and the notebook and the questions that are different from the other reporters' questions. After the game tonight, in the media scrum, he asked me about a specific crossover pattern on the power play entry. Not "how does it feel to be a rookie?" Not "what'sthe biggest adjustment?" He asked me about the mechanics of a skating technique, the weight transfer on the inside edge, the timing of the push. A technical question. A hockey question. A question that assumed I had something worth saying beyond "good" and "the speed."