Eight words. More than he says in most press conferences. Directed at me, specifically, about something I wrote, specifically, and the specificity is the thing that registers because Jamie Kowalski does not engage with media beyond the minimum required by his contract. He does not read features. He does not comment on coverage. He walks from the locker room to the parking lot with his eyes on the floor and his headphones in his ears and the practiced invisibility of a man who does not want to be seen.
He saw this. He read it. He stopped walking to tell me.
"Thank you," I say. "Mik gave me a lot to work with."
"He doesn't do that for everyone. He must have trusted you."
This is perceptive. This is unexpectedly, precisely, startlingly perceptive. Mik Volkov does not give interviews of that depth to journalists he doesn't trust, and the fact that a nineteen-year-old rookie has observed this after three weeks on the roster tells me that Jamie Kowalski is paying a level of attention to his teammates that his monosyllabic public persona does not suggest.
"I appreciate that," I say.
He nods. The nod is different from Mik's nod. Less decisive. More uncertain. The nod of a young man who has just done something (initiated a conversation with a journalist in a hallway) that cost him something (the invisibility he maintains as a default) and who is now recalculating whether the cost was worth the expenditure.
He walks away. I watch him go for approximately one and a half seconds longer than is professionally appropriate, and then I walk to the media room and sit down and open my laptop and stare at the screen while my chest does a thing.
The thing is not professional.
I write it in my notebook: "Kowalski stopped. Commented on Volkov quote. Perceptive. Attentive. More there than the podium suggests."
This is a professional observation. The notation of a source's behavior relevant to a potential feature story. There is nothing in these words that a fellow journalist would find unusual or inappropriate.
Except I know, as I write them, that the notation is not entirely professional. The "more there" is not just a journalistic assessment. It is a personal recognition. The recognition of a person who exists beyond the performance, and the inadvisable desire to see more of that person.
I close the notebook. I adjust my glasses. I write my practice notes.
The glasses are on. The journalist is on. Everything is fine.
JAMIE
The team wins in Nashville and goes to a bar on Broadway and I go with them because I'm supposed to.
This is the thing about being a rookie. You go. You go to the team dinners and the bar nights and the charity events and the optional skates that are not actually optional. You go because belonging requires presence before it requires anything else, and the alternative to going is staying in the hotel room alone, and I have done enough alone to know that alone does not get easier with repetition. Alone just gets quieter, and the quiet is where the thoughts live, and the thoughts are not my friends right now.
The bar is loud and warm and crowded with Broadway tourists and bachelorette parties and a scattering of hockey fans who recognize us from the jerseys some of the guys are wearing over their button-downs (Jonah has a Reapers cap on, which is the subtlety equivalent of a neon sign). I order a Sprite at the bar because I'm nineteen, and the bartender gives me the specific, sympathetic smile reserved for people who are obviously underage and obviously with a group and obviously not having the same kind of night as everyone else.
I take my Sprite to a booth. The booth is in the back, near a hallway that leads to the restrooms, and from here I can see the room without being in it. This is my preferred social configuration: present but peripheral, visible but not central, close enough to the group to technically be part of it and far enough to watch.
I watch.
Cole Briggs and Mik Volkov are at the bar. Cole is telling a story, animated, using his hands in the way that hockey players use their hands when they talk about anything, as if the whole world is a play they're diagramming. Mik is next to him, not participating in the story but participating in Cole, his body angled toward Cole's body with the gravitational certainty of an object that has found its orbit. When they leave, twenty minutes into the evening, Cole puts his hand on the back of Mik's neck. The gesture is casual. The gesture is owned. The hand on the neck says: this person is mine and I touch him because I am allowed to and the allowing is so old and so settled that neither of us thinks about it anymore.
I think about it.
Jonah Park is at a table near the stage, where a cover band is playing something country. He has his phone propped against a bottle of Dos Equis and he's FaceTiming Ren, who appears to be in their apartment in Atlanta, lying on a couch, laughing at something Jonah is saying that I can't hear over the music. Jonah's face, while Ren laughs, transforms. The easygoing charm that is Jonah's default setting sharpens into something more specific and more vulnerable. The face he shows the world is a great face. The face he shows Ren is a better one.
Wes Chen is in a corner booth, alone except for his phone. He is texting. The murder face, which I have learned is the name for Wes's default expression (coined by Luca, adopted by the team, apparently a real and documented phenomenon), has beenreplaced by something I have never seen on that face. Softness. The kind of softness that arrives when a person who is made of edges allows the edges to round, temporarily, in the presence of someone who is not threatened by them. Wes is texting Luca, and the texting is making his face do things that his face does not do in public, and the privacy of this (a man in a corner booth having a private expression about a private person) makes me look away because it feels too intimate to observe.
Mars Santos is at the end of the bar, phone to his ear, speaking in Portuguese. His voice is low and warm and cadenced in a way that the English version of Mars is not. English Mars speaks in short, analytical bursts that sound like they were processed through a computer before reaching his mouth. Portuguese Mars speaks in curves. The warmth in his voice is startling, like discovering that a granite building has a heated interior.
Everyone has someone.
Jonah catches my eye from across the room. He tilts his head, the universal Jonah gesture for "you okay over there?" and I give him a thumbs-up, which is the universal rookie gesture for "I'm fine, please don't come over here and be perceptive at me." Jonah accepts the thumbs-up because Jonah respects boundaries even when his every instinct is to obliterate them with warmth. He goes back to his FaceTime. Ren says something on the screen and Jonah laughs, and the laugh is the sound of a man who has someone to laugh for, and the sound carries across the bar and lands in my booth like a stone in still water.
I am sitting in a booth in Nashville with a Sprite that is losing its fizz and a chest that is doing the thing it does when I watch people who have found each other. The thing is not jealousy. It's closer to bewilderment. A confusion about the mechanics. How does a person get from here (alone in a booth, unnamed feeling, search bar closed) to there (hand on neck, face on phone,softness in a corner)? What are the steps? What is the sequence of events that converts a person from someone who has a feeling into someone who is allowed to act on it?
I don't know the steps. I don't know the sequence. I don't know the first word of the first sentence of the instruction manual, because the instruction manual is written in a language I haven't learned yet, and learning the language requires admitting that you don't speak it, and admitting you don't speak it requires admitting that you need to, and the needing is the thing I am not ready to name.
So I drink my Sprite. I watch the band. Two rookies from the fourth line come by and invite me to their table and I go because I'm supposed to and I laugh at their stories about billet families in juniors and I contribute a story about my father's coaching (the time he made the entire JV team skate suicides because someone forgot to lock the equipment room) and the story is funny and true and the telling of it costs me nothing because the story is about hockey and hockey is the language I already speak.