Daydream (Maple Hills, #3)(5)
Despite my best intentions, and twenty long years of practice, I’m not always on the pulse when it comes to understanding people’s motivations. I am, however, usually on the pulse of not getting on Coach’s bad side. Which is why a knot of anxiety appears in my stomach the second I hear my name being yelled in Faulkner’s gruff bark.
“Ooooooooo.” Bobby’s best attempt at sounding like a cartoon ghost causes a wave of laughter to rip through the half-full locker room. He misses the glare I shoot at him as he pulls his Titans T-shirt over his head. “Someone’s in trouble. Whatcha done, Cap?”
“No idea,” I mutter back as I pull my sweats up my legs. “Play hockey. Breathe. Exist. The possibilities are endless.”
“It’s been nice knowing ya, brother,” Mattie says, patting me on the back as he passes in the direction of the showers. “Don’t tell the others, but you were always my favorite.”
“Am I a joke to you?” Kris shouts, launching what looks like a dirty sock at him. It bounces off the back of Mattie’s head, ruffling his jet-black hair, and rolls beneath a bench.
And just like that, my tolerance for my teammates has reached its limit for the day.
“I’m sure it’s fine.” Russ attempts to reassure me, rubbing his towel against his wet hair. “If you’re not back when I’m ready to go, I’ll wait for you at my truck.”
We’re only a few weeks into the new school year and I already feel like what I imagine being run over is like. During the summer I spent a lot of time googling what makes a good captain, and while I don’t feel like I have the exact answer, I’m trying to put into practice the few points I picked up. I’m the first one here and the last to leave. I’ve been making the effort to encourage the new, less confident players. I’m trying to be positive, which means not always saying the first thing that comes to mind. Being open to trying new things when it’s in my nature to stick to what I know. I’ve been doing my full workout instead of letting myself get distracted by the perfect playlist. I don’t spend practice daydreaming.
I’m doing a lot of things that go against my natural instincts, basically.
I didn’t even drink at Anastasia and Lola’s joint birthday dinner because I fell down an information wormhole about the ties between sports performance and alcohol consumption.
So the fact that Faulkner is angry with me about something when I’m trying really hard to do a good job makes me more than a little nauseated. My fist knocking against Coach’s office door seems to echo around the room. “Come in,” he yells. “Take a seat, Turner.”
He points toward one of the worn mesh fabric seats opposite him and I do as I’m told. It’s through me trying my hardest to pay attention to this man that I can clearly identify his three main states of being:
Irrationally angry and loud.
Irritated by a life surrounded by hockey players.
Whatever the word is to describe the way he’s looking at me right now.
He taps his pen against the desk repeatedly, the plastic making a sharp clicking noise against the wood. It takes everything in me not to lean across and take it away from him to stop the noise. “Do you know why I called you in here?”
“No, Coach.”
He thankfully puts the pen down and pulls his computer keyboard toward him. “I just received an email requesting a phone call to discuss you, because you failed your paper in Professor Thornton’s class, and instead of going to Thornton to find a way to fix it, you went to your academic adviser to try and get out of his class. Do you have anything to say for yourself before I dial this number?”
Every single word I’ve ever learned evaporates from my head other than oh shit.
“No, Coach.”
He runs his hand across the top of his head like he’s brushing back a mane of hair. I’ve always wanted to ask why, considering he’s bald, and according to the game tapes we’ve watched, has been bald for the past twenty-five years. Despite encouragement from some of the guys, Nate told me not to ask him that unless I wanted a world of misery, which I don’t. But the question plagues me every time I watch him brush away his nonexistent hair. “Okay, then.”
His chubby fingers practically poke a hole through the handset as he punches in the number and rests the phone between his ear and shoulder. I have no choice but to listen while he introduces himself then ums and ahs through the call. Nate always told us that Faulkner can smell fear, so you should never show him your weaknesses. Admitting I fucked up the semester before I’ve properly started it feels a lot like weakness.
He puts the phone down and stares at me so intensely it feels like he’s staring at my soul.
“Ms. Guzman said she reminded you three times to schedule your appointment to register for your classes—”
“That’s true.”
“—and by the time you tried to register, the class you wanted was full. So you picked Thornton’s class thinking you could get on the waiting list for something else and drop him during swap week.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t add yourself to the waiting list and you didn’t try to drop it during swap week.”
I intended to. I truly did, but I’ve been so busy worrying about following Nate and being a good captain that everything else took a mental backseat. Every obstacle let me push things off, and I kept telling myself I’d fix it until it was eventually too late.