Wait. She wanted to talk about hockey. The actual game of hockey.
"It was good. Kennedy made it easy—he was in the perfect position, and I only had to find him. Credit to the system Coach has us running."
Measured. Professional. They couldn't twist my quote into clickbait or a meme template. Was I speaking a new language?
"Thanks, Jake. Good luck with the rest of your stint."
She was already walking away when I figured it out. It was my first interview I didn't turn into a performance. I didn't deflect or tell a joke. Maybe playing for Rockford was good for me after all.
I was still riding the post-game high when Eggars, one of the veteran wingers, called out, "Heard you room with some defensive wizard up in Thunder Bay. Kid's got hands, right?"
I responded with another neutral statement. "Evan's solid. Best defensive read I've ever played with."
"That's the queer one, right?" It was a voice from across the room—Klondike, a defenseman who'd been in Rockford for two seasons and acted like he owned the place. "Little guy? Makes cookies?"
I swallowed hard. "He's my teammate."
Klondike laughed, but it wasn't mean-spirited. It was only casual and thoughtless. He thought he was being friendly instead of making my skin crawl.
"Didn't know you were into spreadsheets and twinks."
A few conversations in the locker room paused, but then they quickly moved on. Someone started talking about tomorrow's practice. Klondike asked if anyone wanted to grab dinner.
I'd kept my mouth shut, but the echo in my head didn't sound right. Evan wasn't a punchline. He wasn't a fucking stereotype to be tossed around a locker room.
He was the guy who left notes on my protein bars and stress-baked when I had important games. He was careful, brilliant, and brave beyond most human beings. He'd looked at my mess of a life and decided it was worth organizing, not fixing.
I'd let some dickhead reduce him to a cheap laugh because I was too chickenshit to risk the good thing I had going.
The hotel room, my temporary Rockford home, was standard road-trip fare—two beds, a TV bolted to the wall, and a mini-fridge that coughed instead of hummed. I'd claimed the bed by the window, gear bag spilled open on the floor.
My phone was hot against my palm, thumb working on autopilot through the usual scroll. Instagram first—a few teammates had posted stories from dinner and a photo of Kennedy flexing with his game puck. X next, checking mentions, seeing if anyone had clipped the assist. Old habits.
Most of it was background noise until I hit @MinorLeaksMajorTea.
The account was garbage—amateur gossip, trade rumors that never panned out, and screenshots of players' DMs that were probably fake half the time. I should've kept scrolling. I almost did.
Then I saw my name.
The post was timestamped forty-seven minutes ago. A screenshot of what looked like a group chat, names blacked out but the IceHogs logo watermarked in the corner. The message was short:
Jake Riley's banging that neurotic cookie gay from Thunder Bay, right? No wonder he's skating faster—boy's got incentive.
Below it, another message:
Dude's got a type. Weird and organized
And another:
Nothing wrong with a good luck fuck.
I started to seethe.
The post had 847 likes. 312 retweets. The comments were a sewer of speculation, slurs I wouldn't repeat to my worst enemy, and a dozen variations of "I knew it" from people who'd probably never heard of Thunder Bay before I arrived in Rockford.
neurotic cookie gay
They'd turned Evan into a fucking meme. Reduced him to three words that didn't capture a single thing about who he was.
