Page 28

Chapter 28

Olli

The darkness is such an uncanny, unpredictable beast.

Sometimes you feel it lurking, sneaking up like a predator stalking you through the grass. You’re aware of its presence, the bending grass and snapping twigs, and that’s when you whip out your mantras or your positive self-talk or your gratitude meditations.

And sometimes it just pounces. Soundless, echoless, unseen. Nowhere and then everywhere, all at once.

I wake two mornings later to blinding sunlight spilling through the wide windows of yet another hotel room, and I know.

I've felt it stalking me for weeks, but here it is at last.

The darkness has arrived.

It fills my muscles, my tendons, my blood. Like gravity’s increased tenfold or someone turned my bones to adamantium but forgot to give me the Wolverine superstrength.

I lie cocooned in a web of warmth, eyes closed, bathed in a sea of morning sun, uncharacteristically still. Try not to think or breathe too deeply, like maybe it’ll leave me alone: a predator that’s grown bored of prey that won’t play.

I had so desperately hoped that I’d escaped. That the roller-coaster ride was over, and I could go about leading a normal life, a life with hopes and dreams and plans that didn’t disappear every time my moods changed .

I was wrong.

The darkness has returned. My internal sunshine’s dipped behind the clouds. Where’s my positive self-talk now? My perpetual cheer and positive attitude? They’ve abandoned me—and too soon.

We have one game left to get through, and I know how it’s gonna go. The Vipers are a decent team, a team that would’ve been a fight on a good day.

Today?

It’s gonna be the kind of day where I’ll be putting all my effort into things like smiling and cracking jokes, being the upbeat, bubbly Olli everyone knows. Because when I’m like this, my inclination is to sink into silence and solitude and sleep.

But it’s a game day. I can’t do that.

When Charlie gets up from the neighboring bed and marches into the bathroom, I know I’ll have to move soon too.

I’ll have to get up. Fake a smile. Hide my heavy bones and languid movements. Hope that nobody knows me well enough to call BS. That’s the benefit of never letting anybody in. Nobody knows how to call your bluffs.

Why did I think I could do this?

There’s a reason I haven’t been able to hold my spot on a team since I joined the league seven years ago. And it’s ’cause I’m inconsistent as hell. It’s ’cause when I’m on, I’m on.

And when I’m off . . . Well, everybody’s gonna know the real Olli James soon enough, if they hadn’t already heard the rumors.

Charlie exits the bathroom. “Morning, James.”

I drag myself up to sitting on the bed. “Morning.”

“Well, that was a step down from your usual bubbles,” he says, and I can’t help but be a little surprised he knows me so well. Surprise takes too much energy, though, so I press on a smile.

“My brain’s not awake yet. No coffee up there.” I rap my knuckles against my temple, then brush past him into the bathroom.

I take a shower, make it through breakfast and onto the bus .

Into the rink.

“You ready for this?” Everton’s fingers squeeze my shoulder, dragging me out of my darkening thoughts.

“This is cozy.” I tilt my cheek down onto Ev’s skin. “You trying to hold my hand?”

“Always, bro.” He slaps at my cheek, grinning, and skips ahead to hip-check Skyler into the frame of the locker room doorway. Leaving me to my thoughts.

Trying to convince myself . . . I can do this, I can do this . I don’t need a silly crush to get me high, to bolster me through the impending darkness. I can do this.

I keep weaving lies around my heart, silken armor intended to blind rather than protect. Anything I can do to keep myself moving forward.

“You all right, man?” Charlie’s concerned voice drags my gaze up to his furrowed brow—crap, I’ve been staring at my skates, without putting them on, for God only knows how long now. “You look kinda . . . space cadety.”

“Hey, now. Be nice.” I aim a grin his way—one I definitely don’t feel. “I’m an Ice Out guy now. Don’t make me make you regret things.”

“Yeah, right.” Charlie kicks at my ankle. “If you were a dog, you’d be all bark.”

“Nah, I’d definitely bite too.” I shoot him a grin as I reach for my skate.

“Eh, I kinda think he’d be like one of those big fluffy dogs.” Everton leans in past Charlie, grinning too. “Like a Newfie.”

“You know.” I shove my foot into the boot. “I’ll take that.”

Nobody knows yet, how wrong it’s gonna go. Nobody knows yet, how Olli James is gonna fail another team.

Or maybe they do. Maybe they're waiting for the inconsistent Olli James of the media to make his appearance.

I barely hear the national anthem.

One moment, we’re skating warm-up laps, and then we’re crouched for the face-off, and how did I get here? I feel like I’m watching myself from far away, watching the game from outside of it. Look at all those lil ant-boys. Look at the dark one, the Olli-shaped one! He’s cute, right?

Too bad he’s about to crash this game, and burn it down too.

Please God. Help me.

It starts off okay. We hold on for a bit. Second line nets one. Vipers’ first line sneaks one past us.

It’s not enough.

Not when little ant-Olli’s skating around in circles like a drunk racoon. My line’s flat, so flat, like it’s our first time skating together. We have no synergy at all—my pass behind Dev puts him offsides. Holls’s too-high saucer hits my shinpad, and I’m slow to recover. Dev aims a one-timer my way, and I fumble it, toss it right into the goalie’s pads.

“Fuck is up with you?” Coach roars as we tumble over the boards onto the bench. “You look like a bunch of peewees.”

I stare out over the ice without seeing it.

Second line. Third. Us again—another disaster of stumbling and passes that don’t connect. This one leads to another Viper goal, evening up the score.

More swearing from Coach as the second line heads out. Third. Us again.

The game blurs.

Ends.

We exit the ice.

As I leave the shower, back in my suit and tie, the self-doubt tells me, in no uncertain terms, that was your fault, Olli James.

I make it back onto the bus. Into the plane. Lay my head against the cool glass and close my eyes, pretend like I might actually sleep, even though I never sleep during the day.

On the bus from the airport, Coach plops down into the seat beside me, and cold dread seeps into my gut. Still, I force a smile. Pretend to be some fractional semblance of my normal, cheery self. “Hey, Coach. ”

“You all right, James?” His brow creases with worry. Another perk of being captain, I realize—more intense scrutiny. Nobody notices if a fourth-liner’s having a bad day.

“Coming down with a cold.” I lift a shoulder in half a shrug. “I’ll be fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

He leaves me alone.

I’m first off the bus today, because I can’t stand the thought of someone trying to talk to me. I don’t have any energy for that. Don’t have anything left to give.

So I toss my bag and backpack into the bed of my truck, atop a nice dusting of fresh snow, and throw myself behind the wheel.

My hands shake.

My brain’s a fogged mess of darkness and panic, such a strange twist of illogical emotions. The world’s surreal, like I’m caught in a graymare, a dream that’s strayed a little too dark, a little too close to reality.

I make it home.

Fingers trembling as I unlock the door, I throw my bags on the floor, stumble into my bedroom.

It’s dark.

So gloriously, beautifully dark, like the insides of my mind, like all the realest pieces of me—emptiness that isn’t sadness, isn’t anything real or tangible enough to be sadness, to even hold onto or assess.

I am hollow.

There’s no reason for the darkness. No lurking trauma that catches me and drags me down. That makes me collapse bonelessly onto the bed. Still in all my clothes, I burrow beneath the blankets. Close my eyes, because how much easier is it, sometimes, to just close your eyes and imagine all the world is dark?

To just give up, let the darkness claim you.

I spend so much time, so much effort, being positive. Thinking positive, projecting positive, self-talking my broken brain into positivity. But sometimes I need to just let it all go. Give up. Give in and let the darkness claim me.

There won’t be any poetry writing tonight, no TV or texting or thinking about tomorrow. Dreaming, pondering, reliving my favorite moments of the game or the hours after.

Just silence. Darkness. Aloneness.

I let my mind drift away on a river of despair, hoping, praying to a God in which I no longer believe, that tomorrow the sun will be shining again.

But when I wake early the next morning, nothing has changed. The heaviness still burrows in my chest, the despair gripping my mind in a painful vise. I curl my legs into my knees, pull the blankets over my head to block out the sunlight shining in through my window, close my eyes and hope for sleep. I don’t want to wake up, don’t want to face a day without light.

But there’s practice soon, early, and I’m still trying to impress so many people . . .

So I sit up, glare at the early morning sun pouring in through my window, like how dare it express such cheeriness when my bones are so heavy they ache, my muscles too, from carrying those too-heavy bones around.

Still, I leave the soft confines of my bed. Splash water over my face, grab my toothbrush.

In no time at all, I’m out the door, in the truck, headed across town.

I can do this , I say, and even my inner voice sounds so tired. Unconvinced.

But I make it onto the ice.

Regret it.

I get lit up.

I can’t skate, can’t catch, can’t pass. My hands are like blocks of wood, my legs like Jell-O. My brain and body are irreversibly out of sync, my reactions so slow I’m practically going backwards.

Coach takes me aside while Dev runs the team through wind sprints .

“You look like shit,” he tells me bluntly.

I stare at the toes of my skates because I can’t bear to look at him. “I feel like shit.”

“You sick?”

“Yeah. I’ve had this headache since yesterday.”

I look up in time to catch the way his forehead creases in concern, and that just makes me feel worse for lying. But the lie is simpler than the truth. The truth has too many shades of grey.

“Why didn’t you say something at the beginning of practice?”

I shrug. “I thought I could skate through it.”

“I think you should go home and get some sleep. Take tomorrow off if you need to.”

I open my mouth to protest, to tell him no, I’m fine . I can work through this. But the truth is that hockey requires actual effort, real focus, neither of which this darkness will allow.

“James. I’d rather have you healthy for the game this weekend than try to push yourself through practice.”

I bob my head in resignation.

Slacker , my head reprimands me as I trudge down the hallway to the locker room. You’re just making lame-ass excuses now.

I know.

You should have just sucked it up. Pushed through.

I grit my teeth, will the silent admonishment to stop.

You always find an excuse to give up. To quit because you don’t feel like trying.

I fling my pads angrily into the back of my locker, burn myself under the shower, drag my clothes back on. In the parking lot, I sit in the driver’s seat and glare at the still-early sun.

I’m tired. So much more tired than I should be, after half a practice that’s only been half-assed anyway. I think I hate myself.

Back home in bed, the darkness blooms inside my chest like ink dropped into water .

Once I’m falling, it’s so hard to stop. Especially when I’m looking up, up, up at where I stood just yesterday. How can I ever get ahead when I keep slipping back?

Sometimes it’s easier to just let go, let the darkness take me down.

I’m such a roller coaster of ups and downs, of dreams and despair. Sometimes I’m so high, the world is rainbows and butterflies and hope. I’m in love with life, going after my dreams full speed. The soundtrack to my existence is my favorite eighties party hits, and every song just makes me wanna dance ’cause life’s just so fuckin’ good.

Nothing is unattainable, and I believe in myself so absolutely as to plunge headfirst off a cliff, eyes closed, hands outstretched, knowing I will fly . . .

And then I'm falling.

At the bottom, there’s only emptiness. No dreams or desires, because want is just another form of hope.

To want something bad enough to ache for it, there must be some little part of me that thinks I can get it.

The record of life’s soundtrack has skipped and now there is no music.

On days like this, it’s so hard to believe that this feeling isn’t eternal, that I will once again clamber out of the black pit. I always do—but how can I believe that now?

Especially when I can’t help but wonder: what will today’s episode cost me? The respect of my team? My starting position?

What will tomorrow’s? A game?

And the one after . . . My team? My job? My dream?

My self-respect? My hope? My will to keep going through the dark days?

What will the cost of this darkness be—and when will it be too steep to pay?