Page 35 of The Understatement of the Year

Hartley knelt down in front of me. “I’m only saying this once,” he began, his handsome face serious. “Lay off the sauce. Or I’m going to have to tell Coach that you have a problem.”

Ididhave a problem, and he was walking away from me right now. And even though Bella decided that it was her turn to yell at me next, I tuned her out to watch Rikker’s muscular ass disappear up the street and into the night.

—December—

Gongshow: a rough, dirty game of maximum intensity.

—Rikker

The interview itself was not that bad.

One morning, the week after Thanksgiving, I waited in Coach’s office with a young woman from the Harkness College press office. “You don’t have to answer any questions that make you uncomfortable,” she assured me. “Just look at me, and I’ll tell the reporter that you’re not going to answer.”

That sounded easy enough, I guess.

“I’ll go get her, if you’re ready.”

I was never going to be ready. But I nodded anyway.

A minute later, she returned with the reporter, a mild-looking mom type. “I’m Cyndi,” the reporter said, putting her digital recorder down on the table between us. “Thank you for meeting me, especially during exams. You must be busy.”

“Sure,” I said. “Actually, I have my first exam next week. In Spanish. So if we could do this in Spanish, that would really help.”

She grinned. “No can do. Not only do I not speak Spanish, I don’t really speak sports. I’ve never interviewed a hockey player before. Do you have any tips for me?” She was trying to put me at ease, I guess.

“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” I told her. “We don’t like to see the words ‘bloodthirsty’ or ‘violent brutes,’ though.”

She gave me a smile. “Tell me why you left Saint B's.”

Straight to the point. Great. “Well, okay. On a Sunday night near the end of the regular season, that would have been last March, the head coach learned of my sexual orientation. He called me in Monday morning and told me to clear out my gear. He said, ‘I don’t want that in my locker room.’”

She flinched. “That must have hurt.”

She wanted to talk about my feelings, but I wasn’t going there. “Honestly, it’s about the most lukewarm hate speech ever written.”

She tapped a pencil on her knee. “It doesn’t matter what words he used, though, does it? Were you surprised to be kicked off the team?”

Yay.Now I would get to tell the reporter how stupid I was. “Yeah, actually I was surprised. Saint B's is a Catholic college, so I guess that makes me an idiot. But there’s a pretty active gay student group.” Not that I’d ever gone to an event. “And also, the college has ‘sexual orientation’ in its non-discrimination clause. I thought that would count for something.”

“I saw that, too,” she said. “That’s fairly progressive for a school with religious roots.”

I shrugged. I didn’t know whether it was or wasn’t. But when Saint B's started courting me, and offering me scholarship money, Skippy made me look it up. “Youcannotplay for them if they can toss you out for being gay,” he had said, grumpy that I wanted to go to school in Massachusetts instead of Vermont, where he’d be.

Later, I’d wished that I’d listened.

“What did your teammates think?” the reporter asked.

“Um,” I cleared my throat. “I never got a chance to find out, you know? A few of them wrote slurs on my Facebook page.”

Her eyes widened. “Did you document that?”

Seriously? Who would want to save a screenshot of assholes writing:Faggot, I hope you die of AIDS. “Nope. I deleted my account instead.”

“So, the team did not stick up for you.”

Careful, I coached myself. “I got a couple of texts that were very supportive. The guy who I was actually rooming with on road trips called to say that he thought the whole thing sucked.” I didn’t tell her that when I saw his name come up on my phone, I chickened out and let it go to voicemail. Later, I screwed up my courage and listened to the nice things he had to say. I’ve never been any good at predicting who will turn out to be cool and who will be an ass. One of thefaggotcomments on my Facebook page was from the guy I used to lift with in the weight room. I’d thought of him as a friend.

Called that one wrong.